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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.
Stallman is not a "communist"...it's 2014, and we've progressed as a society beyond pointless politically charged words like 'communism' because it means 'totalitarian state' in some contexts and 'socialist utopia' in others...one has freedom one does not...it has cause **litterally** millions of unecessary arguments for decades in the 20th century
slapping a dumb label like "communist" on theories like Stallman's only serves to cause confusion and pointless arguments
Thank you Dave Raggett
Stallman's a bit of an extremist, and wants all software to be open-source. Remember, it all goes back to when he was trying to get a printer working, and couldn't because the driver was closed-source. That's why he invented the GPL, which just requires you to make source available to anyone whom you distribute software to.
But you're right: some parts are far more important than others. The platform being open-source is much, much more important than any high-level application being open-source. When the platform is closed and proprietary, you have all kinds of problems: you're locked in by the vendor, it's harder to write and debug applications, the platform vendor can have secret APIs to give them an advantage over third-party application vendors (we saw this with MS many times), you're stuck with drivers that vendors provide you and can't upgrade your platform software if the driver providers don't want you to (we've seen this with Windows upgrades, where older but perfectly functional hardware can't be used because the HW vendors didn't feel like updating their drivers for the new OS, since they want you to buy new HW), etc. Whereas if some random application is closed-source and proprietary, that doesn't affect anything at all except that one application.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Stallman is the crazy outlier. Where he stands, at the very edge, is exactly where we need him to be. You dont have to follow all of it, but there would be less of his ideas if he was more concerned with being central and accessible. There is a point to Stallman being far out there, its so the rest of us dont have to. Let him do his thing.
Good-bye
I started doing presentations back in the days of 35-mm slides. I didn't have to prepare them myself—I sent the text to the corporate slide presentation department, and they sent me back the slides.
I prepared my presentation by first writing out what I wanted to say, word for word. I then distilled that document into a few topic lines, which I had made into slides, generally about three topics to a slide. At this point I discarded the original manuscript. When I gave the presentation I glanced at each slide to remind me of what I wanted to say, then spoke extemporaniously.
Today I prepare the slides myself using LibreOffice Impress, the free equivalent of Microsoft PowerPoint, but I use the same method.
I have a similar background, except we had an editor who approved all slides. She was a ruthless, heartless person who lacked a soul while wielding a red pen like calvaryman's saber as she edited. In other words, the perfect editor. To this date, I cringe at a presentation withe text less than 16 pt and more than 20 words on a slide. When I see a sentence with a period on a slide I remember her admonition "Women have periods, slides don't."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
He'd be fine with everything being BSD licensed forever (FreeBSD is a BSD distribution / OS not a license). But he's smart enough to know that BSD licensed software doesn't stay that way in the real world. There is a long proven track record of BSD software getting embedded in commercial software and becoming effectively or actually closed.
Over the past few years, I've learned that people care more about "freedom" when it's called "flexibility". So I've come up with my own sound bite to summarize the benefit of free software: "Free software is flexible software. Using free software gives you the flexibility to hire anyone to make the program do what you want instead of some other big company wants."
I will be snide and I will not post as AC. There are too many comments labelling Stallman as a uncompromising, communist, extremist, liberal, etc... Though it may be true, without his uncompromising stance on freedom, would we have GNU/Linux? Would the Open Source movement even exists?
Sure, there would be source code out there on the web, and the BSDs would probably exists, but he's fighting to ensure that we do not lose the very freedoms that we enjoy with (forgive the term) FLOSS software.
Yes, I run a Linux distro with non-free warts (Mint), I use proprietary software (Steam). But for the most part, I'm in control of my computer, and quite thankful of that. I may not live in the 'ideal' free world of Stallman, but without folks like Stallman and their extreme position on freedom, I suspect the world of computers would be much more closed.
Thank you Richard Stallman for your fight.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
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