"Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution" is stallman's extensively revised and annotated edition of sam-williams's 2002 biography free-as-in-freedom-williams, released by the free-software-foundation in 2010. The revision is as significant as the original: stallman rewrote passages he considered inaccurate, added corrections throughout, updated the narrative to cover 2002–2010, and released the result under a license permitting free copying — which sam-williams's original did not.
The original free-as-in-freedom-williams (2002) was the first full-length biography of stallman, written by journalist sam-williams with stallman's cooperation. It covered his childhood in New York, his time at the mit-ai-lab during the mit-ai-lab-hacker-culture-1971-1984 era, his decision to launch the gnu-project in response to the announcement-of-gnu-project, the founding-of-fsf, and the development of the gpl-v1 and gpl-v2. Williams's account emphasized stallman's personality — his intensity, his social difficulties, his absolute ethical standards — as much as his ideas.
stallman's revision in the 2.0 edition corrects what he regarded as factual errors, tones down what he considered unfair psychological characterizations, adds his own perspective on disputed events, and extends the narrative through the development of gpl-v3 and the open-source-definition-schism's ongoing aftermath. The result is an unusual hybrid: a biography that has been substantially rewritten by its subject, clearly marked as such, with Williams's original also freely available for comparison.
The book covers the key events of stallman's intellectual biography: the printer episode at MIT (a proprietary printer driver he couldn't fix that catalyzed his decision to act), the dissolution of the MIT AI Lab hacker community when Symbolics commercialized the Lisp Machine, the announcement of GNU in 1983, the development of GNU Emacs (see gnu-emacs-manual and gnu-emacs-first-release), GCC, and the GPL, and the relationship between GNU and Linux (the gnu-linux-naming controversy with linus-torvalds).
The book's dual authorship and dual version history makes it a valuable primary source for understanding how stallman presents his own story. Where Williams saw a brilliant but socially difficult hacker, stallman's revisions present a person who made considered ethical choices that others were too accommodating to make. The 2.0 edition is the version stallman endorses and the free-software-foundation distributes; it is available under the fdl and can be freely copied, which is itself consistent with the free-as-in-freedom-concept the title invokes. steven-levy's hackers-levy provides complementary background on the MIT hacker culture that shaped stallman.