Stallman — 20 Years of Explaining Free Software

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The first recorded talk by Richard Stallman on free software was in 1986, so I've picked from the 2006 recordings and have made a transcript of a recent talk: The Free Software Movement and the Future of Freedom. Those two are the only transcripts of his general free software talk. Others that exist are on specific topics such as patents, GPLv3, copyright, etc. For those who've been reading Slashdot during the gradual evolution of Stallman's pronouncements, it's interesting to see what has changed over 20 years."

Comments

Open Stallman

[Doc Ruby]

How about posting audio streams/downloads of all Stallman recordings, and accepting publicly submitted transcripts on a Wiki? Let the community decide what Stallman said, including comments by Stallman. Such a project could be completed for cheap, fairly quickly - the open source way.

Submitter's home page

[grimJester]

Here, actually seems more interesting than TFA (This is Slashdot; I didn't read TFA). To quote:

I work within the political system of the European Union to ensure that the development and use of free software is not hampered by new legislation. The best known example of a legislative project I worked on is the "Software Patents Directive".

security

[bcrowell]

One thing that really sounds dated in the 1986 lecture is the discussion of passwords at the MIT AI lab. This was back when people were on local networks, and they knew everybody else who was on the network with them. People wrote C code that looked like "for (;*q;) {*p++ = *++q}", and didn't worry about buffer overflows, because hey, what kind of idiot would intentionally crash a program by putting in an unreasonably long input string? Also, in a modern university, some of the hardware and software hacking exploits he talked about would probably result in your being presented with a cardboard box to empty your desk into.

Re:Hard to explain

[stefanlasiewski]

It depends...

"Liberty" sometimes sounds honorable, like something out of the US Constitution. "Free" sounds cheap... like "free soda".

In the business world, it's not unusual to hear something like "Oh, MySQL? Oh, we don't support freeware." The perception is often that "Free" == "Cheap and unsupported". In reality, MySQL is a good product, and support is available in several forms.

Get your free painted Liberty silver dollar here!

I guess that's why some people prefer "Libre".

Creative Commons "Non-commercial Use"

[ortholattice]

Although it is apparent that he disapproves CC licences in general, RMS didn't seem to touch on an aspect of "non-commercial use" CC licenses that I find troubling. The problem is that "non-commercial" is not clearly defined. Certainly there can be blatant commercial use that is easy to identify, but there are many situations where it is not so clear. Suppose, for example, the material is posted a personal home page, which is provided free by the ISP in exchange for advertisements. Does that constitute "commercial use"? Clearly, the ISP is profiting from the material if it is drawing people to that page and thus the ads. It is easy to come up with many such examples, and it is even hard to come up with examples where the use is disconnected from the slightest taint of a direct or indirect commercial connection. Is a Red Cross advertisement commericial or noncommercial? If the Red Cross paid a magazine for a full-page ad, then the magazine is earning some money from it.

I will usually avoid using "non-commercial use" material in my own work. For one thing, it is incompatible with say GPL-licensed software, since e.g. a CC-licensed "non-commercial use" icon would prevent a commercial entity from using it, defeating the purpose of the GPL.

Re:Stallman on Linux

[Aim Here]

Read your own quote "... his political point of view is that ... the developer can simply decide whether you have freedom or not...".

Linus chose to give us freedom, but he still believes that authors have the rights to deprive users of 'the four freedoms', should they want to.
Stallman believes that the user should have the right to those freedoms, regardless of the wishes of the authors. Therein lies the ideological difference.

Re:No

[WilliamSChips]

Without RMS, Linus would have used a license which included a non-commercial clause.

