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.

Re:Open Stallman

[Hijacked Public]

How about just replacing the entire Stallman with a CGI character that reads from a wiki based on public transcripts?

Correct me if I'm wrong...

[Zirtix]

Wouldn't it be more efficient to just distribute the diff?

--- oldspeech
+++ newspeech
@@ -202905339 +202905339,2 @@
Software should be free.
+Software patents are bad.

Re:Bleh

[Dik Zak]

what has HE done? He developed the original Emacs, GNU Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. That's a pretty serious contribution you know.

No

[orasio]

He will never get over it.
When mswindows 95 appeared, it wasn't called "the DOS system". It was the Windows system, running on DOS. Okay, that's too much of a stretch.
mswindows nt/2000 was not the "kernel32.exe".
OSX is not "mach + some apple stuff".

An operating system is a lot more than a kernel, in the same way that a car is a lot more than its engine, even when it doesn't work without it. The user doesn't get to interact with the engine, and the car would be the same car, if the engine is replaced. That happens the same way with Operating Systems and kernels. Debian is not there yet, but they have several GNU distributions with varying kernels.

Linux is a good kernel, and plays an important role for the success of free software. Aside from that, when you get for example, Ubuntu, there is a lot more GNU than Linux included in the CD. And the platform is defined by the GNU system, not the Linux kernel.
When people say they know "Linux", for example the "Linux" console, they are talking about bash. When talking about "Linux" programming, it's usually GCC, the "Linux" desktop might be Gnome or KDE, of course, but it's not Linux either.

The guy will never get over it, because, in that particular issue, he is right, and the people who think different from him are just wrong. There's no way he will change his opinion on that issue.

Re:No

[swillden]

If Linux Torvalds hadn't got involved in software RMS would have a following of academic lisp gurus numbering nearly in three digits.

I doubt it. If Linus hadn't done what he did, I think there would have been another kernel by the mid-90s. Perhaps it would have HURD (I think the availability of Linux slowed HURD development), or perhaps it would have been BSD, or perhaps it would have been something else. Linus' contribution was important, but the kernel is one of the smaller components in a full operating system.

If Richard Stallman hadn't got involved in software Linux would have a different compiler.

And a different license. If RMS hadn't started GNU, Linux would have had a BSD user environment, and probably a BSD license. It's hard to say what the impact of that would have been. It seems clear that a BSD-licensed Linux wouldn't have gotten all of the corporate participation that the GPL-licensed Linux has.

Without GNU, I also think Linux would have been delayed for a few years, because it would have been necessary to either write all the user space tools or wait for the BSD settlement to legitimize the BSD stuff.

Getting back to the question of the compiler, I wonder what Linus would have used if GCC weren't available. What were the options for a poor college student in 1991? I was a student at the time, and I know that the compilers available to me were Borland's Turbo C and compilers from OS vendors, including Microsoft, Sun, HP and DEC. Borland's was the the most accessible to students, because of their education prices, but neither it nor Microsoft's compiler would have run on Linus' fledgling new OS, unless it provided a DOS-like kernel interface. The others were really expensive. The BSD and Minix compilers were around, but I'm not sure if he could have used either of them legally.

Perhaps Linus would have had to write a C compiler as he was writing his kernel? I really don't know the answer to these questions.

Speculating about how Free Software history would have changed with either RMS or Linus removed from it is complex and difficult. There were a lot of interrelated factors.

RMS' rationale condensed

[FallLine]

The idea of owning information is harmful in three different levels. Materially harmful on three different levels, and each kind of material harm has a corresponding spiritual harm.

|SNIP|

The first level is just that it discourages the use of the program, it causes fewer people to use the program, but in fact it takes no less work to make a program for fewer people to use.

|SNIP|

The second level of harm comes when people want to change the program, because no program is really right for all the people who would like to use it. Just as people like to vary recipes, putting in less salt say, or maybe they like to add some green peppers, so people also need to change programs in order to get the effects that they need.

|SNIP|

The third level of harm is in the interaction between software developers themselves. Because any field of knowledge advance most when people can build on the work of others, but ownership of information is explicitly designed to prevent anyone else to doing that.

That is it folks. In other words, his argument is closed source software is wrong on pragmatic grounds because:

A) fewer people will use the software (because it tries to prevent people from using w/o paying)

B) the software is less useful to people because they can't modify the original program

C) proprietary software is less valuable because other developers in lateral areas can't learn from it.

It seems pretty clear to me that his arguments failed on these pragmatic grounds and that he's had to shift his anti-ownership rational to far more nebulous and entirely philosophical arguments about "freedom" for its own sake.

The facts are:

A) Contrary to his "first level" of harm: proprietary software has vastly outcompeted open software despite its barriers.

B) Contrary to his "second level" of harm: that most users still prefer closed source software despite the fact that they can't tinker with it and despite the fact that it costs more/has more barriers.

C) Contrary to his "third level" of harm: that proprietary software still appeals more to its end users despite the fact that proprietary developers benefit little from the pool of open source code. This despite the fact that open source developers supposedly have a huge advantage over proprietary developers because they can exploit the GPL and other copyleft code to a level that their counterparts cannot.

In short, he's given up on his pragmatic rationale since they've been proven almost entirely wrong. I'll concede that there is something to be said for the sharing of code in some cases, but we're to choose rationally between no ownership vs choice of ownership (the status quo) that the latter is the only sensible and pragmatic choice given his own (old) arguments and the empirical evidence (or lack thereof) from his so-called copyleft movement.