Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

3.3. Richard Stallman interviews and Speeches

2006

[Mar 21, 2006] Open and Shut Interview with Richard Stallman  This is one of  Open and Shut The Basement Interviews

... A short tale about the challenges and opportunities facing scribblers in the age of the Internet, and six rules exemplified.

Three years ago I had an idea for a book. It was a simple enough idea: I could see that an increasing number of "free" or "open" movements were developing, and that while they all had different aims, they appeared to represent a larger and more generalized development than their movement-specific objectives might suggest.

Indeed, I felt that they looked set to exemplify the old adage that the sum of some phenomena is always greater than the constituent parts. But if that was right, then what was the sum in this particular case?

I was also intrigued as to why were all these movements were developing now. For while it was apparent that Open Source and Free Software, Open Access, Creative Commons, Open Spectrum, Open Biology, Open Journalism, Open Politics, Open Data etc. all owed a great debt to the development of the Internet, it was not clear (to me at least) that the network was the only driver.

...Today I am publishing an interview with Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Movement, and of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

To read the interview in its entirety (as a PDF file) click here.

LinuxP2P View topic - Richard Stallman on P2P

Richard Matthew Stallman (On the picture below) is the creator of the Free Software movement, the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. He has written several programs used in almost all GNU/Linux distributions, such as the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Emacs editor and the GNU Debugger, amongst others. He wrote the GNU GPL, and is also currently co-authoring version 3 of the GPL. He also gave POSIX it's name, the term used to mean most UNIX-like operating systems today. We asked him for his opinions on File Sharing, DRM and some other subjects.

LinuxP2P: What is your general opinion of Peer to Peer File-Sharing? Is it a positive or negative thing, and why?

RMS: People have a right to share copies of published works; P2P programs are simply a means to do it more usefully, and that is a good thing.

LinuxP2P: The recording and movie industries claim that P2P users infringe on their intellectual property. In your opinion, is this correct, or are the users exercising fair use?

RMS: The reason they use the term "intellectual property" is because it misleads and confuses. If they said "infringe their copyrights", they would be making a clear and meaningful statement. But when they say "intellectual property" instead of "copyrights", the mix up copyright law with a dozen other laws. It's impossible to say anything clear about such a confused subject.

Anyone who uses the term "intellectual property" is either trying to confuse the public, or confused himself. Those who wish to encourage clear thinking would do better to avoid it. (See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml for more explanation.)

So let's imagine that they tried to be clear, and said these people are infringing their copyrights. Whether that is true, I am the wrong one to ask--I am not a lawyer. What I can say is that I think that question is irrelevant to the ethics of the issue. If copyright law forbids people from sharing, copyright law is wrong.

LinuxP2P: What is your opinion on DRM? Is it good or bad, and why?

RMS: Digital Restrictions Management means technically restricting the public's use of published works. It is fundamentally unjust. I reject all DRM. I have signed a pledge not to buy fake CDs that carry DRM--http://www.pledgebank.com/boycottdrm. The host of a speech once gave me a fake CD, and I said "Here you see the face of the enemy--please return this to the store".  I have also never bought an encrypted DVD, and I never will buy one, unless I someday live in a country where DeCSS is legal.

LinuxP2P: Now that we have iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster etc. providing an outlet for digital music, is there really a need for P2P file sharing to continue?

RMS: That question is absurd--it's like saying "Now that we have Fox News, is there really a need for blogging?" Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that Rhapsody and Napster are shackled by DRM. People should not do business with them. iTunes is a peculiar case: it allows you to burn the music onto a genuine audio CD. Therefore, it is DIM (Digital Inconvenience Management) rather than DRM, and I think that makes iTunes ethically acceptable--in this respect, at least.

However, Apple says it reserves the right to change the rules on you at any time. Therefore, you should systematically burn all music you get with iTunes onto genuine audio CDs, as a kind of a backup--and don't wait too long before backing up your music! If you wait until you actually want a certain piece on a CD, you may longer be able to write the CD.

In any case, iTunes distributes only music. As far as I know, the only way you can get a non-digitally-restricted version of a movie is through a P2P network.

A further problem with iTunes is that it distributes MP3 format. We need to move away from the use of that format, because it is patented. The free software that used to exist for MP3 encoding has been driven underground by threats of lawsuits.

The free software community has developed another audio format called Ogg Vorbis which is both superior in sound quality and non-patented. You can help take away the patent holder's power by using Ogg Vorbis format for the audio files you make, and by preferring that format for files you listen to.

LinuxP2P: In what directions would you say P2P has to develop before it is accepted by content producers?

RMS: When publishers describe the works that they publish as "content", in effect referring to these works as mere filler, they ironically show how little they value and appreciate them as works of the intellect.

I do not wish to devalue works of authorship, so I decline to refer to them as "content". I also decline to refer to writers and musicians as "producers", because I do not want to treat music and writing as "products" (which implies a narrowly economic point of view).

Many writers and musicians are happy with P2P sharing. Many others, pursuing the unlikely dream of getting rich through commercial publication, do not like it. I do not see how further developments in the P2P software could be expected to set them straight about their dreams of riches, and I tend to think that this has to be done by cultural change instead.

As for the music factories--a.k.a. the major record companies--what they want is power. They will never accept P2P sharing as long as it remains a way to escape from their power. For their abuses against the people, they deserve to be abolished, and that should be everyone's goal.

LinuxP2P: The Free Software Foundation is currently working on the GPL version 3, which I understand will ban all forms of DRM. A large amount of P2P software exists under the GNU GPL. Will the GPLv3 have any effect on those projects, considering one can use P2P software to download files with DRM?

RMS: That is somewhat of a misunderstanding--we cannot "ban DRM". What we can do is prevent GPL-covered software from being corrupted into an instrument for implementing DRM.

The way we do this is not by restricting which technical jobs the program can do. (That kind of restriction would make the program non-free.) Instead, we make sure that users retain the effective freedom to change the software and run their changed versions.

Since DRM is based on restricting the user, effectively maintaining the user's freedom thwarts DRM. Or more precisely, effectively maintaining the user's freedom to change a certain program thwarts use of that program to implement DRM. We cannot stop them from implementing DRM in other ways.

These parts of GPL v3 will have no effect on such programs, because they are not used to impose Digital Restriction, and their developers do not attempt to stop users from running modified versions.

LinuxP2P:In the last couple of years, independent media and entertainment seems has grown immensely. Just last week, CreativeCommons.org passed the 200000 mp3s indexed milestone. Most independent music, movies etc., use Creative Commons licensing. A lot of the independent artwork has been spread through P2P (Using legal independent artistry sites such as Jamendo.com and ccMixter.org, as well as manually by the artists themselves.). Apart from the obvious, which is that the GPL is written to cover software, what differences are there between generic CC licensing and the GPL?

RMS: I have already explained the patent problem of MP3 format.

As your question illustrates, people have a tendency to disregard the differences between the various Creative Commons licenses, lumping them together as a single thing. That is as mixed-up as supposing San Francisco and Death Valley have similar weather because they're both in California.

