RMS and the Free Software Movement

This week, Dr Bonk organized a lecture about open source. He divided the subject into 5 topics, and arranged conference sessions about these topics. He assigned nearly 30 articles to more or less 17 people, including himself both as a moderator and a speaker. We have roleplayed the writers of the articles. I was assigned to Richard Stallman whom I first heard his name last week. But reading about him whole week, I admired him. He even wrote a song about free software movement. And we performed the song in class all together. You can listen to it by clicking here.
Here is the presentation notes I want to share with you:

RMS (Richard Matthew Stallman)

I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953 by Jewish parents and moved to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, science fiction and programming.

(I am a Green Party supporter. I don't follow any religious leaders. I choose not to celebrate Christmas; instead I celebrate on December 25 a holiday of my own invention, "Grav-mass." The name and date are references to Isaac Newton whose birthday falls on that day. I enjoy a wide range of musical styles from Nancarrow to folk. More recently I wrote a take-off on the Cuban folk song Guantanamera (about a prisoner) and recorded it in Cuba with Cuban musicians. I admire international folk dance. But, unfortunately in 1998 a foot injury forced me to abandon folk dancing permanently, but I still perform small dance steps.I am also a fan of science fiction. I have written two science fiction stories, The Right to Read and Jinnetic Engineering.)

But most of my time, I spent with programming, writing essays, campaigning against both software patents and copyright laws and give speeches about:

“The GNU Prject and the Free Software Movement”

Everything started at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. The AI Lab used a timesharing operating system called ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System) that the lab's staff hackers had designed and written. As a member of this community, an AI lab staff system hacker, my job was to improve this system. We didn’t call our software “free software”, because that term did not yet exist; but that is what it was. Whenever people from another university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly let them.

But the situation changed drastically in the early 1980s. The AI lab bought new computer series and its administrators decided to use non free timesharing system instead of ITS. The spin-off company Symbolics had hired away nearly all of the hackers from the AI lab.

With my community gone, to continue as before was impossible. Instead, I faced a stark moral choice. The easy choice was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker. I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.

Another choice was to leave the computer field. That way my skills would not be misused, but they would still be wasted. I would not be culpable for dividing and restricting computer users, but it would happen nonetheless.

I asked myself, was there a program or programs that I could write, so as to make a community possible once again? The answer was clear: what was needed first was an operating system. That is the crucial software for starting to use a computer. As an operating system developer, I had the right skills for this job. In 1984 I quit my job at MIT and began writing GNU software. Leaving MIT was necessary so that MIT would not be able to interfere with distributing GNU as free software.

I chose to make the system compatible with Unix so that it would be portable, and so that Unix users could easily switch to it. The name GNU was chosen following a hacker tradition, as a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not Unix.”

This goal of making a free software operating system was achieved in 1992 when the last gap in the GNU system, a kernel, was filled by Unix-style kernel called "Linux" which was developed by Linus Tervalds. We call this system version: GNU/Linux. And estimates today are that there are ten million users of GNU/Linux systems.

Free as in freedom

The term “free software” is sometimes misunderstood—it has nothing to do with price. It is about freedom!

• Freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
• Freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (This implies you must have access to the source code)
• Freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.
• Freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.

Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial:

- collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the community,

- selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development.

Here I want to underline an important terminology (using free software). “Free software” and “open source” describe the same category of software, more or less, but say different things about the software, and about values. The GNU Project continues to use the term “free software”, to express the idea that freedom, not just technology, is important.

Copyleft

The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular. So we needed to use distribution terms that would prevent GNU software from being turned into proprietary software. The method we use is called “copyleft”.

Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over (all rights reversed) to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free.

The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions—but not permission to add restrictions of their own.

Try!

Contradicting to Yoda's philosophy (“There is no ‘try’”), I tried anyway, because there was no one but me, between the enemy and my city. I have sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed.

Over time, I've learned to look for threats and put myself between them and my city, calling on other hackers to come and join me. (I even wrote a song for this: free software song)

Nowadays, often I'm not the only one. I realize, this city may survive—for now. But the dangers are greater each year, and now Microsoft has explicitly targeted our community.

We can't take the future of freedom for granted.

Don't take it for granted!

If you want to keep your freedom,

You must be prepared to defend it.

Sources:

• Stallman, R. Home Page http://www.stallman.org/

• Stallman, R. (1985). The GNU Project. Retrieved March 3, 2006, from http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

• Stallman, R. from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_stallman

• GNU, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU