A Free Speech by Richard Stallman

Yesterday was a busy day. Infusion Angels was on campus with a big conference in which it showed the features of the Microsoft XNA 3.0 platform, but more importantly, Richard Stallman gave a talk on the GNU Operating System and Free Software. Some of you may ask: who is this Richard Stallman? Well, to make a long story short, Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU movement and the Free Software Foundation. He is probably the most important person behind the GPL license and the ideas it represents. He is also a fierce adversary of proprietary software and the software patents.

So like I said, he was at the University yesterday. I had been waiting for this talk for while and it was totally worth it. Not necessarily in a good way though, but more on that later. The first part of his talk was about the Free Software Philosophy. For a program to be Free Software, you need four things.

You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.)

You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.

You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.

And, following Stallman philosophy, this is the only ethical way of developing software. By not following these principles, proprietary software goes against the freedom of the user and is thus unethical. As such, every piece of software should be released using copyleft, so that nobody in particular owns the code and the four principles can be followed. There is a lot more about Free Software than that, but it can be summarized to that. For more information, you can visit the GNU website.

He then talked a bit about the history of the GNU Operating System. He started with the how and why of the creation of the movement which led him to the need for a kernel and Linus Torvald unwanted contribution to the movement. His main point for this section really was: the GNU Operating System is not Linux. It than changed to Open Source software is not Free Software and why Open Source is also bad. And this is were I disagree. Stallman is particularly stubborn in his beliefs and insist that software has to be free for freedom reasons and so Open Source is good only if it is open to respect the freedom of the user. The way I see Open Source software is in a pragmatic way, I see it as a better alternative. By opening the code, more people can have a look at it and improve it. It is also a way to share knowledge between developers. This way nobody has to redo something somebody already did. This is more Linus view on Open Source and Stallman is totally opposed to it. However, it is still interesting to hear about different ideas and I can’t say that Stallman talk was bad.

He finished his talk with two subtopics, Free Software and the software industry and Free Software and education. For the software industry, his theory is that there should be no software product. Every software being Free Software, developers would be hired by companies to adapt already existing software to their needs. The problem with this, is that it kills the software entertainment industry right away. How can developing a game be profitable when the code has to be released once finish? Also, companies, in order to reduce their costs, would probably use already existing software even if it is not totally adapted for them. And what about concurrent companies? On the other side, I agree with his position on software in education. Most schools use proprietary software and don’t talk about the alternatives. For example, in College, I followed a (compulsory) course that teaches how to use the Microsoft Office Suite. The problem with that is that it target Microsoft Office directly meaning that if I want to do my homework or put this knowledge to use at home or at work, I have to buy (or pirate) a Microsoft Office License. Children are raised with closed source software that they then have to buy which is ridiculous. Schools should at least teach something people something they can get without paying. And this is especially true for people following Computer Science classes. Studying Free Software code is one of the best way to learn how to program. However, most schools teach the use of closed source program and framework like .NET.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting talk. I learned a lot, especially on the GNU philosophy and the differences between Free Software and Open Source.

Tags: Free Software, GNU, GPL, Open Source, Software, Software Development, Software Licenses