Some Creative Commons licenses are free licenses; most permit at least noncommercial verbatim copying. But some, such as the Sampling Licenses and Developing Countries Licenses, don't even permit that, which makes them unacceptable to use for any kind of work. All these licenses have in common is a label, but people regularly mistake that common label for something substantial.

I no longer endorse Creative Commons. I cannot endorse Creative Commons as a whole, because some of its licenses are unacceptable. It would be self-delusion to try to endorse just some of the Creative Commons licenses, because people lump them together; they will misconstrue any endorsement of some as a blanket endorsement of all. I therefore find myself constrained to reject Creative Commons entirely.

Does Creative Commons publish the number of music files that are released under Creative Commons licenses that DO permit noncommercial sharing of copies? If so, could you give that number?  

2002

LWN Interview with Richard M. Stallman

The GNU manifesto states "An initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix." What was that kernel, and what happened to it?

It was called TRIX, and was developed by someone at MIT (I don't remember who). I think that I eventually concluded it was not really usable as a starting point. One factot was that it ran only on an obscure machine, and would have required porting before we could even try to develop it further.

The GNU Project's kernel now, of course, is the Hurd; it is evidently getting close to ready for more widespread distribution. Free operating systems based on other kernels are now widely used; what will Hurd-based systems offer that will make them attractive relative to the others?

The Hurd offers the power of a microkernel-and-servers architecture. For instance, you can run two copies of the Hurd at the same time, debug the new one using the old one, even gradually switch from one version to another. You can even use GDB to debug the file system while the system is running--thread-specific breakpoints allow you to debug the file system's activity for certain files, while the same file server runs normally when GDB opens the source files of the file system.

These servers do not in general require special privileges. As an ordinary user you can write a new file system and attach it to a file name in your directory. Then anyone who accesses that file name talks to your file system. The file system can emulate the behavior of a single file, or the behavior of a directory.

One user-level benefit is that a command analogous to `su' can give root privileges to your existing jobs, including your Emacs. Another command can take root privileges away again. So you don't have to start a separate Emacs under your `su', which lacks your usual buffers etc. You can also assume several user identities at once for access purposes, adding and deleting them at will.

We hope to provide an extremely simple and convenient system for package installation and deinstallation, using specially written file systems for /bin and other such directories.

Also from the Manifesto: "Unix is not my ideal system, but it is not too bad." What is your ideal system at this point, and how do you see getting there?

I don't have grandiose ambitions in the area of technical changes. I would like to see the whole system made more coherent through use of Scheme as an extension language (supporting other popular scripting languages too by translating them into Scheme). I would like to see full and thorough support for internationalization.

At a higher level, I would like to see all the activities and customizations that non-wizards might want to use available in GUI form.

Is it your belief that "high-paying organizations" (i.e. proprietary software vendors) should be banned?

I would not ban high salaries, but I think they should have a high tax bracket. As for making software proprietary, I really don't care whether it is legal as long as in practice it is rare enough to have no significant impact on society.

Some companies have adopted a hybrid business model where proprietary software products are used to help fund free software development. In your view, is this an appropriate way to raise the money to pay for free software projects?

Proprietary software is antisocial, so developing it is wrong. In most cases, the user of proprietary software is expected to promise not to share with anyone else. It's wrong to make that agreement, wrong to keep it if you have made it, and especially wrong to lure someone else into making such a promise. Using part of the proceeds of this antisocial activity for a worthy cause cannot justify it.

We can easily identify the practical harm such companies do. When major institutions in our community develop non-free software, they tell the public that non-free software is ok. This weakens our community's resolve to maintain our freedom, and that weakness hurts our chances of surmounting each of the various obstacles that we face: hardware with secret specs, non-free tools and libraries such as Sun's Java platform, software patents, the DMCA, and the proposed SSSCA. When they make it tough to obtain free software for a certain job, will we persevere, or will we give in? Those who are willing to take the easy way out and use non-free software will not help us prevail.

Often a change in a company's public message is the first sign we get that it is thinking of jettisoning its principles on this issue. The idea that free software has an ethical importance disappears, and often the term "free software" disappears as well. It is replaced by statements that appeal only to the practical convenience their software offers.

The usual cause of this change is accepting outside investment from people who are not dedicated to free software. Many a free software company has been maimed or destroyed by a VC ambush, though I can't give you a body count. For instance, Cygnus Support was started with its founders' money, and was profitable and growing for several years as a free software company; then it accepted investment from people who did not care about free software, and they decided to start developing non-free programs. (We were lucky that Red Hat acquired Cygnus and rereleased them free software, but you can't count on being rescued that way.) Although Cygnus continued developing free software as well, it was no longer a free software company; our community had lost its biggest example of business success. If you are running a free software company, beware outside investors!

In contrast, I think it is acceptable to do what MySQL AB and TrollTech do: release under the GPL, but sell alternative licenses permitting proprietary extensions to their code. My understanding is that all the code they release is available as free software, which means they do not develop any proprietary software; that's why their practice is acceptable. The FSF will never do that--we believe our terms should be the same for everyone, and we want to use the GPL to give others an incentive to develop additional free software. But what they do is much better than developing proprietary software.

(Footnote: RMS added later: "I later learned that TrollTech does develop proprietary software. I apologize for having mentioned it erroneously.")

What system do you run on your desktop and/or laptop now? Who was its distributor?

I use Debian GNU/Linux.

The large commercial tax programs require, for their production and maintenance, vast armies of lawyers and accountants to ensure that all the rules are followed. They also come with a warranty: if a bug in the program leads to tax penalties, the vendor will pay those penalties. It has said that this kind of software can never be free, since the users must pay for the lawyers, accountants, and warranty. In a society based on free software, how can such programs be developed and supported?

If warranties are so important, the same people who now pay for the right to use the program (to get the warranty) might pay the same amount specifically for a warranty. The same company might thus develop the same program as free commercial software with a business model of selling a warranty for it.

Alternatively, the IRS could release this software. Or it could provide a back end which does the calculations, so that others could develop interfaces for that back end, without risk that the calculations might go wrong.

... ... ...

There is, for example, some disagreement (among the copyright holders) over whether run-time loading of modules into the kernel, Linux, requires that the modules have a GPL-compatible license. As the creator of the GPL, do you feel that Linux kernel modules fall within the boundary?

They clearly are covered by the GPL; modules for Linux are extensions of Linux, so under the GPL these modules must be free.

However, anything the copyright holders of Linux give permission for in use of Linux is certainly permitted, regardless of what the GPL by itself would say. The license used on a program is legally a statement of what the copyright holders permit. Any statements they make that they permit this or that, once others rely on them, have the same legal force.

How about MySQL AB's claim that some uses of the MySQL server over a network connection constitute a derived work?

Progress Software put out a press release that suggested MySQL AB was making such a claim, but that was not so. The GPL violation involved static linking of non-free (at the time) code with the mySQL code and distributing the result as a single binary.

As far as I know, the GPL violation by Progress involved static linking of MySQL with non-free code.

Code can remain in active use far longer than many of us would expect. Is the prospect of GPL-licensed code moving into the public domain something to worry about?

No. Even in 1997, copyright lasted a very long time. According to the laws in effect then, the early versions of GNU Emacs would go into the public domain 50 years after I die. So what? Newer versions of Emacs have major contributions by other people, most of them considerably younger.

