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Interview: Ask Richard Stallman What You Will
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. He now spends much of his time fighting excessive extension of copyright laws, digital restrictions management, and software patents. RMS has agreed to answer your questions about GNU/Linux, how GNU relates to Linux the kernel, free software, why he disagrees with the idea of open source, and other issues of public concern. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Why are these interviews always for some dude trying to sell his latest crappy software? Yet another way Dice has ruined slashdot.
Inbetween Google, Apple, Samsung, NSA, GCHQ, ... can we still make it?
What are your views on the recent NSA activities and how do you think it will change free software & the internet?
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
If he ever did, you know it wouldn't have a shower scene.
What is your opinion on cryptocurrencies?
Okay, just kidding... but my question is this: How do you see the FSF remaining relevant 10 years hence - in other words, what is the FSF doing to keep from being obviated by the evolution of technology at large?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
How close are we to obtaining a truly free phone given that MWC 2014 has shown us a once proprietary Nokia running Android and do you have any further ideas as to how we can finally free the hardware firmware and what would be timescale until we see a truly free smartphone?
What are your thoughts on the gpl'ing of plan9 recently? What affect do you think this could have the gnu/linux ecosystem?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Can the GPL version 4 become the 'Good Public License'? One which forbids use of the software for weapon systems and invading privacy? A committee by the FSF could for example determine what is 'evil' enough to prohibit its use.
Do you think that's a good idea?
Jasper Internet
How much changed since November 2012?
http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/12/11/28/049240/ask-richard-stallman-anything
I read a little on your website about your take on technology that uses non-free software. Do you still not own a cell phone? If not, I'd love to hear your perspective on life without one these days, where its just assumed that people own one.
As a follow-up, where exactly do you draw the line concerning openness of source and whether or not you use software. For example, do you toast bread in a toaster that runs proprietary code? Obviously we're talking about different things here, but I'm curious to know at what point you say "no thanks!" when it comes to locked down technology.
How do you view Facebook's internet.org initiative? In my opinion, it's even worse than DRM, because today I can opt out of DRM content. What if someday internet access that doesn't pass through Facebook become so expensive I can't afford it? How can we fight to keep the internet away from such corporate control?
Dear RMS, I for one am very interested in what your view is concerning the future of GNOME and specifically GTK. In the past there were concerns over licensing between GTK and Qt and there seems to be a rise in uptake of Qt. My question is whether you see there being a future in GTK and should developers consider moving their projects to Qt?
Which site would you recommend for grown-up adults who used to visit Slashdot and who want to talk about computers, GNU/Linux and technology?
In the recent Clang thread, you seemed to say quality of software either isn't important to you, or at least is less important than the software being free software.
As someone who writes software for a living, this seemed like a "jump the shark" moment. (But maybe you jumped this particular shark long ago.)
Does it do your moment a disservice to say things like to, and also to have software that isn't of the up-most quality?
How many times have you been attacked by ninjas?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Please share your vision for where you would like to see GNU/Hurd, and GNU software over the next 25 years, and what people would be doing with it.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
In my experience; it is far easier to obtain; install and work with Free Software than with Free Hardware. I asked you about this in person 2 years back; but you brushed it aside saying hardware is not trivial to copy.
Recent events have proved me right; I feel. We simply do not have access to Freedom Hardware at low cost - even the Raspberry Pi has proprietary components in its hardware.
Why can't the FSF pool resources; license technology from ARM Holdings; and build a truly Free Tablet, Free Cellphone and Free PC running Free GNU/Linux instead of the pseudo-free Android? I am sure the community will pay any money to buy truly free Hardware from the FHF.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
Next question please.
Hi, Richard!
In the debian-cloud list, we had a long discussion about wordings, which I also think is very important. It stroke me that you felt cloud was in essence non-free, and that you wanted everyone to stop using the word "cloud" which you (rightly) thought was too vague. But since there is also private IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), I do think we may have fully free cloud systems.
I never knew if I was able to convince you that a completely free IaaS software was very important to keep our freedom, and would like to know what is your current feeling about it.
Mr. Stallman, do you ever play computer games (video games)?
If so, which ones?
I live a modest life, how ever I do need to pay the bills. For the most part I make my living doing stuff against the ideals of the GPL.
Here is why.
1. I am not charismatic enough to gain peoples attention, so I will not make a living off of speeches and publications.
2. The software I write tends to fill a small niche, so it will not gain mass popularity outside that niche. So my products won't make a good resume item. And the owners of the niche mostly will not donate to my efforts, if they can get it for free. As well wouldn't be distributed on most systems.
3. The software I write tends to be user friendly and intuitive to use. So consulting off the product or service isn't a good way either.
4. The ease of Internet Download makes shipping of media seem barbaric.
Now I would love to make all my stuff open source, however I do need to live, and I prefer if possible not to live off of government handouts. I am a software developer by heart and nature, doing it as a hobby would be a waste of my talents.
So how would a 100% GPL developer operate in a small business settings?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
http://neo900.org/
Would you maybe want to own one? Why?
They seem to go different way than FSF does with "Respects Your Privacy" program - instead of modifying the modem to either be free or act "as a circuit", which both may be not feasible given their limited resources, they seem to go with the "sandboxing" way - giving the user a way to control and monitor what does the modem do. They want to achive the same result, but with different way than proposed by FSF. What is your take on that?
And if not hero, then perhaps mildly inspiring personage (real or otherwise)?
I appreciate what you have done. I understand your ideology and wish you the best.
Thank you.
https://talky.io/ AFAICT is a fully free software video chat system. Have you used it? Would you recommend it to others?
It uses http://simplewebrtc.com/.
Dear RMS,
Many users have fallen victim to spying software such as facebook, and have willingly or unwittingly surrendered their privacy rights to corporations which sell their information.
Can Free Software salvage this situation and make the Internet a more private, a more free place for the common user? And what must we do about it?
Regards,
--exa--
You are an idol on 4chan's technology board, /g/, including an iconographic picture of you in that board's sticky. At one point you've even addressed us, or at least some common misconceptions circulated on 4chan (http://stallman.org/to-4chan.html).
Do you read 4chan at all? How did we come to your attention? Are you okay with your demigod status there?
Isn't it time to let this go? Fair or not, 'Linux' has won even if only because it's a more marketable name. Isn't encouraging community infighting over this distracting from many far more important free software issues?
Let me just state up front, I think the new versions of the GPL are becoming exactly what the GPL was originally used to protect agains, another intrusive EULA, restricting usage because someone doesn't like that usage. I personally use BSD style licensing, because I create for others to use, and I am not concerned with how they use it. My source is open, free, to use as you (end user / repackager / thief) see fit. By keeping my source pure, at my point, forks become the one-offs that are abandoned, while mine remains (i've already seen this). I truly believe that what goes around, comes around.
My question is, when does "free" stop being free? My reading of the GPL3 is such that it is placing restrictions on use, simply because of how it is being used, not because of anything else. Using GPL 2, or better yet, BSD, one is not restricting its use, and isn't that better for everyone? Restricting use, is not "free" in my definition of "free".
On the other hand, I admire your zealotry. People like you(and me??) drive the conversations we need to have, even if we disagree.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I believe you're in favour of much-reduced copyright terms - a few years rather than the endless decades of today.
If copyright were reduced to, say, five years, then the vast majority of GNU code would become public-domain - copyleft depending on copyright as it does, this would mean anyone could create a closed-source fork of, say, emacs. How do you feel about that?
So.. it has come to this
I remember when compiz was new, demos of it running effectively on 7 year old machines.
Recently I replaced the had drive in an old laptop with an SSD despite meeting the minimal requirements for Mint KDE I had many problems installing.
I kept running into out of memory problems when the LiveCD used the ramdisk it created. Finally I created a VM on which I installed a basic copy of the distro, I then rsynced the files to the old laptop drive. There I tweaked a few thing installed grub, made the drive bootable. Then I booted from a USB dock installed ubiquity on the old drive and installed Mint to the SSD. This seems like a very exhausting process to go through to install Linux.
In doing this I see a lot of defects in linux: growing memory requirements, drowing disk space requirements, inefficient sytems. In this sense Linux and free software seems to be becoming Windowized. Good archotectural decisions are been forsook for the sake of expediency, even to the point of exposing the systems to malware writers. Is this a concern for you?
"It's not what goes inside of a man that makes him dirty, but what comes out of him."
- Jesus Christ
How about relating how OS have failed to the point where users are running virtual machines. (We all know restricted software makes this worse, but it is not exclusively their fault.)
GNU/Hurd does not seem like so much overhead today given the huge amount of waste a VM creates. Perhaps GNU/Hurd is better suited to address where things have been progressing?
Multics doesn't seem so "bloated" anymore either.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
There is an entire generation of people out there for whom mobile apps, mostly on iOS and Android, are the way in which they do their computing. The more successful apps are usually very well-designed with incredible user interfaces, an area where free software has not achieved much success, and sold at very low prices and, in many cases, also monetized through stolen personal data.
It appears to me that the GNU project is mostly ignoring this important area - I am aware of Replicant and F-Droid but these are well behind their proprietary counterparts at the moment. What should we do? Ignore mobile and hope it goes away, try to get onboard with Replicant and F-Droid, try to bring in a new generation of free software developers that is native to the mobile environment, or avoid the mobile "ecosystem" completely and try to work on the hardware side and try to make free hardware that is not inherently trackable/centralized and then run free software on top of that instead?
Give the man a break. He's just trying to promote open sores food.
While I agree with your mission and am a fan of the work you have done, I can't help but feel you've managed to shoot yourself in the foot with how you've handled your beliefs. I recently commented about how I felt your insistence of free software purity has made it so your organization was unable to appropriately evolve with the technological environment. GNU/Hurd is a failure. I see Apple and Microsoft trying their damnedest to bring us back into the walled garden world of proprietary UNIX, without the benefits of UNIX. I see Unity, I see Metro, I see the app store commercialization of the package manager, I see you calling LLVM a tragedy. What I don't see is you and your organization having done the footwork necessary to make it so we have a choice. Those of us who value our computing freedom, I feel, have been let down by the lack of a reasonable solution from GNU. My assertion is that in 2014, the GNU Free Software Foundation has failed to provide us an 'out' from proprietary computing platforms.
My question is thus: What do you feel can be done to allow yourself and the Free Software Foundation to move forward and solve this problem of failure?
Automobile user interfaces have become increasingly complex and de-standardized as computerization reaches into the driver's seat. The major vendors don't seem to care about possible legal liabilities of designing inherently dangerous UIs.
Google has enticed Honda, GM and Audi to join the Open Automotive Alliance, but that project seems more oriented towards selling android and nVidia products than providing an objectively better car OS.
Do you see a future where a real Free (or at least Open Source) car operating system is a reality, or do you think the car makers will just continue to create unsafe and unstandardized vehicle UIs indefinitely?
Given that compilers are something that very few programmers can realistically work on, why is your objection to LLVM so strong?
Its licensing also means that the GNU compiler projects can use whatever advancements LLVM makes freely.
His opinions on those things are a lot more insightful and a lot less emotion-driven than most people's half-baked, freedom-hating opinions.
Thank you Dave Raggett
How do you find systemd/linux? Systemd's success could decrease relevance of Hurd, as systemd is Linux only.
:wq
and when we are already there, favorite version of Windows?
Ignoring preference of open source license for a minute, the open source landscape has lots of software to satisfy a wide range of users.
What piece of software is still sorely missing from the open source landscape that isn't yet being seriously attempted by any project?
Short version; what open source projects still need to be started?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Peter H. Salus, in his book `The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin' quotes Thomas Bushnell (the initial Hurd architect) as saying:
In hindsight, do you regret that decision, or are you happy about Linux being the usual kernel in GNU systems (and the subsequent misnaming)?
Windows users:
Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
Why not perhaps a more majestic creature?
Similar facial hair...
The BSD kernels are descendants of the original Unix kernel by bloodline, though they do not contain any original AT&T code has it has been replaced. This was an issue with the USL lawsuit. It was once common for computer vendors to allow free copying of software, since the computer vendor made their money off the hardware and the software was bundled with the hardware in all cases. Computer vendors were getting money to develop the software no matter how much the software was being shared. There was a lawsuit from software only companies that required operating systems to be sold seperately from the hardware which changed that, though now we seem to be back to users being required to buy the OS with the computer but without the open sourceness being so common.
The original Unix sources have been open sourced, in the early 2000s, long after they were reimplemented by Linux and expunged from BSD.
Caldera open sourced Ancient Unices 12 years ago: http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Ca...
Windows users:
Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
You argue that it is unethical for someone to distribute software in a way that limits any one of the 4 freedoms to users.
If you had the option, would you make it illegal to do so?
In other words, if you had the option would you make it so that software developers were forced by law to use a free software license? or would you leave the option to the developers and try to convince them (without coercion) that it is the right thing to do?
The Gnu Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) has not been embraced with nearly as much love as the GPL and numerous issues have been raised:
*Non compability with GPL (both ways).
*Non-freeness (as deemed by Debian) of invariant sections.
*Cumersomeness of having to print the full licence when distributing physical printouts.
Etc.
Wikipedia for example does not accept contributions licenced under the GFDL only.
What do you see as a way forward in adressing the issues raised regarding the GFDL?
Mine grows with some bald spots & I want to obtain neckbeard status.
I've often heard it levied that some of the FSF's goals are a bit out of touch, and it's often been speculated that one of the root causes may be inexperience with the modern computer interface. Reading over even how you search for web pages, the pipeline is very unix but it would be nearly entirely alien to a modern computer user.
Do you think there is any value in trying to switch paradigms for a while?
(please disregard any loaded language that may have slipped through, i'm tired, but this question has been eating at the back of my head for a while)
You (RMS) have said on numerous occasions that you don't use a cell phone because of privacy issues - that it can be used as a tracking device and underhandedly, for spying on its user.
What do you think of the "security-oriented" Blackphone? Secure enough for RMS?
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Well I think for child porn the other side of it is that having the pictures is criminalized even if they can't prove you did the act, know the person that did, that it wasn't consenting, that you were aware at the time of download that it was going to be someone underage you got or just that "young girls" means to you first year university students. The actual criminal assault | guilty mind part of the case isn't proven just the position of evidence that someone somewhere might have done something naughty (assuming it is illegal where they did it) is enough. Very few other areas of the legal system are so clearly thought crimes.
What's your opinion about GitHub and that more and more free software development is moving there?
You hear that sound over your head? It means you missed the joke.
Which programs do you use on a daily basis?
The only contemporary mention (Josephus) of Yeshua ben Yosef is known to be falsified. Nazareth probably didn't exist then. Arguments for the existence of such a man rely on the "principle of embarrassment", that is, that certain aspects of the narrative would be embarrassing to the early church and so are more likely to be factual. No unbiased person could uphold such a thing as evidence, and this is the only field of knowledge where it might be admitted as an argument.
I can only wonder what you must believe if that is what you call "ample evidence".
A child is a child because they are incapable of making choices for themselves.
That is simply incorrect. Children make choices for themselves all the time, and they also make mistakes. Likewise, adults do the same. Adults have sex with people and then later regret, and sometimes severely. Most adults are only a little bit less shortsighted than children, and yet they're allowed to have sex.
But the bottom line is this: In each individual case, the prosecution should have to prove that rape took place. We should revise our nonsensical consent laws and such, as well. This is all mainly caused by irrational "for the children" people like you who spew forth circular arguments and then make moral judgements and pretend as if their morals should be enforced through the law.
Thank you Dave Raggett
My only question about gNewSense is why did they choose a name which reads "gee, nuisance"?
Even if that's not the intended pronunciation, it's a remarkable oversight that a lot of people will read it as such.
--