www/philosophy rms-interview-edinburgh.html

[Yavor Doganov]

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        philosophy     : rms-interview-edinburgh.html 

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+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<title>Interview with Richard Stallman, Edinburgh, 2004</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>Interview with Richard Stallman, Edinburgh, 2004</h2>
+
+<p><i>Transcript of an interview with Richard Stallman that took place
+at the School of Informatics, Edinburgh University, on 27<sup>th</sup>
+May 2004; originally published
+at <a href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/05/292609.html";>
+Indymedia</a>.</i></p>
+
+<dl>
+<dt>
+A person doesn't devote his whole life to developing a new form of
+freedom without some pre-existing beliefs that drive him to do so.
+What drives you to spend so much time on software freedoms?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+First of all growing up in the US in the 1960s, I certainly was
+exposed to ideas of freedom and then in the 1970s at MIT, I worked as
+part of a community of programmers who cooperated and thought about
+the ethical and social meaning of this cooperation.  When that
+community died in the early eighties, and by contrast with that, the
+world of proprietary software, which most computer users at the time
+were participating in, was morally sickening.  And I decided that I
+was going to try to create once again a community of cooperation.  I
+realized that, what I could get out of a life of participation in the
+competition to subjugate each other, which is what non free software
+is, all I could get out of that was money and I would have a life that
+I would hate.
+</dd>
+
+<dt>
+Do you think that the Free Software movement, or parts of it, could or
+does benefit from collaboration with other social movements?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+I don't see very much direct benefit to free software itself.  On the
+other hand we are starting to see some political parties take up the
+cause of free software, because it fits in with ideas of freedom and
+cooperation, that they generally support.  So in that sense, we are
+starting to see a contribution to the ideas of free software from
+other movements.
+</dd>
+
+<dt>
+Have you considered that the Free Software movement is vital to
+oppositional movements in the world that are against corporate rule,
+militarism, capitalism, etc.?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+Well, we are not against capitalism at all.  We are against
+subjugating people who use computers, one particular business
+practice.  There are businesses, both large and small that distribute
+free software, and contribute to free software, and they are welcome
+to use it, welcome to sell copies and we thank them for contributing.
+However, free software is a movement against domination, not
+necessarily against corporate domination, but against any domination.
+The users of software should not be dominated by the developers of the
+software, whether those developers be corporations or individuals or
+universities or what.  The users shouldn't be kept divided and
+helpless.  And that's what non-free software does; It keeps the users
+divided and helpless.  Divided because you are forbidden to share
+copies with anyone else and helpless because you don't get the source
+code.  So you can't even tell what the program does, let alone change
+it.  So there is definitely a relationship.  We are working against
+domination by software developers, many of those software developers
+are corporations.  And some large corporations exert a form of
+domination through non free software.
+</dd>
+
+<dt>
+And also that Free Software developers could provide a technical
+infrastructure for these movements that would be impossible to develop
+using proprietary software, which are too expensive and locked into an
+ideological model that reflects the interests of the dominant
+world-system like commoditization, exploitation, control and
+surveillance instead of sharing, justice, freedom and democracy?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+At the moment I would not go quite so far as to say that non free
+software couldn't be usable by opposition movements, because many of
+them are using it.  It is not ethical to use non free software.
+Because&hellip; At least it is not ethical to use authorized copies.
+But it is not a good thing to use any copies.  You see to use
+authorized copies, you have to agree not to share with other people
+and to agree to that is an unethical act in itself, which we should
+reject.  And that is the basic reason why I started the free software
+movement.  I wanted to make it easy to reject the unethical act of
+agreeing to the license of a non free program.  If you are using an
+unauthorized copy then you haven't agreed to that.  You haven't
+committed that unethical act.  But you are still&hellip; you are
+condemned to living underground.  And, you are still unable to get the
+source code, so you can't tell for certain what those programs do.
+And they might in fact be carrying out surveillance.  And I was told
+that in Brazil, the use of unauthorized copies was in fact used as an
+excuse to imprison the activists of the landless rural workers
+movement, which has since switched to free software to escape from
+this danger.  And they indeed could not afford the authorized copies
+of software.  So, these things are not lined up directly on a straight
+line, but there is an increasing parallel between them, an increasing
+relationship.
+</dd>
+
+<dt>
+The business corporation as a social form is very closed &mdash; it
+answers to no one except its shareholders for example a small group of
+people with money, and its internal bureaucratic organization is about
+as democratic as a Soviet ministry.  Does the increasing involvement
+of corporations with Free Software strike you as something to be
+concerned about?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+Not directly.  Because as long as a program is free software, that
+means the users are not being dominated by its developers whether
+these developers be it a large business, a small business, a few
+individuals or whatever, as long as the software is free they are not
+dominating people.  However, most of the users of free software do not
+view it in ethical and social terms, there is a very effective and
+large movement called the Open Source movement, which is designed
+specifically to distract the users attention from these ethical and
+social issues while talking about our work.  And they have been quite
+successful, there are many people who use our free software, which we
+developed for the sake of freedom and cooperation who have never heard
+the reasons for which we did so.  And, this makes our community weak.
