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Transcript of Talk with Richard Stallman
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."
Now, this is something I do not get: are Linus, Richard Stallman some kind of Gods ?
Everytime they just say something, it appears as if it was God in person speaking...
No matter what they did (I mean: how many people wrote their own kernel ? be it Un*x or not), I don't understand why they always appear as Gods...
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!
Poppycock!
/me wipes tear away. ]
I will never, ever forget the way I felt when I first heard Lincoln's immortal words: "Be excellent to one another, and party ON, dudes!"
[
Can I have a moment, please?
These stories are free but worth money.
The original interview (which the blog has just copy-pasted, inexplicably introducing errors) is here. There is also another interview (another newspaper, another Indian city) here. Both of them are short and say the usual things, and not much info on GPLv3 itself (naturally, as they are newspaper interviews).
Just a heads up. The article contains nothing new, interesting, or provocative (which many of RMS's interviews tend to be). It's very much a fluff piece.
Although, I was interested to see how an interview that takes place outside of the mainstream tech media unfolded. There was no discussion of a FSF/RMS vs. Linus Torvalds/Linux headbutting. Nothing at all about why there is much contention of v3. That being said, I found it admirable that he did not take the opportunity to express his opposing views in this one-sided piece. Many would take such a chance to bash the oppositions arguments.
Richard Stallman is, in my humble opinion, A HERO and even a true american patriot.
b _start:int=0
h ard-stallman-protests-at-un-world-summit/
He has been protesting evil surveillance technology such as RFID for years. And there are few other people who have contributed more to free software and humanity in general as he has.
Take a look at his past speches: http://www.fsf.org/events/past-rms-speeches.html?
And remember his protest at the UN Summit: http://www.secureidnews.com/weblog/2005/11/21/ric
(as you may or may not be aware, the UN are evil. They openly admit they want the UN to be a one-world government and that they want to destroy the sovereignty of any existing nation. Richard Stallman is a hero for protesting against UN evil)
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Now, this is something I do not get: are Linus, Richard Stallman some kind of Gods ?
Everytime they just say something, it appears as if it was God in person speaking...
No matter what they did (I mean: how many people wrote their own kernel ? be it Un*x or not), I don't understand why they always appear as Gods...
O Lord Stallman, forgive this unbeliever for his foolish words of blasphemy. We, your true believers, will shun him and send him out from our fold. Once he could visit Slashdot and bask in the glory of (transcripts of) your wisdom, but now he will live on the streets and fight over garbage with alleycats.
Quoted from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/10/15/the_bofh_q uestionnaire_how_geeky/
2. You're locked in a room with Richard Stallman and Bill Gates and have only a gun with two bullets in it (which you normally secrete on your person in case you ever get locked in a room with Richard Stallman, Bill Gates, etc). They both clear their throats to speak. What do you do?
A. Shoot Bill, hoping he hasn't got a tablet device (or the XP Security Vulnerability notes) crammed up his blazer
B. Shoot Richard, hoping he hasn't got the notes for his speech in front of his heart
C. Shoot Richard AND Bill and take your chances
D. Shoot yourself, twice, for getting into such a contrived situation
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.
A collection of miscellaneous links about OSS developments in India.
Indian President Advises Open Source Approach
President Of India Advocates OSS
Indian President Advises Open Source Approach
Stallman Goes to India (and meets the President)
and finally, more recently...
Indian State Logs Microsoft Out
I'm hoping to see more active participation in OSS development from India, as more of it's educated masses come online. Computer and internet usage has surged among the middle-class only in recent years, with improvement (albeit gradual) in infrastructure.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In other words, [Stallman is saying that] software developers aught not be paid for their efforts.
You didn't consider the context. Stallman was arguing against the belief that "if people aren't paid, they won't write code". He was mentioning the fact that most FLOSS code is written by nonpaid volunteers, while only a minority are paid.
