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On April/4/2008, Richard Stallman came to UAB to give a conference about GNU. You can view the WHOLE conference in Spanish at the end of this post (and some pictures as well). I strongly recommend you to view the video as it’s quite interesting.

A brief introduction to who Richard Stallman is:

Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated “rms”, is an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project’s lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he started the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up the Free Software Foundation. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Let’s come back to the conference.

RMS came to UAB to introduce and clarify for us what free software really means, and why we should use it. First of all, I would like to advise you that RMS is a showman. But never mind, don’t lose the thread. Some teachers introduce RMS… While he felt asleep on the table.

The first reflexion was:

- Does this program respect my freedom?

Starting from this question, we should know what a program which respects our freedom means. If it does so, it is a free software (from now on free software is going to be FS). Otherwise, it is a privative software (from now on privative software is going to be PS). So, FS is the one which respects our freedom according to the notes below:

1. Be able to execute the program as you wish.
2. Be able to change the source code.
3. Be able to distribute your software as you wish.
4. Share your improvements with the community (it means, everybody).

If just one of these freedoms is missed, we have a PS because their distribution won’t be ethical. And because of this,it is better to have nothing than a PS.

We can imagine a practical case, for instance, a friend asks you to copy one of your PS (at random… Windows). You can’t copy it… Even though it’s yours! You have two possible options:

• Break the license (of the PS) and give the program to your friend.
• Don’t contribute.

If you don’t respect the third freedom, you are doing two wrong things, you’ve got a dilemma. If you have to choose, you choose the less harmful option, the first one. But you are breaking a license! This is not ethical either! So, we should avoid this situation. We can count again our options:

• Don’t have friends.
• Don’t use PS.

There are some people that think that piracy is bad. But, according to RMS (from now on, everything is according to RMS), piracy is the act of boarding ships. Helping your neighbor is not bad!

Now, let’s talk about freedom number 1. In this case, developers are forcing you to do whatever they want. So, this is why we also need freedom 2, to change this, to be able to do whatever we want with our program. There are a lot of programs that have evil process’. Maybe you have heard of one of these, Microsoft. Every time you are searching something in your computer, Microsoft is being notified. Every time you update Windows XP, you are sending a list of programs installed in your computer. Without your knowledge, of course. This has been discovered by a lot of users analyzing the traffic.

But not just MS! Real player also does so. MS is more popular because of their limitations than their inventions. Because the lack of freedom is a limitation. It is the functionality of not working, limiting your own freedom. When you are searching for some files in your PC, why aren’t all files related with your search listed? A lot of companies are limiting you such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Mac, Amazon… Some, more than others. It’s very sad to sell your liberty. Vista is asking you to update the OS in order to limit your freedoms. Isn’t it sad? Some time ago, these people who sold its liberty was called slaves.

But the problem goes further. Because if we are notifying MS through Windows Vista, this means that WV has a backdoor. A PS with backdoors… Just awesome!

We can realize how big the problem is with a practical example, as always: Some years ago, a few Al Qaeda terrorists who were working in Microsoft (coding Vista) were arrested for trying to implement a backdoor in Vista in order to know… Imagine it yourself. We can conclude with these premises that a PS, that is to say, without freedom number 2, is non-reliable!! If you are using a program without freedom number 2, you are a prisioner.

With Vista, Microsoft can change wathever they want in you PC. But apple too. And others. A program without freedom 2 asks for blind trust.

In the other hand, FS can have bugs or problems too… But if you notice it, just notify it and it will be fixed.

The problem is that not everybody knows how to program something. This is the reason why we need freedom 3: A community is needed to help each other in order to improve the software. There are some people that don’t know programming and therefore, they can’t take advantage of this liberty, but never mind, others do, and will.

A PS is a dictatorship.

We can appreciate some differences between PS and FS:

In PS, if you have a bug, you can wait for 6 months… And maybe, with the update, it will be fixed. Maybe not.

In FS, you can update it or ask for solutions whenever you want. The improvement is constant and progressive.

One paradox is that people who don’t want FS are calling us communists. Who is the communist, those people who don’t let you distribute your own software, or us?

Another one is that if you choose a PS, you also have to choose a monopoly. You’ve got a dilemma again. And, again, the best option is to not have a dilemma… Use FS.

This was the main part of the conference. After that, he explained us how he arrived to these ideas (not so clear, but a draft) and how he started to develop GNU. He spent from 1983 to 1991, with more programmers working on it, building GNU. And in 1991, they had finished it, but they also needed a kernel, and when they started it, they realized it was going to be very difficult. They needed to release GNU soon, so they used Linux to launch the first GNU/Linux Operative system. But the problem was that the creator of linux didn’t agree with free software whatsoever and it has been a problem since then. In the year 2000, there were a lot of GNU/Linux distribution but, unfortunately, most of them used PS.

Nowadays, we just have 3 distributions TOTALLY free: Ututo, Gobuntu and GnewSense.

At the end, he talked about how important education is nowadays in order to expand GNU/Linux, joking about his own “church” (with an old hard drive as a halo on his head), reminding us to say GNU/linux and not just Linux (because the most important part is GNU) and some other curiosities. But the best was at the end when a student asked him the last question of the conference.

- Can you sing the Free Software Song?

Judge for yourself…

And the video of the whole conference below, enjoy it. Sorry but it is in Spanish because he gave us the conference in Spanish

Thanks to gnuab for the video.

And some pictures

…SaMy*^24

PS: A Spanish summary here.

PS2: Maybe you also wanna see Ricardo Baeza’s conference, researcher and director of Yahoo! Research in Barcelona and Santiago de Chile

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