Do you see the (seemingly continuous) extension of copyright terms as a good thing for GPL-licensed software or not?

I am surprised you would even entertain the notion that some minor secondary benefit could outweigh the great harm done by the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act. I supported the Eldred vs Reno case at the beginning, and still do.

In an earlier message, you said: "People often describe our work as "open source", but that is actually the slogan of another movement which was formed specifically to reject our views." Can you please explain why you believe the OSI was formed for that purpose?

Its founders said so, and if you compare www.opensource.org with the views of the free software movement in www.gnu.org/philosophy, you can see it for yourself. The free software movement is based on an ethical stance: that users are morally entitled to the freedom to share and change software, that non-free software is unethical and wrong. The open source movement rejects this basic view; it does not say or even hint that software should be free (or "open source"). It does not raise this as an ethical issue at all.

Some say that omission is just a strategem, that "open source" is a "marketing campaign" for free software, but I believe the open source movement is sincere and I take it at its word. Some of the OSI's leaders have told me they really don't believe that software morally ought to be free. As for Linus Torvalds, who is regarded as an open source celebrity, he recently condemned all political ideals, saying that anyone who would do without a tempting non-free program for the sake of his freedom is "thinking with his gonads". And here I thought that gonads had to do with sex.

For the open source movement, non-free software is a less than ideal solution to a problem. For the free software movement, non-free software is the problem, and replacing it with free software is the solution.

This is not to say that the open source movement is evil. Nearly all open-source software is also free software; they have convinced many people and companies to develop free software, and that is a contribution to the free software community. However, while contributing to our community in that way, the open source movement weakens the community in another way: by spreading an attitude that is less than firm, they undermine our resolve to win and keep our freedom.

Occasionally one hears rumors of work on version 3 of the GPL. Is there such an effort afoot? If so, what sort of changes to the GPL are anticipated?

We are working on GNU GPL version 3 now. The changes will only be in details, of course. Most are just clarifications, but one substantive change will make the GPL compatible with some additional free software licenses.

Probably the most substantial change would [give a] program's developer a way to insist that an ASP running the program and offering access to the public must make the source code for the program available for public download. Some developers have been unwilling to release software under the GNU GPL without this provision.

2001

Interview Richard M. Stallman - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) -- another official (reproduced on FSF site) interview with telling statemnets like "open source is a development methodology; free software is a political philosophy (or a social movement).", "There is a place in life for business, but business should not be allowed dominate everyone's life. ",  "Proprietary software divides the users and keeps them helpless, and that is wrong.".

I would like, in this interview, to focus on your current work, and on the problematic of what kind of society we should like to live in. Your focus now--and for at least the last seventeen years--has been on working to make the social arrangements for using software more ethical.

But, [briefly,] what do you mean by the notion of a what I call here a more ethical society?

We need to encourage the spirit of cooperation, by respecting other people's freedom to cooperate and not advancing schemes to divide and dominate them.

This takes us to a point that is quite important and that I am hoping you can clarify for our readers. The term you prefer for your ethic is "free software," where the word "free" means freedom from constraints and not free to take. But the term that more and more people are using is "Open Source," a term of quite recent vintage (1998), and, from your perspective, filled with significant problems. Of the two, free software is a term that implies an ethic of living and holds out the promise of a more just society; the other, "open source," does not.

Is that a fair statement? Would you address that issue, and clarify the distinctions for our readers?

That is exactly right. Someone once said it this way: open source is a development methodology; free software is a political philosophy (or a social movement).

The open source movement focuses on convincing business that it can profit by respecting the users' freedom to share and change software. We in the free software movement appreciate those efforts, but we believe that there is a more important issue at stake: all programmers [owe] an ethical obligation to respect those freedoms for other people. Profit is not wrong in itself, but it can't justify mistreating other people.

Along these lines, there has been considerable confusion over how to name your idea of an ethical society. Mistakenly, many would assert that you are suggesting a communism.

Anyone who criticizes certain business practices can expect to be called "communist" from time to time. This is a way of changing the subject and evading the issue. If people believe the charges, they don't listen to what the critics really say. (It is much easier to attack communism than to attack the views of the free software movement.)

Pekka Himanen, in his recent work, the Hacker Ethic, has rightly countered these claims. I would go further: that what you suggest is close to what political theorists such as Amitai Etzioni would describe as a communitarianism (see, for instance, http://www.gwu.edu/~icps/about.html). And communitariannism is by no means hostile to the market economy that most people associate with capitalism. Quite the opposite. Would you speak to what could be called the politics of your ethical system?

There is a place in life for business, but business should not be allowed dominate everyone's life. The original idea of democracy was to give the many a way to check the power of the wealthy few.

Today business (and its owners) has far too much political power, and this undermines democracy in the US and abroad. Candidates face an effective veto by business (see http://www.billionairesforbushorgore.com), so they dare not disobey its orders.

The power to make laws is being transferred from elected legislatures to nondemocratic bodies such as the World Trade Organization, which was designed to subordinate public health, environmental protection, labor standards, and the general standard of living to the http://www.citizen.org/pctrade/gattwto/gatthome.htmlinterests of business. Under NAFTA [North American Free Trade Associtation], a Canadian company which was convicted in Mississippi of anticompetitive practices is suing for Federal compensation for its lost business due to the conviction. They claim that NAFTA takes away states' right to make laws against anticompetitive practices.

But business is not satisfied yet. The proposed FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas] would require all governments to privatize their [public facilities] such as schools, water supply, record keeping, even social security. This is what Bush wants "fast track" authority to push through.

Peaceful protestors against the FTAA in Quebec were violently attacked by police, who then blamed the fighting on the protestors. One protestor standing on the street was shot in the throat with a plastic bullet at a range of 20 feet. He is maimed for life, and seeks to press charges of attempted murder--if the cops will reveal who shot him.

One protest organizer was attacked on the street by a gang that got out of a van, knocked him down, and beat him up. When his friends came to the rescue, the gang revealed itself as undercover police and took him away.

Whatever democracy survives the globalization treaties is likely to be crushed by the efforts to suppress opposition to them.

The most immediate criticism of your insistence on ethics would be that the ethic of free software is fine, but not relevant to the real world of business.

With over half the world's Web sites running on GNU/Linux and Apache, that is evidently just FUD. You should not give such falsehoods credibility by appearing to take them seriously yourself.

I think it is worse to leave implicit lies unanswered than to address them directly. The thrust of my argument was that Microsoft, for instance, would and does claim that free software does not make money and rather loses money. They argue it's a bad idea all around. I don't think that Microsoft is to be ignored, just as the WTO should not be ignored. But: my question was to suggest a rebuttal this self-evident FUD, not to credit the errors of others.

So, I'll rephrase my question: Microsoft has attacked the GPL as business foolishness that is also bad for "America" (whatever that means). They don't care about community ethics. How do you then counter their FUD, or for that matter, the FUD of those who share Microsoft's views?

Stallman did not respond to this query for clarification, but as it happened, a speech he recently presented at New York University responded to Microsoft's propaganda. The Free Software Foundation has presented a defense, of free software, as well.

[To return to the interview....]

On a more individual level, how would you address the criticism of person who would like to follow your ethical standards but feels she cannot because she wants also to make money from her intellectual work?

This hypothetical person appears to believe that developing free software is incompatible with being paid. If so, she is misinformed--hundreds of people are now paid to develop free software. Some of them work for Sun. She is challenging us to solve a problem that doesn't really exist.

But what if she can't get one of these free software jobs? That could happen--not everybody can get them today. But it doesn't excuse developing proprietary software. A desire for profit is not wrong in itself, but it isn't the sort of urgent overriding cause that could excuse mistreating others. Proprietary software divides the users and keeps them helpless, and that is wrong. Nobody should do that.

So what should she do instead? Anything else. She could get a job in another field. But she doesn't have to go that far--most software development is custom software, not meant to be published either as free software or as proprietary software. In most cases, she can do that without raising an ethical issue. It isn't heroism, but it isn't villainy either.

But copyright can be thought of as an author's friend.

In the age of the printing press, that was true: copyright was an industrial restriction on publishers, requiring them to pay the author of a book. It did not restrict the readers, because the actions it restricted were things only a publisher could do.

But this is not true any more. Now copyright is a restriction on the public, for the sake of the publishers, who give the authors a small handout to buy their support against the public.

In the current situation, then, who benefits most from copyright?

The publishers.

Were I freelancing again, I would not want to release my works without the minimal security of payment for my labor copyright affords.

You could do that without copyright. It is part of your business dealings with the magazine you are writing for.

But please note that I don't say copyright should be entirely abolished. You can disagree with what I said, but it makes no sense to attack me for things I did not say. What I said in my speech was that software which is published should be free.

[GNU-FSF Press] Transcript of Stallman's NYU speech Please note is strange passage about the printer driver: several helpless programmers were unable to disassemble a simple printer driver to make some change. And this is at the University. The other nice quote is about a programmer who moonlight as a waiter ;-)

URETSKY: I'm Mike Uretsky.  I'm over at the Stern School of Business.  I'm also one of the Co-Directors of the Center for Advanced Technology.  And, on behalf of all of us in the Computer Science Department, I want to
welcome you here.  I want to say a few comments, before I turn it over to -- Ed, who is going to introduce the speaker.

The role of a University, is a place to foster debate, and to have interesting discussions.  And the role of a major university is to have particularly interesting discussions.  And this particular presentation, this seminar falls right into that mold.  I find the discussion of open source particularly interesting.  In a sense, [Laughter]

STALLMAN: I do "free software".  Open source is a different movement. [Laughter] [Applause]

URETSKY: When I first started in the field in the '60's, basically software was free.  And we went in cycles.  It became free, and then software [[or "some of the"]] manufacturers, in the need to expand their markets, pushed it in other directions.  A lot of the developments that took place with the entry of PC moved in exactly the same kind of a cycle.

There's a very interesting French philosopher -- Pierre Levy -- who talks about movement to this direction, and who talks about the move into cyberspace as not only relating to technology, but also relating to social restructuring, to political restructuring, through a change in the kinds of relationships that will improve the well-being of mankind.  And we're hoping that this debate is a movement in that direction; that this debate is something that cuts across a lot of the disciplines that normally act as solace within the University.  We're looking forward to some very interesting discussions.  Ed?


SCHONBERG: I'm Ed Schonberg from the Computer Science Department at the Courant Institute.  Let me welcome you all to this event.  Introducers are usually, and particularly, a useless aspect of public presentations, but,
in this case, actually, they serve a useful purpose as Mike easily demonstrated.  Because an introducer for instance, told him, by making inaccurate comments, can allow him to straighten out and correct and [Laughter] sharpen considerably the parameters of the debate.

So, let me make the briefest, possible introduction to somebody, who doesn't need one.  Richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by acting locally, started thinking globally from problems concerning the unavailability of source code for printer drivers at the AI-Lab many years ago.  He has developed a coherent philosophy that has forced all
of us to re-examine our ideas of how software is produced, of what intellectual property means, and what the software community actually represents.  Let me welcome, Richard Stallman.  __: [Applause]

STALLMAN: Can someone lend me a watch?  [Laughter] Thank you.  So, I'd like to thank Microsoft for providing me the opportunity to [Laughter] be on this platform.  For the past few weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously banned somewhere.  [Laughter] Except that all the articles about it are giving the wrong author's name, because Microsoft describes the GNU GPL as an open source license, and most of the press coverage followed suit.  Most people, of course just innocently don't realize that our work has nothing to do with open source; that, in fact, we did most of it before people even coined the term "open source". We are in the free software movement, and I'm going to speak about what the free software movement is about, what it means, what we have done, and because this is partly sponsored by a School of Business, I'll say some things more than I usually do about how free software relates to business, and some other areas of social life.

Now, some of you may not ever write computer programs, but perhaps you cook.  And if you cook, unless you're really great, you probably use recipes.  And, if you use recipes, you've probably had the experience of getting a copy of a recipe from a friend who's sharing it.  And you've probably also had the experience -- unless you're a total neophyte -- of changing a recipe.  You know, it says certain things, but you don't have to do exactly that.  You can leave out some ingredients.  Add some mushrooms, 'cause you like mushrooms.  Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt -- whatever.  You can even make bigger changes according to your skill.  And if you've made changes in a recipe, and you cook it for your friends and they like it, one of your friends might say "hey, could I have the recipe?"  And then, what do you do?  You could write down your modified version of the recipe, and make a copy for your friend.  These are the natural things to do with functionally useful recipes of any kind.

Now a recipe is a lot like a computer program.  A computer program's a lot like a recipe.  A series of steps to be carried out to get some result that you want.  So it's just as natural to do those same things with computer programs.  Hand a copy to your friend.  Make changes in it because the job it was written to do isn't exactly what you want. It did a great job for somebody else, but your job is a different job.  And, after you've changed it, that's likely to be useful for other people.  Maybe they have a job to do that's like the job you do.  So, they ask, hey can I have a copy?  Of course, if you're a nice person, you're going to give a copy.  That's the way to be a decent person.

So imagine what it would be like if recipes were packaged inside black boxes -- You couldn't see what ingredients they're using, let alone change them -- And imagine, if you made a copy for a friend, they would call you a pirate, and try to put you in prison for years.  That world would create tremendous outrage from all the people who are used to sharing recipes.  But that is exactly what the world of proprietary software is like.  A world in which common decency towards other people is prohibited or prevented.

Now, why did I notice this?  I noticed this because I had -- because of my good fortune, in the 1970's, to be part of a community of programmers who shared software.  Now, this community could trace its ancestry, essentially back to the beginning of computing.  In the 1970's though, it was a bit rare for there to be a community where people shared software. And, in fact, this was sort of an extreme case, because in the lab where I worked, the entire operating system was software developed by the people in our community, and we'd share any of it with anybody.  Anybody was welcome to come and take a look and take away a copy, and do whatever he wanted to do.  There were no copyright notices on these programs. Cooperation was our way of life.  And we were secure in that way of life. We didn't fight for it.  We didn't have to fight for it.  We just lived that way.  And, as far as we knew, we would just keep on living that way. So there was free software, but there was no free software movement.

But then, our community was destroyed by a series of calamities that happened to it.  Ultimately it was wiped out.  Ultimately, the PDP-10 computer which we used for all our work was discontinued.  And you know, our system -- the Incompatible Timesharing System -- was written starting in the '60's, so it was written in assembler language.  That's what you used to write an operating system in the '60's.  So, of course, assembler language is for one particular computer architecture; if that gets discontinued, all your work turns into dust -- it's useless.  And that's what happened to us.  The 20 years or so of work of our community turned into dust.

But before this happened, I had an experience that prepared me, helped me see what to do, helped prepare me to see what to do when this happened, because at certain point, Xerox gave the artificial intelligence lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer.  It was very fast, printed a page a second, very fine in many respects, but it was unreliable, because it was really a high-speed office copier that had been modified into a printer. And you know, copiers jam, but there's somebody there to fix them.  The printer jammed and nobody saw.  So it stayed jammed for a long time.

Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem.  Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell our timesharing machine, and tell the users who are waiting for printouts, or something like that, you know, tell them, go fix the printer.  Because if they only knew it was jammed, of course, if you're waiting for a printout, and you know that the printer is jammed, you don't want to sit and wait forever, you're going to go fix it.

But, at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software -- it had come with the printer, and it was just a binary.  We couldn't have the source code -- Xerox wouldn't let us have the source code.  So, despite our skill as programmers -- after all, we had written our own timesharing system -- we were completely helpless to add this feature to the printer software.

And we just had to suffer with waiting -- it would take an hour or two to get your printout because the machine would be jammed most of the time. And only once in a while -- you'd wait an hour figuring "I know it's going to be jammed, I'll wait an hour and go collect my print-out," and then you'd see that it had been jammed the whole time, and in fact, nobody else had fixed it.  So you'd fix it and you'd go wait another half hour.  Then, you'd come back, and you'd see it jammed again -- before it got to your output.  It would print three minutes and be jammed thirty minutes.  Frustration up the whazzoo... But the thing that made it worse was knowing that we could have fixed it, but somebody else, for his own selfishness, was blocking us, obstructing us from improving the software.  So, of course, we felt some resentment.

And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of that software.  So I was visiting there later, so I went to his office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT, could I have a copy of the printer source code?"  And he said "No, I promised not to give you a copy." [Laughter]  I was stunned.  I was so -- I was angry, and I had no idea how I could do justice to it.  All I could think of was to turn around on my heel, and walk out of his room.  Maybe I slammed the door. [Laughter] And I thought about it later on, because I realized that I was seeing not just an isolated jerk, but a social phenomenon that was important and affected a lot of people.

This was -- for me -- I was lucky, I only got a taste of it, but other people had to live in this all the time.  So I thought about it at length. See, he had promised to refuse to cooperate with us -- his colleagues at MIT.  He had betrayed us.  But he didn't just do it to us.  Chances are he did it to you too.  And I think, mostly likely, he did it to you too. [Laughter] And he probably did it to you as well.  He probably did it to most of the people here in this room -- except a few maybe who weren't born yet in 1980.  Because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with just about the entire population of the Planet Earth.  He had signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Now, this was my first, direct encounter with a non-disclosure agreement, and it taught me an important lesson -- A lesson that's important because most programmers never learn it.  You see, this was my first encounter with a non-disclosure agreement, and I was the victim.  I, and my whole lab, were the victims.  And the lesson it taught me was that non-disclosure agreements have victims.  They're not innocent.  They're not harmless.  Most programmers first encounter a non-disclosure agreement when they're invited to sign one.  And there's always some temptation -- some goody they're going to get if they sign.  So, they make up excuses. They say, "well, he's never going to get a copy no matter what, so why shouldn't I join the conspiracy to deprive him?"  They say "this is the way it's always done.  Who am I to go against it?"  They say," if I don't sign this, someone else will."  Various excuses to gag their consciences.

But, when somebody invited me to sign a non-disclosure agreement, my conscience was already sensitized.  It remembered how angry I had been, when somebody promised not to help me and my whole lab solve our problem. And I couldn't turn around and do the exact same thing to somebody else who had never done me any harm.  You know, if somebody asked me to promise not to share some useful information with a hated enemy, I would have said yes.  You know?  If somebody's done something bad, he deserves it.  But, strangers -- they haven't done me any harm.  How could they deserve that kind of mistreatment?  You can't let yourself start treating just anybody and everybody badly.  Then you become a predator on society.  So I said, thank you very much for offering me this nice software package.  But I can't accept it in good conscience, on the conditions you are demanding, so I will do without it.  Thank you so much.  And so, I have never knowingly signed a non-disclosure agreement for generally useful technical
information, such as software.

Now, there are other kinds of information which raise different ethical issues.  For instance, there's personal information.  You know, if you wanted to talk with me about what was happening between you and your boyfriend, and you asked me not to tell anybody -- you know, I could keep -- I could agree to keep that a secret for you, because that's not generally useful technical information.

At least, it's probably not generally useful. [Laughter]  There is a small chance -- and it's a possibility though -- that you might reveal to me some marvelous new sex technique, [Laughter] and I would then feel a moral duty [Laughter] to pass it onto the rest of humanity, so that everyone could get the benefit of it.  So, I'd have to put a proviso in that promise -- you know.  If it's just details about who wants this, and who's angry at whom, and things like that --
soap opera -- that I can keep private for you, but something that humanity could tremendously benefit from knowing, I mustn't withhold.  You see, the purpose of science and technology is to develop useful information for humanity to help people live their lives better.  If we promise to withhold that information -- if we keep it secret -- then we are betraying the mission of our field.  And this, I decided I shouldn't do. But, meanwhile my community had collapsed, and that was collapsing, and that left me in a bad situation.  You see, the whole Incompatible Timesharing System was obsolete, because the PDP-10 was obsolete, and so, there was no way that I could continue working as an operating system developer the way that I had been doing it.  That depended on being part of the community using the community software, and improving it.  That no longer was a possibility, and that gave me a moral dilemma.  What was I going to do?  Because the most obvious possibility meant to go against that decision I had made.  The most obvious possibility was to adapt myself to the change in the world.  To accept that things were different, and that I'd just have to give up those principles, and start signing non-disclosure agreements for proprietary operating systems, and most likely writing proprietary software as well.  But I realized that that way I could have fun coding, and I could make money -- especially if I did it, other than at MIT -- but, at the end, I'd have to look back at my career and say "I've spent my life building walls to divide people," and I would have been ashamed of my life.

So I looked for another alternative, and there was an obvious one.  I could leave the software field, and do something else.  Now I had no other special noteworthy skills, but I'm sure I could have become a waiter. [Laughter]  Not at a fancy restaurant, they wouldn't hire me, [Laughter] but I could be a waiter somewhere.  And many programmers, they say to me "the people who hire programmers demand this, this and this -- If I don't do those things, I'll starve."  It's literally the word they use.  Well, you know, as a waiter, you're not going to starve. [Laughter]  So, really their in no danger.  But -- and this is important, you see -- because sometimes you can justify doing something that hurts other people by saying "otherwise something worse is going to happen to me."  You know, if you were really going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software. [Laughter]  If somebody's pointing a gun at you, then I would say it's forgivable. [Laughter]  But, I had found a way that I could survive without doing something unethical, so that excuse was not available.  So, I realized though that being a waiter would be no fun for me, and it would be wasting my skills as an operating system developer.  It would avoid misusing my skills. Developing proprietary software would be misusing my skills. Encouraging other people to live in the world of proprietary software would be misusing my skills.  So it's better to waste them than misuse them, but it's still not really good.

So for those reasons, I decided to look for some other alternative.  What can an operating system developer do that would actually improve the situation, make the world a better place?  And I realized that an operating system developer was exactly what was needed.  The problem, the dilemma, existed for me and for everyone else because all of the available operating systems for modern computers were proprietary.  The free operating systems were for old, obsolete computers, right?  So for the modern computers -- if you wanted to get a modern computer and use it, you were forced into a proprietary operating system.  So if an operating system developer wrote another operating system -- and then said, everybody come and share this, you're welcome to this -- that would give everybody a way out of the dilemma, another alternative.  So I realized that there was something I could do that would solve the problem.  I have just the right skills to be able to do it.  And it was the most useful thing I could possibly imagine that I'd be able to do with my life. And it was a problem that no one else was trying to solve.  It was just sort of sitting there, getting worse, and nobody was there but me.  So I felt "I'm elected.  I have to work on this.  If not me, who?"  So, I decided I would develop a free operating system -- or die trying.  Of old age of course. [Laughter]

So, of course I had to decide what kind of operating system it should be -- there are some technical design decisions to be made.  I decided to make the system compatible with UNIX for a number of reasons. First of all, I had just seen one operating system that I really loved, become obsolete because it was written for one particular kind of computer.  I didn't want that to happen again.  We needed to have a portable system.  Well, UNIX was a portable system.  So if I followed the design of UNIX, I had a pretty good chance that I could make a system that would also be portable and workable.  And furthermore, why[[24:44?]] be compatible with it in the details.  The reason is, users hate incompatible changes.  If I had just designed the system in my favorite way -- which I would have loved doing, I'm sure -- I would have produced something that was incompatible.  You know, the details would be different.  So, if I wrote the system -- then the users would have said to me "well, this is very nice, but it's incompatible.  It will be too much work to switch.  We can't afford that much trouble just to use your system instead of UNIX, so we'll stay with UNIX" they would have said.

Now, if I wanted to actually create a community where there would be people in it -- people using this free system, and enjoying the benefits of liberty and cooperation -- I had to make a system people would use, a system that they would find easy to switch to, that would not have an obstacle making it fail at the very beginning.  Now, making the
system upward compatible with UNIX actually made all the immediate design decisions, because UNIX consists of many pieces, and they communicate through interfaces that are more or less documented.  So if you want to be compatible with UNIX, you have to replace each piece, one by one, with a compatible piece.  So, the remaining design decisions are inside one piece, and they could be made later by whoever decides to write that piece; they didn't have to be made at the outset.

So, all we had to do to start work was find a name for the system. Now, we hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because thinking of people being amused by the name is half the fun of writing the program. [Laughter]  And we had a tradition of recursive acronyms to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing program.  You can give it a recursive acronym name which says -- this one's not the other.  So, for instance, there were many Tico text editors in the '60's and '70's, and they were generally called something or other Tico.  Then one clever hacker called his Tint, for Tint Is Not Tico -- the first recursive acronym.  In 1975, I developed the first Emacs text editor, and there were many imitations of Emacs, and a lot of them were called something or other Emacs, but one was called Fine -- for Fine Is Not Emacs, and there was Sine -- for Sine Is Not Emacs, and IINA for Ina Is Not Emacs, and MINCE for Mince Is Not Complete Emacs. [Laughter]  That was a stripped down imitation.  And, then, IINA was almost completely rewritten, and the new version was called ZWII[[27:42?]].  For, ZWII Was IINA Initially.  [Laughter]

So I looked for a recursive acronym for Something is not UNIX.  And I tried all 26 letters, and discovered that none of them was a word. [Laughter] Hmm, try another way.  I made a contraction.  That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's not UNIX.  And I tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU" -- the word "GNU" is
the funniest word in the English language. [Laughter] That was it.  Of course, the reason it's funny is that according to the dictionary, it's pronounced "new".  You see?  And so that's why people use it for a lot of word play.  Let me tell you, this is the name of an animal that lives in Africa.  And the African pronunciation had a click sound in it. [Laughter] Maybe still does.  And so, the European colonists, when they got there, they didn't bother learning to say this click sound.  So they just left it out, and they wrote a "G" which meant "there's another sound that's supposed to be here which we are not pronouncing."  [Laughter] So, tonight I'm leaving for South Africa, and I have begged them.  I hope they're going to find somebody who can teach me to pronounce click sounds. [Laughter] So that I'll know how to pronounce GNU the correct way, when it's the animal. But, when it's the name of our system, the correct pronunciation is "guh-NEW" -- pronounce the hard "G".  If you talk about the "new" operating system, you'll get people very confused, because we've been working on it for 17 years now, so it is not new any more. [Laughter] But it still is, and always will be GNU -- no matter how many people call it Linux by mistake. [Laughter]

So, in January 1984, I quit my job at MIT to start writing pieces of GNU.  They were nice enough to let me keep using their facilities though.  And, at the time, I thought we would write all these pieces, and make an entire GNU system, and then we'd say "come and get it" and people would start to use it.  That's not what happened.  The first pieces I wrote were just equally good replacements, with fewer bugs for some pieces of UNIX, but they weren't tremendously exciting. Nobody particularly wanted to get them and install them.  But, then, in September 1984, I started writing GNU Emacs -- which was my second implementation of Emacs -- and by early 1985, it was working.  I could use it for all my editing, which was a big relief, because I had no intention of learning to use VI, the UNIX editor. [Laughter] So, until that time, I did my editing on some other machine, and saved the files through the network, so that I could test them.  But when GNU Emacs was running well enough for me to use it, it was also -- other people wanted to use it too.

So I had to work out the details of distribution.  Of course, I put a copy in the anonymous FTP directory, and that was fine for people who were on the net; they could then just pull over a tar file, but a lot of programmers then even were not on the Net in 1985.  They were sending me emails saying "How can I get a copy?"  I had to decide what I would
answer them.  Well, I could have said, I want to spend my time writing more GNU software, not writing tapes, so please find a friend who's on the Internet, and who is willing to download it and put it on a tape for you.  And I'm sure people would have found some friends, sooner or later, you know.  They would have got copies.  But I had no job.  In fact, I've never had a job since quitting MIT in January 1984.  So, I was looking for some way I could make money through my work on free software, and therefore I started a free software business.  I announced "send me $150 dollars, and I'll mail you a tape of Emacs."  And the orders began dribbling in.  By the middle of the year they were trickling in.

I was getting 8 to 10 orders a month.  And, if necessary, I could have lived on just that, because I've always lived cheaply; I live like a student, basically.  And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do.  I can do what I think is important for me to do. It freed me to do what seemed worth doing.  So, make a real effort to
avoid getting sucked into all the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans.  Because if you do that, then people with the money will dictate what you do with your life.  You won't be able to do what's really important to you.