He did not say that developers shouldn't be paid for their efforts. In fact, his GPL says the opposite: you can write free software and make money from it - by selling warranties for it, or media with your software on it.
When he says (without the careful wordsmithing) that developers shouldn't be paid, and that they should just either be independently wealthy or find other means of supporting themselves, he demonstrates an almost willful disconnection with/disdain for many of the very people who praise his efforts.
If you are a paid programmer, RMS is not your friend.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
In other words, software developers aught not be paid for their efforts; it should be something they freely contribute to some global software collective. Software developers should instead find another way to make a living.
1 4188526128&q=stallman
Stallman has never suggested that software developers should not be paid. In fact he's said many times that FLOSS creates economic opportunity. He's even detailed how its earned him some decent consulting fees.
You can see him discussing that on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-16476263
He's not actually saying that developers shouldn't be paid, but rather that they don't have to be paid, which is an important distinction. He doesn't mind if people do get paid, but he thinks if they don't get paid it's not that big a deal as long as software still gets made.
But yeah, Stallman really doesn't care that much about the interests of the professional programmer in particular. His goals are for the freedoms of computer users in general, (people in general, ultimately) and if proffessional programmers have to take a paycut or enter a new field entirely, so be it. Making proprietary software is (as he sees it) unethical, so why should they feel entitled to make money that way? Of course, if you asked him, I imagine he might say that programmers are (ultimately) better off with free software but small paychecks than they are with decently sized paychecks but unfree software because unfree software is just that bad.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
From http://kerneltrap.org/node/4484...
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This is neither the time or place for people to ask a Why? to RMS about free software. Sure, it was a place to ask a Why GPL v3 or about DRM licensing or patent protections, but the questions that were asked was almost total bullshit. Yet again, I'm not speaking from personal presence there - I've just talked to people on irc and read their blogs.
Was one of those weeks when I wasn't in Bangalore ... but RMS was in Kerala (where I am now) and the discussions here were more practical than those quoted from Blr. The ones here were really about the freedoms and mostly by students or political decision makers versus the armchair activists from the software industry.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
It's the classic head-in-the-clouds, hippie mentality that making money is evil and that your "freedom"--or, rather, Stallman's particular personal definition of freedom (in which somehow the BSD license is less free than the GNU license)--is more important than functionality, technological progress, or simple economics in which people make money for their efforts.
For some reason, he has a following in which he's revered as a "hero" and a "patriot." Apparently, using the word "freedom" over and over in interviews and insisting that proprietary software is evil and should be abolished makes you a genius.
"Sufferin' succotash."
There is no need to be parsimonious with your gratitude. You say that as if we must choose between giving thanks to both the community and RMS and Torvalds. By the standard you endorse we end up essentially saying "what have you done for me lately?" instead of valuing both the community including both men for their work in the past and their continued work on things that matter.
After all, even by the silly logic of valuing what is and not what was, Torvalds and RMS both deserve thanks; Linus Torvalds is still involved in Linux kernel development, despite not writing all of the code in his fork of that kernel. Richard Stallman is the author of the most widely used free software licenses—the GNU GPL, the GNU LGPL, and the free documentation license the GNU FDL. And when it comes to the GPL (the subject of the talk at the heart of this /. thread), Eben Moglen says "there is no other copyright license in the world that is so strongly identified with the achievements, and the philosophy, of a single public figure".
Digital Citizen
Because there's no gnu-linux.slashdot.org?
*ducks*
The fact is that RMS is loaded, and he hangs out with other such people (you know the kind.... they come up with a concept, hype it to venture capitalists, run the company into the ground or simply never produce a product, but they walk away with millions), and he is completely and totally out of touch with those of us poor souls that (God forbid!) have to WORK in order to earn money and pay our bills. Not all of us can be a blowhard that gets paid for spouting nonsense like "First of all there are many people who don't have to make money. " He sounds like a smug, pretentious asshole to me.
He doesn't have a lack of understanding. He knows why people don't want to share. He merely disagrees with them at a very fundamental level. He disagrees with the concept of information as property.
A lot of people are paid to create software - custom software for some particular customer's needs. For me, the act of writing of software is the process of creating wealth, not the act of selling it. Enough companies make their living just producing code rather than licensing the same code over to a million customers.
Now, when I create something out of nothing, I expect to be paid. But that doesn't go against any Free Software concept to be remunerated for work, but it does go against a few of mine if you merely sell licenses instead of the work done. Proprietary firms do exactly that, they sell you the use of some code, but not the code itself. And RMS might be a hardliner, but we need those in moderation too - because otherwise the rational people among us will accept compromises which might be harmful in the long run ... (yes, I'm talking about ESR).
In short, with free software, you get what you pay for and sometimes a few developers whom you didn't pay for.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
(I (was (expecting more) (brackets (in (that transcript)))))
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
That's just not true. He didn't say programmers shouldn't be paid. He said that some programmers don't do it for money but volunteer out of altruism or because they love programming and well crafted software.
I think he is sick of hearing the proprietary software shops of the world tell him, and any tech trade rag that will listen, that it's impoosible to create software unless you spend a ton of money. The GNU project, Linus's kernel, the BSD's and numerous other examples have proven that to be completely false.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
People kept refering to me as a crank, so I looked it up, it's a useful tool for starting revolutions
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
Are you going to appologize for lying? We don't need your shilling for software companies on slashdot. Here is an selection from an RMS interview
JA: How do you react to the opinion that non-free software is justified as a means for raising dollars that can then be put into the development of completely new software, money that otherwise may not have been available, and thus creating software that may have never been developed?
Richard Stallman: This is no justification at all. A non-free program systematically denies the users the freedom to cooperate; it is the basis of an antisocial scheme to dominate people. The program is available lawfully only to those who will surrender their freedom. That's not a contribution to society, it's a social problem. It is better to develop no software than to develop non-free software.
So if you find yourself in that situation, please don't follow that path. Please don't write the non-free program--please do something else instead. We can wait till someone else has the chance to develop a free program to do the same job.
JA: What about the programmers...
Richard Stallman: What about them? The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job.
JA: Such as?
Richard Stallman: There are thousands of different jobs people can have in society without developing non-free software. You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software--only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid.
JA: What is the distinction there?
Richard Stallman: Non-free software is meant to be distributed to the public. Custom software is meant to be used by one client. There's no ethical problem with custom software as long as you're respecting your client's freedom.
The next point is that programmers are a tiny fraction of employment in the computer field. Suppose somebody developed an AI and no programmers were needed anymore. Would this be a disaster? Would all the people who are now programmers be doomed to unemployment for the rest of their lives? Obviously not, but this doesn't stop people from exaggerating the issue.
>> Stallman has never suggested that software developers should not be paid.
> Is that so? "The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job. [- Stallman]"
Stallman is not against making money for writing software. As I said elsewhere in this topic, he would probably support e.g. FLOSS developers getting paid by governments. What he is against is non-free software. So, it follows that he is against getting paid for making non-free software. He is also against paying money for non-free software, using non-free software, teaching people how to use non-free software... you get the point.
Well, and there is a significant source of paid programming work that he is (intentionally?) not mentioning. It's when a company that develops some software product for internal use recognizes that it would benefit if the product is released to the public, even if it is only bug reports that it's going to get, and even if they can never hope to sell (er, should I have said license?) the program.
I myself have participated in several such projects. Moreover, I'm always actively on the lookout for things that would *benefit us* if GPL'ed. I actually have a very easy time convincing people of that. The story goes like this: it happened several times that we took sources of an open project, added to it internally (things like bugfixes, features etc.), but the management refused to release the changes back, citing things like "why should we share our work" and "it's now the company's IP". However, what invariably happened was that our internal source code stagnated, since we found it increasingly hard to migrate our changes whenever the new version of the outside software was released. Ultimately, things came to a screeching halt, when we had no internal updates for a year, while the outside version continued developing. (To be more concrete, one of the examples is when we decided to use XParam (xparam.sf.net).
