156 Free Software, ~ree Society: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
So, let me make the briefes possible introduction to somebody who doesn't need one. Richard is the perfect e ample of somebody who, by acting locally, started thinking globally-from probl ms concerning the unavailability of source cQde for printer drivers at the M.I. T. I Lab many years ago. He has developed a cqherent philosophy that has forced a I of us to re-examine our ideas of how software is produced, of what intellectua property means, and what the software community actually represents. Let me w lcome Richard Stallman. [applause] I
Free Software: Free~om and Cooperation
Richard M. Stallman: Can s meone lend me a watch? [audiencelaughs] Thank you. So, I'd like to thank Mi rosoft for providing me the opportunity to [audience laughs]be on this platform. F r the pastfew weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously banne somewhere.! [audiencelaughs] Except that all the articles about it are giving th wrong author's name, becauseMicrosoft describes the GNU GPL as an open so rce license,and most of the presscoverage followed suit. Most people, of coursej st innocently don't realize that our work has nothing to do with open source,that i fact we did most of it before people evencoined the term "open source." We are in the free softwar movement,and I'm going to speak about what the free software movementis ab ut, what it means,what we have done, and, because this is partly sponsoredby a chool of business,I'll say some things more than I usually do about how free s ftware relates to business,and some other areas of social life. Now, someof you may not ver write computerprograms, but perhapsyou cook. And if you cook, unless you' e really great, you probably use recipes. And if you userecipes, you've probably ad the experienceof getting a copy of a recipe from a friend who's sharingit. And y u've probably also had the experience-unlessyou're a total neophyte-of changing a recipe. It says certain things, but you don't have to do exactly that. You can leav out someingredients. Add somemushrooms, , cause you like mushrooms.Put in I ss salt becauseyour 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 n a recipe, and you cook it for your friends, and they like it, one of your friends ght say, "Hey, could I have the recipe?" And then, what do you do? You could rite down your modified version of the recipe and make a copy for your friend. These are the natural things to do with functionally useful recipesof any kind. Now a recipe is a lot like a computerprogram. A computerprogram is 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 ame things with computerprograms-hand a copy to your friend. Make changesi it becausethe job it was written to do isn't exactly what you want. It did a great ob for somebodyelse, but your job is a different job. And, after you've changed it that is likely to be useful for other people. Maybe~
1 Less than a month before, Micr6soft vice presidentCraig Mundie gave a speechattackling free software(calling it "open ~ourcej'). Chapter20: Free Software: Freedom~d Cooperation 157 they have a job to do that's like the jo~ 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 decentperson. I So imagine what it would be like if [ecipes were packagedinside black boxes. You couldn't see what ingredients they re using, let alone changethem, and imag- ine if you made a copy for a friend, ~ey would call you a pirate and try to put you in prison for years. That world would createtremendous outrage from all the people who are used to sharing recipes; But that is exactly what the world of pro- prietary software is like. A world in w~ch common decencytowards other people is prohibited or prevented. Now, why did I notice this? I noticed this becauseI had the good fortune in the 1970's to be part of a community of prqgrammerswho sharedsoftware. Now, this community could trace its ancestryessentially back to the beginning of computing. In the 1970's, though, it was a bit rare ~orthere to be a community where people sharedsoftware. And, in fact, this was ~ort of an extreme case,because in the lab where I worked, the entire operating systemwas software developedby the people in our community, and we'd share any ,f it with anybody. Anybody was welcome to come and take a look, and take away a copy, and do whateverhe wanted to do. There were no copyright notices on theseprograms. Cooperationwas our way of life. And we were secure in that way lof 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 fr~e software,but there was no free software movement. I But then our community was destroyedby a seriesof calamities that happenedto it. Ultimately it was wiped out. mtimatfly, the PDP-I0 computer,2which we used for all our work, was discontinued. O\lf system-the Incompatible nmesharing System-was