So, that was fine, but people used to ask me "What do you mean it's free software if it costs $150 dollars?"  [Laughter] Well, the reason they asked this was that they were confused by the multiple meanings of the English word "free".  One meaning refers to price, and another meaning refers to freedom.  When I speak of free software, I'm referring to freedom, not price.  So think of free speech, not free beer. [Laughter] Now, I wouldn't have dedicated so many years of my life to making sure programmers got less money.  That's not my goal.  I'm a programmer and I don't mind getting money myself.  I won't dedicate my whole life to getting it, but I don't mind getting it.  And I'm not -- and therefore, ethics is the same for everyone.  I'm not against some other programmer getting money either. I don't want prices to be low.  That's not the issue at all.  The issue is freedom.  Freedom for everyone who's using software, whether that person be a programmer or not.

So at this point I should give you the definition of free software.  I better get to some real details, you see, because just saying "I believe in freedom" is vacuous.  There's so many different freedoms you could believe in, and they conflict with each other, so the real political question is "Which are the important freedoms, the freedoms that we must make sure everybody has?"  And now, I will give my answer to that question for the particular area of using software.

A program is free software for you, a particular user, if you have the following freedoms: First, Freedom Zero is the freedom to run the program for any purpose, any way you like.  Freedom One is the Freedom to help yourself by changing the program to suit your needs.  Freedom Two is the freedom to help your neighbor by distributing copies of the program.  And Freedom Three is the freedom to help build your community by publishing an improved version so others can get the benefit of your work.  If you have all of these freedoms, the program is free software, for you -- and that's crucial, that's why I phrase it that way.  I'll explain why later, when I talk about the GNU General Public License, but right now I'm explaining what free software means, which is a more basic question.

So, Freedom Zero's pretty obvious.  If you're not even allowed to run the program anyway you like, it is a pretty damn restrictive program.  But, as it happens, most programs will give you Freedom Zero.  And Freedom Zero follows, legally, as a consequence of Freedoms One, Two, and Three. That's the way that Copyright Law works.  So, the Freedoms that distinguish free software from typical software are Freedoms One, Two, and Three.  So I'll say more about them and why they are important.

Freedom One is the freedom to help yourself by changing the software to suit your needs.  This could mean fixing bugs.  It could mean adding new features.  It could mean porting it to a different computer system.  It could mean porting all -- translating all the error messages into Navajo. Any change you want to make, you should be free to make.

Now, it's obvious that professional programmers can make use of this freedom very effectively.  But not just them.  Anybody of reasonable intelligence can learn a little programming.  You know, there are hard jobs, and there are easy jobs.  And most people are not going to learn enough to do hard jobs.  But lots of people can learn enough to do easy jobs -- just the way,you know -- 50 years ago -- lots and lots of American men learned to repair cars.  Which is -- what enabled the U.S. to have a motorized Army in World War II and win.  So, very important -- having lots of people tinker.  So -- and if you are a people person, and you really don't want to learn technology at all - -that probably means that you have a lot of friends, and you are good at getting them to owe you favors. [Laughter] Some of them are probably programmers.  So, you can ask one of your programmer friends -- would you please change this for me? Add this feature?  So, lots of people can benefit from it.

Now, if you don't have this freedom, it causes practical, material harm to society.  It makes you a prisoner of your software.  I explained what that was like with respect to the laser printer, you know?  It worked badly for us -- and we couldn't fix it-- because we were prisoners of our software. But it also affects peoples' morale. You know the computer is constantly frustrating to use.  And people are using it -- their lives are going to be frustrating.  And if they're using it in their jobs - -their jobs are going to be frustrating.  They're going to hate their jobs.  And you know, people protect themselves from frustration by deciding not to care. So, you end up with people whose attitude is -- well, I showed up for work today.  That's all I have to do.  I can't make progress -- that's not my problem.  That's the boss's problem.  And when this happens, it's bad for those people, and it's bad for society as a whole.  That's Freedom One -- the Freedom to help yourself.

Freedom Two is the Freedom to help your neighbor -- by distributing copies of the program.  Now, for beings that can think and learn -- sharing useful knowledge is a fundamental act of friendship.  When these beings use computers, this act of friendship takes the form of sharing software. Friends share with each other.  Friends help each other.  This is the nature of friendship.  And, in fact, this spirit of good will -- the spirit of helping your neighbor, voluntarily - is society's most important resource.  It makes the difference between a livable society and a dog-eat-dog jungle.  It's importance has been recognized by the world's major religions for thousands of years.  And they explicitly try to encourage this attitude.

When I was going to kindergarten, the teachers were trying to teach us this attitude - -the spirit of sharing by having us do it.  They figured if we did it, we'd learn.  So they said, if you bring candy to school, you can't keep it all for yourself, you have to share some with the other kids.  Teaching us -- the society was set up to teach this spirit of cooperation.  And why do you have to do that?  Because people are not totally cooperative.  That's one part of human nature.  And there are other parts of human nature.  There are lots of parts of human nature. So, if you want a better society, you've got to work to encourage the spirit of sharing.  You know, it'll never get to be 100%.  That's understandable.  People have to take care of themselves too.  But, if we make it somewhat bigger -- we're all better off.

Nowadays, according to the U.S. Government, teachers are supposed to do the exact opposite.  Oh, Johnny, you brought software to school.  Well, don't share it.  Oh no.  Sharing is wrong.  Sharing means you're a pirate. What do they mean when they say "pirate"?  They're saying that helping your neighbor is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship. [Laughter] What would Buddha or Jesus say about that?  Now, take your favorite religious leader.  I don't know -- maybe Manson would have said something different. [Laughter] And who knows what L. Ron Hubbard would say.  But, ...... ... ....
 

2000

Slashdot Richard M. Stallman Visits Teradyne  some interestig details about how RMS handles his e-mail (it's definilitly not an optimal way ;-)

I had been corresponding with RMS via email for a while, following an initial response of his to a general inquiry I made of the FSF. (Yes, I was surprised that RMS himself would take the time to respond. It was the first of many popular misconceptions I had about the man that were about to be shattered.) Many of my inquiries involved dynamically linked combinations of free and non-free code and the circumstances under which distributions of aggregates that could self-assemble at run time would be legit under the GPL.

Since a free program can interact with a non-free one via pipes or sockets without the combination necessarily considered a derived work of the free program, I was wondering if a general rule applied whereby such "loose coupling" might be permitted. (RMS's position was that it might be possible but we could not find a general rule to define the necessary relationship. This shattered a second misconception: there were things of which RMS didn't approve, but would admit might be admissible under the GPL. Zealots never act with such reason.) It became apparent that it would be beneficial if RMS could address our developers that were producing code to run under GNU/Linux about the GPL. Did it have to be "the man" himself? Probably not, but it certainly strengthens the perceived legitimacy of any claims we might make about taking the GPL seriously if we welcome RMS to advise us: we certainly wouldn't invite the attention if we were trying to hide something.

... ... ...

