Stallman Does Slides -- and Brevity -- For TEDx

New submitter ciaran2014 writes Richard Stallman's long-format talks are well-known — there are videos going back to 2001 and transcripts dating back to 1986 — but he recently condensed his free software talk down to 14 minutes and set it to hand-drawn slides for TEDxGeneva (video link). He introduces with the four freedoms, as always, and then moves on to spyware, surveillance, non-free drivers, free software in schools, non-free javascript, Service as a Software Substitute and how free software is today necessary for a strong democracy. As usual, the talk is suitable for non-technical audiences.

Comments

Re:Where to draw the line

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused by your confusion. Stallman's been pretty consistent, unambiguous, and what irritates a lot of people about him, uncompromising. Since you mentioned the distros the FSF endorsed, then perhaps comparing them to the ones they don't endorse would help clear your confusion. http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

Link to the video

[BasilBrush]

For those who want something more useful than webm:

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video...

Re:Where to draw the line

[guruevi]

A LOT of (embedded) appliances. VxWorks, Cisco, Juniper, McAfee, Check Point, NetApp...

Free for the community

[sjbe]

Give Stallman some software with a BSD license and see how he responds.

BSD software has a strong tendency to turn into proprietary products - i.e. not free. That doesn't really bother someone like Stallman who is a programmer but it causes a huge problem for the majority of people who are not programmers like myself. My skills lie elsewhere and for the majority of us out there functionally there is little difference to me between a BSD license and a proprietary license.

He's of the "It's only free as long as I say it's as free as I want it to be" people.

Doesn't mean he's wrong. A BSD license may as well be proprietary because eventually it will become proprietary if it is of any use at all.

Re:Free for the community

[trparky]

A BSD license may as well be proprietary because eventually it will become proprietary if it is of any use at all.

Is a horrendous POS. It is factually wrong. If you can't see or accept that then you really do need to grow up a little, both politically and intellectually.

Ok, so please explain this one.

Take OpenBSD, there's a reason why much of Apple Mac OS X is based upon OpenBSD. Apple needed a new OS, they looked about and saw an already written base operating system with a nice licensing agreement that states that if you make any modifications to the source code you are under no legal requirement release said changes back to the community from which the original code came from. That is essentially what the BSD license states.

However, the GPL states that if you make changes to the source code you are legally required to release said changes back to the community.

That's why Apple OS X is largely based upon OpenBSD. Apple can make changes all they want and they can keep those changes to themselves and the OpenBSD community doesn't have a legal leg to stand on to prevent that from happening.

Re:Free for the community

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so please explain this one.

What are we being asked to explain? Has Apple somehow robbed the world of the original BSD-licensed software they based their OS on?

Or have they simply said "We'll use this as a starting point, but we decline to release our own code to the rest of the world?"

The worst you can argue is that they're being poor citizens - using a "public" good for themselves without contributing back. If the OpenBSD community cared about "preventing that from happening," well... they probably would've chosen a different license - don't ya think?