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."

Comments

Re:Time to burn karma

[The Snowman]

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.

Re:Very historically significant

[CheeseburgerBrown]

Poppycock!

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!"

[ /me wipes tear away. ]

Can I have a moment, please?

Richard Stallman or Bill Gates?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

RMS dodged the question

[debilo]

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.

Re:RMS dodged the question

[Peter La Casse]

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.

India and Open Source

[GillBates0]

FYI, President APJ Kalam is quite literally a rocket scientist, who was formerly with the Defense Research and Development Organization. He's met with Richard Stallman a number of times to talk about OSS, particularly with it's importance to a developing country like India, and stressed it's importance to domestic software organizations a number of times.

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.

Re:My HERO

[WankersRevenge]

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.

Re:Time to burn karma

[UserGoogol]

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.

A raw treatment to RMS ...

[Gopal.V]

From what I hear from a lot of people who attended the actual GPL v3 conference, the audience was quite uninformed and rude (RMS also lost his temper, but what do you expect). Here's the blog of somebody who was on the DRM panel.

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.

Re:Why is this posted...

[curecollector]

Because there's no gnu-linux.slashdot.org?

*ducks*