RMS previously indicated that he'd like company for dinner so we got a small group together to try one of his favorite restaurants: Cafe Luciano, in the north end of Chicago. Alas, he didn't get much rest: after some 15 hours incommunicado, it was imperative for him to get his email. He was left at the hotel to get on with this task.

By this time, I had returned to work, and met with my coworkers. "So, what's he like in person?" was my first question. I was informed that he corrected the use of a "Linux" moniker to "GNU/Linux" twice, didn't care for small talk, and settled down with his laptop for the trip to the hotel. I thought to myself that if my coworker survived his "Linux" faux-pas well enough to recount it, RMS couldn't be all that bad. Besides, our email exchange was always friendly. As for small talk, I don't care for it much either. I was to learn the importance of his attachment to his laptop soon enough -- my coworker relayed that RMS had trouble getting his email upon his arrival at the hotel. Help was offered, but with only marginal success.

I emailed RMS my local phone number and that I would try to assist him any way I could. I didn't want to call, because I thought he'd be getting some sleep and didn't want to disturb him, confident that he'd got his email. He had my coworker's phone number and could call if he had trouble. That call came quickly. It turned out that dial-up access to his ISP was inadequate for him to get his email in a timely manner. We realized that I could indeed help by providing telnet and ftp access from our office. Without delay, I set out to bring him to Teradyne. I was to meet RMS in person at last!

RMS is a lot less imposing in person than he is by reputation. He's of average height, has the stereotypical hacker hair style and beard, and arms himself with a laptop. He looks like he could benefit from losing a bit of weight and smiles like one imagines the wizard in the old Collosal Cave adventure game might smile when granting you another life. Though appearing innocuous, I had no doubt that in his hands that laptop was a formidable weapon against those who would deny software freedom, kind of the way that a light-saber is as powerful as the Jedi wielding it. I introduced myself, we quickly optimized to using first names, and got on the the task at hand: retrieving Richard's email.

Richard gets his email by building a compressed GNU zip archive on his mail server of his incoming mail, and transferring it to his laptop -- in our case, via an intermediate floppy. He then reads and queues responses on his laptop for later transmission by reversing the process. It takes him several hours a day to keep up with his email.

... ... ...

After working on his email for a while, it was time to head off to dinner. On Richard's suggestion, we picked up some CDs at his hotel room, to listen to during the hour drive to the restaurant. Richard settled down to read and respond to another batch of email on the trip, occasionally wondering how we liked his choice of music, and offering alternates. I think I liked the Burmese percussion pieces best.

While his presentation the next day was to focus on legal compliance with the GPL and only describe briefly the underlying philosophy from a historical perspective, it was anything goes at dinner. Boy, did the queries fly! A lot of basic questions were asked, and challenges made, about his fundamental beliefs. I couldn't tell if Richard was round-robin scheduling among the queriers or playing a variant of whack-a-mole with each response he offered. I was getting nervous: here were a bunch of GPL newbies debating with the great RMS. I seized upon the opportunity a lull offered and asked him, "How can you stand answering the same questions over and over?" "I have a mission!" he replied, with vigor. Clearly another misconception of mine was shattered: RMS will patiently take the time to explain his position to anyone who shows interest. I suppose that he's the only person I can describe as an evangelical atheist without it being an oxymoron.

You'd think that it was an divisive, and sometimes uncomfortable, evening, but somehow the excellent food appeared to help overcome differing philosophies, that, in the end, weren't as disparate as initially thought. Of course, Richard's sense of humor certainly helped liven everyone's spirits. He is a notorious punster. Unfortunately so many of his puns are sensitive to subtleties of timing and context, that to try to relay them would not do justice to how funny they were at the time. Dinner came to an end all too soon, and Richard capped the evening by insisting on adding a zero to the waitress's tip. Literally -- he carries with him a stash of bank note-sized pieces of paper with a "0" denomination on them.

The trip back to our car was punctuated by what appeared to be a destitute young man asking for money for food. True to his help-your-neighbor ethic, Richard had us wait while he took the bewildered man to a local store and bought him a sandwich. I was a bit worried about this adventure but realized that he must have done this many times before and I certainly wasn't going to presume that he needed babysitting. Of course, the rest of us debated the effect on Teradyne's stock price if Richard had been mugged while our guest, the wording of the subsequent Slashdot headline, and what a strange fellow he was. Personally, I think a bit more of that kind of strangeness wouldn't hurt the world. Richard promptly returned (no doubt to a mental sigh of relief) and explained that someone once asked him for a quarter for the subway, but proceeded to pocket the change instead of taking the train. Not to be duped by a liar in the future, he resolved to never give money to a beggar for some purported worthwhile purpose, but to see to it, if he could, that the purpose was met with his help. He does donate money to charitable organizations.

... ... ...

Richard needed to service a higher-priority interrupt: seeking tea to drink while lecturing. While I'd heard of his fondness for specialty teas, he had to settle for the generic vending machine variety. No jasmine or lechee blossom around here. (Note to self: fix this if ever he visits again).

The presentation was agreed upon before hand. We were permitted to videotape the lecture for future training. Rather than his usual speech about software freedom, Richard focused only briefly on the history of the GPL, and proceeded to explain what it means for software to be free, the GPL and LGPL (and their differences), and what was necessary to comply with both. There are a few important differences depending on how the software is distributed, whether via the internet, or physical media, and he covered these. Richard provided examples of programs working together that would not be considered derived works of one of them: where communication between them was via a simple socket or pipe interface. There was no opportunity to debate the "rightness" or "wrongness" of his philosophy -- that was not the purpose of the presentation. Free code is here to stay, and having made the choice to use it in our products, we had to abide by the licensing requirements. Richard is an excellent speaker, properly pacing his lecture, without wandering away from the topics at hand. Oh, and all this without notes. He spoke for about an hour, and then proceeded to answer questions for another hour.

Audience questions ranged from simple queries to subtle aspects of, and potential "gotchas" related to compliance. Accidents happen, and sometimes GPL-violating combinations of free and non-free code escape, typically as demo versions. Richard explained that the FSF is interested in ensuring that compliance with the GPL is restored as soon as possible when a violation occurs and not in embarking on a witch-hunt. Scratch any misconceptions about being unreasonable. A few people asked about ways to "get around" the GPL, and Richard calmly explained that he would not help anyone do this and refused to answer such questions. (We had agreed to this before hand, as well as not allowing the Q&A session to turn onto a philosophical debate.) Richard explained simple ways that we could be friendly to the free software community, beyond legal compliance with the GPL. During the Q&A session, I asked if any other companies had invited him to speak on the subject of GPL compliance, and Richard said that we were the first. However, as part of GPL-violation settlements with the FSF, some (unnamed) companies were required to appoint a GPL compliance officer, known to the FSF, and pay for their training to understand the GPL. Apparently the FSF pursues GPL violators quite actively, but does not make a habit of publicly exposing offenders. My boss made the overture that we would voluntarily have a person assigned to verify GPL compliance on projects where we include GPL code.

... ... ...

While generally frugal and unassuming, Richard likes to eat well (whether this had anything to do with his expenses being covered by Teradyne, I don't know). Fortunately so do I, and we found a local seafood place. While he enjoys Chinese food, having spent several weeks in Asia, he had an appetite for more occidental fare.