Ask Richard Stallman Anything

Richard Stallman (RMS) founded the GNU Project in 1984, the Free Software Foundation in 1985, and remains one of the most important and outspoken advocates for software freedom. RMS now spends much of his time fighting excessive extension of copyright laws, digital rights management, and software patents. He's agreed to answer your questions about GNU/Linux, free software, and anything else you like, but please limit yourself to one question per post.

Comments

Re:Copy protection and GPL

[alexhs]

allots (2783683) and quartersa (2783685) are both astroturfing accounts, posting the minute the story goes live. Usually there's only one of them by story, but they have no shame :)

Stolen bag / laptop in Argentina

[Cigarra]

What ever happened with the stolen bag and laptop? Did you get something back? Did you LOSE data (that is, was something not backed up)? Are you mad with the organizers / country that hosted the event?

Re:Microsoft and GPL

[Dr_Barnowl]

The only improvements I'm aware of are related directly to their own products - Hyper-V drivers for Linux operating systems hosted on their virtualization platform.

Ironically, these were first contributed because of a GPL violation.

Citation : Hyper-V submission by Microsoft

Things seem to have gone quiet on the matter of the alleged 235 patents that Linux (and "other open source software") are supposed to violate.

Re:Is Microsoft the Great Satan? Betteridge says

[clarkn0va]

I don't see how preferring "free software" over "open source software" makes one touchy or pedantic, given that RMS has stated his reasons for said preference. You may not agree with him, but it doesn't add anything to the discussion to label him.