Richard Stallman: Cell Phones Are 'Stalin's Dream'

jbrodkin writes "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software pioneer Richard Stallman, who refuses to own one. 'Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop.' Even the open source Android is dangerous because devices ship with proprietary executables, Stallman says in a wide-ranging interview on the state of the free software movement. Despite some progress, Stallman is still dismayed by 'The existence and use of non-free software [which] is a social problem. It's an evil. And our aim is a world without that problem.'"

Comments

Re:Open source vs proprietary

[jedidiah]

It's amazing how the Lemmings can turn this into something about Microsoft. Although that sort of brand fetish is part of the problem.

The sort of regime that RMS is complaining about now doesn't even allow for the likes of WinDOS. This is a new level of restriction above the old school problem of just the applications being proprietary. At least something like a kludge clone is a device that's in your control and you can run anything you want on it. The proverbial "off switch" is still under your control.

The new regime even strips of of freedoms a WinDOS user would be accustomed to.

Namely the freedom to run whatever program you want (free or not).

This also makes it a lot easier for platform vendors to control and distort standards regarding user data.