+It is like a nation that has freedom but most of its people have never
+been taught to value freedom.  They are in a vulnerable position,
+because if you say to them: &ldquo;Give up your freedom and I give you
+this valuable thing&rdquo;, they might say &ldquo;yes&rdquo; because
+they never learnt why they should say &ldquo;no&rdquo;.  You put that
+together with corporations that might want to take away people's
+freedom, gradually and encroach on freedom and you have a
+vulnerability.  And what we see is that many of the corporate
+developers and distributors of free software put it in a package
+together with some non free user subjugating software and so they say
+the user subjugating software is a bonus, that it enhances the system.
+And if you haven't learnt to value freedom, you won't see any reason
+to disbelieve them.  But this is not a new problem and it is not
+limited to large corporations.  All of the commercial distributors of
+the GNU/Linux system going back something like 7 or 8 years, have made
+a practice of including non free software in their distributions, and
+this is something I have been trying to push against in various ways,
+without much success.  But, in fact, even the non commercial
+distributors of the GNU+Linux operating system have been including and
+distributing non free software, and the sad thing was, that of all the
+many distributions, until recently there was none, that I could
+recommend.  Now I know of one, that I can recommend, its called
+&ldquo;Ututo-e&rdquo;, it comes from Argentina.  I hope that very soon
+I will be able to recommend another.
+</dd>
+
+<dt>
+Why are the more technically-oriented beliefs of the Open Source
+movement not enough for you?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+The Open Source Movement was founded specifically to discard the
+ethical foundation of the free software movement.  The Free Software
+movement starts from an ethical judgment, that non free software is
+anti-social, it is wrong treatment of other people.  And I reached
+this conclusion before I started developing the GNU system.  I
+developed the GNU system specifically to create an alternative to an
+unethical way of using software.  When someone says to you:
+&ldquo;you can have this nice package of software, but only if you
+first sign a promise you will not share it with anyone else&rdquo;,
+you are being asked to betray the rest of humanity.  And I reached the
+conclusion in the early eighties, that this was evil, it is wrong
+treatment of other people.  But there was no other way of using a
+modern computer.  All the operating systems required exactly such a
+betrayal before you could get a copy.  And that was in order to get an
+executable binary copy.  You could not have the source code at all.
+The executable binary copy is just a series of numbers, which even a
+programmer has trouble making any sense out of it.  The source code
+looks sort of like mathematics, and if you have learned how to program
+you could read that.  But that intelligible form you could not even
+get after you signed the betrayal.  All you would get is the
+nonsensical numbers, which only the computer can understand.  So, I
+decided to create an alternative, which meant, another operating
+system, one that would not have these unethical requirements.  One,
+that you could get in the form of source code, so that, if you decided
+to learn to program you could understand it.  And you would get it
+without betraying other people and you would be free to pass it on to
+others.  Free either to give away copies or sell copies.  So I began
+developing the GNU system, which in the early nineties was the bulk of
+what people erroneously started to call Linux.  And so it all exists
+because of an ethical refusal to go along with an antisocial practice.
+But this is controversial.
+
+<p>In the nineties as the GNU+Linux system became popular and got to
+have some millions of users, many of them were techies with technical
+blinders on, who did not want to look at things in terms of right and
+wrong, but only in terms of effective or ineffective.  So they began
+telling many other people, here is an operating system that is very
+reliable, and is powerful, and it's cool and exciting, and you can
+get it cheap.  And they did not mention, that this allowed you to
+avoid an unethical betrayal of the rest of society.  That it allowed
+users to avoid being kept divided and helpless.  So, there were many
+people who used free software, but had never even heard of these
+ideas.  And that included people in business, who were committed to an
+amoral approach to their lives.  So, when somebody proposed the term
+&ldquo;Open Source&rdquo;, they seized on that, as a way that they
+could bury these ethical ideas.  Now, they have a right to promote
+their views.  But, I don't share their views, so I decline ever to do
+anything under the rubric of &ldquo;Open Source&rdquo;, and I hope
+that you will, too.</p>
+</dd>
+
+<dt>
+Given that it helps users to understand the freedoms in free software
+when the ambiguous use of the word free in English is clarified, what
+do you think of use of name FLOSS as in Free/Libre Open Source
+Software?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+There are many people, who, for instance, want to study our community,
+or write about our community, and want to avoid taking sides between
+the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement.  Often they
+have heard primarily of the Open Source movement, and they think that
+we all support it.  So, I point out to them that, in fact, our
+community was created by the Free Software movement.  But then they
+often say that they are not addressing that particular disagreement,
+and that they would like to mention both movements without taking a
+side.  So I recommend the term Free/Libre Open Source Software as a
+way they can mention both movements and give equal weight to both.
+And they abbreviate FLOSS once they have said what it stands for.  So
+I think that's a&hellip; If you don't want to take a side between the
+two movements, then yes, by all means, use that term.  Cause what I
+hope you will do is take the side of the free software movement.  But
+not everybody has to.  The term is legitimate.
+</dd>
+
+<dt>
+Are you happy with the development of the community which has grown
+out of your vision of a free operating system?  In what way did it
+develop differently from the vision you had at the beginning?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+Well, by and large, I am pretty happy with it.  But of course there
+are some things that I am not happy with, mainly the weakness that so
+many people in the community do not think of it is an issue of
+freedom, have not learned to value their freedom or even to recognize
+it.  That makes our future survival questionable.  It makes us weak.
+And so, when we face various threats, this weakness hampers our
+response.  Our community could be destroyed by software idea patents.
+It could be destroyed by treacherous computing.  It can be destroyed
+simply by hardware manufacturers' refusal to tell us enough about how
+to use the hardware, so that we can't write free software to run the
+hardware.  There are many vulnerabilities, that we have over the
+long-term.  And, well the things we have to do to survive these threats
+are different, in all cases, the more aware we are, the more motivated
+we are, the easier it will be for us to do whatever it takes.  So the
+most fundamental long-term thing we have to recognize and then value
+the freedom that free software gives so that the users fight for their
+freedoms the same like people fight for freedom of speech, freedom of
+the press, freedom of assembly, because those freedoms are also
+greatly threatened in the world today.
+</dd>
+
+<dt>
+So what in your opinion threatens the growth of free software at the
+moment?
+</dt>
+
+<dd>
+I have to point out that our goal is not precisely growth.  Our goal
+is to liberate cyber-space.  Now that does mean liberating all the
+users of computers.  We hope eventually they all switch to free
+software, but we shouldn't take mere success as our goal, that's
+missing the ultimate point.  But if I take this to mean &ldquo;what is
+holding back the spread of free software&rdquo;.  Well partly at this
+point it is inertia, social inertia.  Lots of people have learnt to
+use windows.  And they haven't yet learned to use GNU/Linux.  It is no
+longer very hard to learn GNU/Linux, 5 years ago it was hard, now it
+is not.  But still, it is more than zero.  And people who are, you
+know,&hellip; if you never learned any computer system, than learning
+GNU/Linux is as easy as anything, but if you already learned windows
+it's easier.  It's easier to keep doing what you know.  So that's
+inertia.  And there are more people trained in running windows systems
+than in running GNU/Linux systems.  So, any time you are trying to
+convince people to change over, you are working against inertia.  In
+addition we have a problem that hardware manufacturers don't cooperate
+with us the way they cooperate with Microsoft.  So we have that
+inertia as well.  And then we have the danger in some countries of
+software idea patents.  I would like everybody reading this to talk to
+all of &mdash; or anybody listening to this &mdash; to talk to all of
+their candidates for the European Parliament and ask where do you
+stand on software idea patents? Will you vote to reinstate the
+parliament's amendments that were adopted last September and that
+apparently are being removed by the Council of Ministers?  Will you
+vote to bring back those amendments in the second reading?  This is a
+very concrete question.  With a yes or no answer.  You will often get
+other kinds of &mdash; you may get evasive answers if you ask
+&ldquo;Do you support or oppose software idea patents?&rdquo; The
+people who wrote the directives claim that it does not authorize
+software idea patents, they say that this is because the directive
+says, that anything to be patented must have a technical character.
+But, somebody in the European Commission involved in this, admitted
+that, that terms means exactly what they want it to mean,
+humpty-dumpty style, so, in fact, it is no limitation on anything.  So
+if a candidate says: I support the commissions draft because it won't
+allow software idea patents you can point this out.  And press the
+question: &ldquo;Will you vote for the parliaments previous
+amendments?&rdquo;
+</dd>
+
+<dt>Okay thanks very much.</dt>
+</dl>
+
+</div>
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+
+<p>
+Please send FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to 
+<a href="mailto:address@hidden";><em>address@hidden</em></a>.
+There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a> 
+the FSF.
+<br />
+Please send broken links and other corrections or suggestions to
+<a href="mailto:address@hidden";><em>address@hidden</em></a>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Please see the 
+<a href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting
+translations of this article.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Copyright &copy; 2004 Richard M. Stallman
+</p>
+<p>
+Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire interview is
+permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2008/07/30 20:16:54 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+
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