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Thirty years after the fact, Lippman punctuates the memory with a laugh. "To tell you the truth, I don't think I ever figured out how to solve that puzzle," she says. "All I remember is being amazed he knew the answer."

Hearing Breidbart's anecdote retold elicits a wry smile from Stallman. "I may have been a bit of a jerk sometimes," he admits. "But I found kindred spirits among the teachers, because they, too, liked to learn. Kids, for the most part, didn't. At least not in the same way."

To solve the problem, Stallman, Steele, and fellow hackers David Moon and Dan Weinreib limited their standardization effort to the WYSIWYG commands that controlled how text appeared on-screen. The rest of the Emacs effort would be devoted to retaining the program's Tinker Toy-style extensibility.

Seated at the dining-room table of her second Manhattan apartment-the same spacious three-bedroom complex she and her son moved to following her 1967 marriage to Maurice Lippman, now deceased-Alice Lippman exudes a Jewish mother's mixture of pride and bemusement when recalling her son's early years. The nearby dining-room credenza offers an eight-by-ten photo of Stallman glowering in full beard and doctoral robes. The image dwarfs accompanying photos of Lippman's nieces and nephews, but before a visitor can make too much of it, Lippman makes sure to balance its prominent placement with an ironic wisecrack.

Proponents of software copyright had their counter-arguments: without copyright, works might otherwise slip into the public domain. Putting a copyright notice on a work also served as a statement of quality. Programmers or companies who attached their name to the copyright attached their reputations as well. Finally, it was a contract, as well as a statement of ownership.

Looking back and forth, between the puzzle and her son, Lippman says she initially regarded the offer with skepticism. "I asked Richard if he'd read the magazine," she says. "He told me that, yes, he had and what's more he'd already solved the puzzle. The next thing I know, he starts explaining to me how to solve it."

Although helpful in codifying the social contract of the Emacs Commune, the Emacs 15 license remained too "informal" for the purposes of the GNU Project, Stallman says. Soon after starting work on a GNU version of Emacs, Stallman began consulting with the other members of the Free Software Foundation on how to shore up the license's language. He also consulted with the attorneys who had helped him set up the Free Software Foundation.

Such comments reflect the sense of humor that comes with raising a child prodigy. Make no mistake, for every story Lippman hears and reads about her son's stubbornness and unusual behavior, she can deliver at least a dozen in return.

The anger eventually drove her son to focus on math and science all the more. Even in the realm of science, however, her son's impatience could be problematic. Poring through calculus textbooks by age seven, Stallman saw little need to dumb down his discourse for adults. Sometime, during his middle-school years, Lippman hired a student from nearby Columbia University to play big brother to her son.

By fall, Stallman was back within the mainstream population of New York City high-school students. It wasn't easy sitting through classes that seemed remedial in comparison with his Saturday studies at Columbia, but Lippman recalls proudly her son's ability to toe the line.