Stallman Crashes Talk, Fights 'War On Sharing'

schliz writes "Free software activist Richard Stallman has called for the end of the 'war on sharing' at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. He criticized surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats, and software-as-a-service in a keynote presentation, and asserted that digital society had to be 'free' in order to be a benefit, and not an attack. Earlier in the conference, Stallman had briefly interrupted a European Patent Office presentation with a placard that said: 'Don't get caught in software patent thickets.' He told journalists that the Patent Office was 'here to campaign in favor of software patents in Australia,' arguing that 'there's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents.'"

Comments

GNU/Stallman

[dandart]

Shouting, running, making a fool out of himself. I think if only he would do the sort of things he does without calling a ruckus, then people might take him more seriously.

I admire the sort of things he's doing, but the way he does them is troublesome. He shouldn't for example be blocking access to an Apple store despite their terribly non-free products. Nobody likes an asshole and would tend to ignore it. Now, if he were to stand outside, offering leaflets on why Apple is wrong, but disguising it as something like "Bad Computer Practises", or "Why Software Freedom is Important" instead of "Apple is crap! Don't buy from them!" which no one will pay attention to, I think he'd get a lot further.

Good luck, rms.

stallman rocks

[Jeek Elemental]

He secured his place in history a long time ago and is STILL at it, and most impressive, still relevant.

Re:Humans who own stock benefit when...

[sakshale]

There is a problem currently with laws that were written with humans in mind, being interpreted to cover corporations.

For example; California's property tax reform a few decades back, was written to protect older citizen's from being taxed out of their family homes. It limits the amount your property tax can go up, unless you sell your property or perform a major upgrade. Now, however, there is a problem. Corporations also own property, but quite often they never sell it or transfer it... and they don't die of old age. There is simply no mechanism in place to allow Corporations to have the value of their property reassessed on a periodic basis to adjust their property tax to reflect current value.

Whether this is good or bad is not the point. The point I am making is that corporations are not human beings and thus laws written for human beings might not work as intended when applied to corporations.