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Transcript of Talk with Richard Stallman

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-to-read dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This is the transcript of the talk with Richard Stallman, the father of GNU in the background of the 4th International GPLv3 Conference being held at Bangalore where RMS is a prominent delegate. He answers questions related to GPLv3, DRM and a couple of other queries."

4 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Time to burn karma by The+Snowman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, he is, but sometimes that's what it takes to get the job done. He doesn't let people walk all over him: he is self-assertive because he believes what he believes so strongly. If it weren't for him, free and open source software wouldn't exist the way it does today. I'm sure it would exist, but we'd be very far behind the power curve.

    --
    24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
  2. RMS dodged the question by debilo · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You may find this disturbing, but I actually read the interview and I find this tidbit quite revealing:

    Q. There are a lot of misconceptions about free software. What kind of an economic model does an entrepreneur look at when he starts out with free software ?

    RMS: I want to ask you why that question is worth asking. First of all there are many people who don't have to make money. Importantly even if a person has to make a living, he doesn't have to make a living from everything he does. [snip]
    To me it seems like RMS totally dodged the question. What is "...there are many people who don't have to make money" supposed to mean in this context? I'm sure there are people that don't have to make money, but most people do have to make money, and I wonder why RMS is so opposed to economic acceptance. It seems that he believes F/OSS's noble goals will be corrupted if Linux gains momentum in the corporate world, but don't we have the GPL to prevent just that? Ultimately, corporate support will help secure the foundation of F/OSS -- I'm thinking of IBM and Sun, and the corporate support behind OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
    1. Re:RMS dodged the question by Peter+La+Casse · · Score: 4, Insightful
      To me it seems like RMS totally dodged the question. What is "...there are many people who don't have to make money" supposed to mean in this context?

      I believe that Stallman believes that making money by doing bad things isn't acceptable. To him, morality (remember that Free Software is a moral issue to him) sufficiently justifies a Free Software approach.

      I wonder why RMS is so opposed to economic acceptance.

      I don't see evidence that he's opposed to economic acceptance as a whole any more than antislavery folks are opposed to economic activities as a whole. They're only opposed to economic activities that they consider morally wrong.

  3. Re:My HERO by WankersRevenge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is it just me, or are other people getting a bit wearied of people distilling this rather complex world into the rather simplistic ideas of good and evil? My god - the world is not a comic book.