Re:Hard to explain

[pairo]

Well, basically, because it lacks many of the decent features of other RDBMSs (I won't say real RDBMS :-P), some of which are even OpenSource (see PostgreSQL and Firebird), while having quite a few misfeatures (the authentication model is utterly retarded. You have users, identified by user at host. And, you then have users - identified by user AND host - for table privileges. And databases. And columns. Heck, am I the only one that thinks that anything with more than 10 users will give you headaches for the years to come?), performance issues (SELECT * FROM foo is fine and all, but... The first thing that comes to mind is a cron script that runs every ten minutes and ANALYZEs a table, twice. It would refuse to use its index otherwise and take about 50 seconds, instead of half a second. And, let's just say that many a time I've found its locking mechanism getting stuck while trying to acquire a lock. That is, if - and, yes, this does belong in the misfeature bit - it won't give out an exclusive lock to two threads), compatibility issues (SQL is optional for it), and (and this one's actually pretty subjective), being marketed as 'Enterprise', nowadays.

Some of its design decisions (threads v.s. processes, they used to say transactions suck and they won't implement them, lack of focus on features at the beginning) were questionable, to say the least. Some of the way they implemented them is pretty mindboggling. The way InnoDB breaks whenever you as much as blow in the general direction of its huge ass files...

And, uhm, there are many examples I could give you, but I'm off home. :-)

Re:RMS' rationale condensed

[AeroIllini]

In short, he's given up on his pragmatic rationale since they've been proven almost entirely wrong.

They're not proven wrong yet.

Remember that the copyleft movement is a movement about purity of design; in essence, all of his conclusions about open-source vs. closed-source software are based on the assumption of all else being equal. With no other factors involved, his three points about software are absolutely correct. More people will use a free product over a product they have to pay for, if those products are equal (and/or are percieved as equal). People are more productive when they can adjust their tools to their preferences. And no one likes reinventing the wheel over and over just because of some proprietary agreements.

Unfortunately for his movement, we don't live in a world where all else is equal, and there are a number of very important factors affecting people's software choices. Advertising. Capital. Perception. Inertia. Economy. All of these create conditions where proprietary software thrives (in terms of sheer number of programs), seemingly contradicting his aims.

Perception and inertia are the most important two. Companies that create software still, for the most part, see software as a product, and not a means to achieve a service. Therefore, they apply all the standard rules to their product that any other company would: they keep the plans and the means to reproduce it secret, so that they can't be undercut in the market by someone else with a lower initial investment. This thinking is very firmly ingrained in our culture, and I don't expect it to change anytime soon. Those of us who see software as a tool, i.e., a means to an end and not the end itself, understand that it is much more valuable in the long run to ensure the customer has the best tool for the job at all times, even if that involves letting the customer modify the tool as they see fit. In this model, the software is a service, not a product, and allowing the customer to make changes is part of that service. There is plenty of money to be made in this sector, and many people are already doing that with Free Software, but the majority of companies (and managers making purchasing decisions) are still in the software-as-product mindset, where "free" means "cheap and useless."

Inertia is important because it causes people to not make changes that would benefit them, even when they have the means to do so. How many people have looked at an application on their computer and thought to themselves, "boy, I really wish it would do X when I do Y, instead of doing Z."? And how many people, even if they are using Free Software, *truly* have the means to make that change themselves? Slashdotters aside, almost no one. The learning curve is too high. No cubicle monkey is going to spend time coding some new function that exports vector data to .dxf from their favorite drawing program, then spend the time getting that function integrated into the main branch of the CVS tree, wait for a full release, and finally wait for their company's IT department to integrate the new release into their computer's hdd image so they can finally start using it. Even if it makes them far more productive in the long run. So even though the ability to make changes to the tool is there, it doesn't mean everyone will. And once we accept that fact, it makes sense that people are willing to simply purchase or download a program and grumble about it. If I can't (or won't) tinker with it, what does it matter if it's open or closed source?

Stallman's points have not yet been proven wrong. He is simply fighting hundreds of years of conventional thinking which is being brought to an industry that's just getting started. And the metrics we typically use for measuring the "success" of a program, i.e., number of installations, are not the same metrics Stallman uses for measuring the "success" of a program. If a program is the proper tool for the job, and helps a person do something more effectively or efficiently, then that program is a success. His three points you mentioned will very much aid in creating that type of success.

Stallman is not wrong. He just hasn't changed the world yet.