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:No thanks

[spire3661]

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.

Re:Where to draw the line

[jbolden]

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.

Re:not communism

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds RMS totalitarian in his views.

Against the backdrop of the current U.S. political climate it seems particularly absurd to label RMS of all people totalitarian.

I, for one, and thankful for Stallman

[jfbilodeau]

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.