What I did then, was schedule an appointment with a senior boss and explain him, as clearly as possible, the situation that we got ourselves into. Now, that may be sheer luck, or his good humor at the time, or maybe my persuasiveness :), but I got out of that meeting that, in principle, we are permitted to release any software, provided that we explain that it will not *hurt* the company bottomline (compare to the previous situation, where we had to explain that releasing would *mightily help*, otherwise there was nothing to talk about).
So, to summarize, there's a large source of GPL'ed code coming from paid programmers: it's when companies understand that it serves their interest to make it free rather than keeping it close to the chest. That's not right for any program though...
If you are using Linux then you're using his The GNU Operating System
No, you're using the GNU operating system, along with X.org, Mozilla, and QT/KDE.
Remember that the "GNU" part of Mozilla/[KDE|QT]/X.org/GNU/Linux only refers to a small set of command-line utilities - that's just one peice. The rest was put together by many volunteers across the globe.
I'll call it "GNU/Linux" when Stallman calls it "Mozilla/[KDE|QT]/X.org/GNU/Linux." Until then, he's just being hypocritical.
...then his viewpoint is shared by an overwhelming majority. Most people have no problem prohibiting whatever their personal moral code says is wrong. Real, honest-to-goodness "live and let live" is rare. Up to a point, that's fine; I think that murder is not a morally acceptable way to make a living, and I encourage you to find other means of support. I doubt Stallman considers non-Free Software to be as bad as murder, but he clearly prefers that you find other means of support.
Consider those claims again:
Claim 1: Many people don't have to make money. Correct.
Claim 2: Even if you have to make a living, not everything you do has to make money. Not true for everyone, but certainly for the average working human being.
He nowhere states that devs should not profit from programming. However, I agree that he feels that devs should freely contribute.
Anyway, your poorly supported conclusions show that you need to improve your logical reasoning.
The comment does not distinguish commercial versus proprietary software business and so is completely pointless, i.e., mod to zero!
In Stallmanland, there are two distinct categories of software:
- Infrastructure Software
- Bespoke Software
The second is easier to look at. Pretty much all bespoke software is already Free Software. You would have to be slightly mad to pay someone to write software for you, to solve a particular problem you might have, without granting you the FSF's four freedoms.The second is the problem a lot of people have. Currently, much infrastructure software is proprietary. Things like operating systems come into this category. Everyone needs one. It doesn't make sense for everyone to write one than it makes sense for everyone to pay someone to lay a road in front of them as they walk. And, once the costs of development are paid, it doesn't make sense economically to keep paying for it. It does make sense for people who need new features to pay to have those developed, and for people who need security to pay for periodic security audits.
It is easy to see how bespoke software would be developed in Stallmanland, because it is exactly the same as how it was always developed; and this represents about 90% of the software market. Infrastructure software is slightly different. Some would likely come from academia, much like Mach and BSD UNIX. Some would come from individuals scratching an itch and releasing their code, some from corporations employing someone to scratch their itches (see IBM, Sun, and Novell's funding of Free Software for examples).
The first poster likened Stallman to Lincoln. This is not entirely inaccurate; both were trying to help people who had had their freedom taken away. Stallman is trying to help more people, Lincoln was trying to help people who had had more freedoms removed. The difference, perhaps between a police officer catching a spammer and a murderer. A murderer who kills one person takes 91980000 person-seconds of life (assuming that the person would live for 70 years). A spammer who takes a minute and a half from a million people does the same damage to society. If you are the person being murdered (or enslaved), then it makes a huge difference to you, but overall the impact is similar. Stallman may well end up having an enormous impact on future society. Personally, I hope he does.
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