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

Misses a point

[tomstdenis]

RMS has good intentions with the FSF but misses one critical point.

It's all good and well to give out free software, but how useful is that if nobody can really learn from it or modify it?

Raise your hand if you're a software developer. Keep your hand up if you can digest the Mozilla code and add new functionality to it within a day. Weekend. Week. Month.

Repeat for GCC, Linux Kernel, etc...

Now granted there are some well commented/documented projects. But if you don't make it part of your core values to not only give out free functional software but also EDUCATIONAL SOURCE CODE then we're not much better off are we?

Tom

Re:A directory of free software recordings

[Doc Ruby]

I know that Stallman champions zero-price software, and only tangentially open source software. So? I prefer the open source to the zero price. And my suggestion operates according to both, unless you can find somewhere I suggested charging the public to listen to the audio they're transcribing for free. I don't know whether Stallman would prefer to get emails asking him to correct what he thinks he said in an old audio recording over a wiki. Why don't you email him and ask him?