In 1990, stallman was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship — the "Genius Grant" — in recognition of his work on the gnu-project and free software philosophy. The fellowship, which provides a no-strings-attached stipend over five years, was the first major mainstream institutional recognition that stallman's activities constituted an intellectual and social achievement of the first order.
The award came in the middle of the founding-gnu-and-fsf-1983-1991 era, between the founding-of-fsf in 1985 and the emergence of Linux in 1991. At this point the GNU system was incomplete — the gpl-v2 had been released (1991 came just after the award period began), and GCC and GNU Emacs were the movement's major technical achievements. The MacArthur Foundation was recognizing both the technical work and the philosophical project: the idea that software freedom was a legitimate and important cause, not merely a preference.
The fellowship provided financial support at a time when stallman's income was largely from consulting and speaking. More significantly, it signaled to the broader intellectual community that the free software project was worth serious attention. This kind of external validation preceded by a decade the corporate and mainstream press recognition that the gpl-and-linux-era-1991-1998 would bring.
stallman has described the MacArthur recognition as validating that his decision to leave a conventional academic or industry career to work full-time on GNU was not simply eccentric. The hacker-ethic-mit that steven-levy documented in hackers-levy had operated largely outside mainstream recognition; the MacArthur award was a signal that what stallman was doing fit recognizable categories of intellectual achievement.
The stallman-macarthur-fellowship-1990 belongs to the same category of recognition as the honorary doctorates and other awards Stallman received in subsequent years — markers of the movement's growing legitimacy and of the unusual fact that a programmer's ethical commitments had produced something that looked, from the outside, like a major intellectual contribution.