I am Saint Ignatius of the Church of Emacs
I’m at NYU’s Courant institute for math and science attending a talk by the g-dfather of free software, Richard Stallman. Years ago I used to volunteer for the FSF.
I’m going to try to document this in real time, we’ll see how this goes. The funniest thing so far is that the screen-server on the overhead projector (for the talk by Richard “emacs” Stallman) is a Windows XP logo. The hall isn’t as full as it was when Jimmy Wales spoke. Clearly he’s more of a rock star but we owe a lot to Stallman.
A lot of my friends used to type for him when we were in high school. He had pretty bad CTS then and needed to hire other people to do his typing.
Talk Starting:
Richard Stallman needs a Pepsi.
“The most important consideration for choosing software is ‘does it respect your freedom’. What does that mean? There are four essential freedoms. Freedom Zero (hah!) is to run the software as you wish.”
“Software should allow you to be upright members of a community in which you cooperate. The social dimensions of software becomes ethical. Not what the software is, but the social surrounding circumstances that are imposed on the user.”
“The developer of proprietary software is attacking the fabric of your community. Since you cannot copy software you cannot help others in your community. ”
“The most essential resource of a society is a psychosocial resource, it’s the spirit of goodwill. If you can raise the value of this resource a little bit, you can have profound implications on society. Proprietary software makers are poisioning this society.”
(on Piracy) Helping your neighbor != Attacking Ships
“How much fear is it going to take to make you not help your neighbor.”
Stallman also just said that in Germany and Argentina he has heard that people are threatened with rape for pirating software.
This is a very big picture, preachy talk. We’re supposed to be the foot soldiers and he’s the visionary. “To live in freedom, we must only use free software.”
“When a program says, I don’t want to copy this music for you, I don’t want to print this file for you, because I don’t like you.” <– Stallman’s take on DRM.
“A non free program can never be trusted. Just-trust-me software. Does a given developer deserve this kind of trust?”
“The freedom to contribute lets us built upon each other’s work and decide together where we want our software to go.”
GNU origin story. Stallman came to the conclusion that he wanted to write free software in 1983. “The word ‘gnu’ is the funniest word in the english language. It’s also very funny because the G is silent.” They tried to build a MACH micro-kernel but failed. Luckily in 1991 Linux came along. Legally, a program is a literary work and so it is covered by copyright law. The GNU GPL works around that copyright law.” The difference between the GPL and other free software licenses is ‘copy left’. The X windows systems allows you to release modified versions that aren’t free. Copy left doesn’t allow for that. Every copy of the program comes with the freedom. The GPL makes the four freedoms inalienable rights.
“Linus does not agree with the FSF tenants, he considers himself apolitical.”
“To finish I will now present my other identity.”
He then proceeds to pun on a robe and a halo.
“I am Saint Ignatius of the Church of Emacs.”
