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[Leo Albert Jackson Jr]

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+Transcript of an interview with Richard Stallman that took place at the School 
of Informatics, Edinburgh University, on 27th May 2004; originally published at 
Indymedia.
+
+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?
+    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. 
+Do you think that the Free Software movement, or parts of it, could or does 
benefit from collaboration with other social movements?
+    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. 
+Have you considered that the Free Software movement is vital to oppositional 
movements in the world that are against corporate rule, militarism, capitalism, 
etc.?
+    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. 
+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?
+    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… 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… 
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. 
+The business corporation as a social form is very closed — 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?
+    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: “Give up your 
freedom and I give you this valuable thing”, they might say “yes” because 
they never learnt why they should say “no”. 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 “Ututo-e”, it comes from 
Argentina. I hope that very soon I will be able to recommend another. 
+Why are the more technically-oriented beliefs of the Open Source movement not 
enough for you?
+    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: 
“you can have this nice package of software, but only if you first sign a 
promise you will not share it with anyone else”, 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.
+
+    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 “Open Source”, 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 “Open Source”, and I hope that you will, 
too.
+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?
+    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… 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. 
+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?
+    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. 
+So what in your opinion threatens the growth of free software at the moment?
+    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 “what is holding back the spread of free software”. 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,… 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 — or anybody listening to this — 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 — you may get evasive answers 
if you ask “Do you support or oppose software idea patents?” 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: “Will 
you vote for the parliaments previous amendments?” 
+Okay thanks very much.
+