written starting in the '601s,so it was written in assemblerlanguage. That's what you used to write an opefflting system in the '60's. So, of course, assemblerlanguage is for one particular computerarchitecture; if that gets discon- tinued, all your work turns into dust-it,s useless.And that's what happenedto us. The 20 years or so of work of our community turned into dust. But before this happened,I had an e*perience that preparedme, helped me see what to do, helped prepare me to see ~hat to do when this happened,because at a certain point, Xerox gave the Artifici~ Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsomeIgift, becauseit was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser p.rinter. It w~.svery fast, pri~ted a page a sec?nd, very fine in many respects, but It was unrelIable, becauseIt was really a high-speed office copier that had been modified into a printer. And, you know, copiers j~, but there's somebodythere to fix them.1rhe printer jammed and nobody saw. So It stayedjammed for a long time. Well we had an idea for how to deal With this problem. Changeit so that when- , . ever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell o~ timesharIng machine, and tell the userswho are waiting for printouts, go fix the pnnter-because
--I 2 ProgrammedData Processormodel 10, a mr.nframe computerused by many top researchand governmentorganizations in the 1970's. 158 Free Software, Free ~ociety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
if they only knew it was jammed. ..of course,if you're waiting for a printout and you know that the printer is jamm d, you don't want to sit and wait forever, you're going to go fix it. I But at that point, we were comp etely stymied, becausethe software that ran that printer was not free software. It h d come with the printer, and it was just a binary. We couldn't have the source cod; Xerox wouldn't let us have the source code. So, despite our skill as programm rs-after all, we had written our own timesharing system-we were completely helpl ss to add this feature to the printer software. And we just had to suffer with aiting. It would take an hour or two to get your printout becausethe machine wo ld be jammed most of the time. You'd wait an hour figuring "I know it's going 0 be jammed. I'll wait an hour and go collect my printout," and then you'd s that it had beenjammed 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, an you'd seeit jammed again-before it got to your output. It would print three minut s and be jammed thirty minutes. Frustration up the whazzoo. But the thing that ade it worse was knowing that we could have fixed it, but somebodyelse, for s own selfishness,was blocking us, obstructing us from improving the software. 0, of course,we felt someresentment. I And then I heard that somebo y at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of that software. I was visiting there later, so I went to his office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT. Could I have a copy f the printer sourcecode?" And he said "No, I promised not to give you a copy." [audiencelaughs] I was stunned. I was so-I was angry,and I had no idea how I co ld do justice to it. All I could think of was to turn around on my heel and walk out 0 his room. Maybe I slammedthe door. [audience laughs] And I thought about it lat r on, becauseI realized that I was seeingnot just an isolatedjerk, but a social phe omenon that was important and affected a lot Iof people. I was lucky, I only got a taste of it. Other people had to live with this all the time. So I thought about it at len tho See,he had promised to refuse to cooperate with us-his colleagues at MIT. e had betrayed us. But he didn't just do it to us. Chancesare he did it to yo too [Pointing at member of audience]. And I think, mostly likely, he did it to Y u too. [Pointing at anothermember of audience]. [audiencelaughs] And he probab y did it to you as well [Pointing to third member of audience]. He probably did it 0 most of the people here in this room-except a few, maybe, who weren't born y tin 1980. Becausehe had promised to refuse to cooperatewith just about the en .e population of the planet Earth. He had signed a non-disclosureagreement. Now, this was my first direct ncounter with a non-disclosureagreement, and it taught me an important lesson a lessonthat's important becausemost program- mers neverlearn it. This was my first encounterwith a non-disclosureagreement, and I was the victim. I, and my whole lab, were the victims. And the lesson it taught me was that non-disclosur agreementshave victims. They're not innocent. They're not harmless. Most pro ammers first encountera non-disclosure agree- ment when they're invited to sig one. And there's always sometemptation-some goodythey'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 conspir-
III Chapter 20: Free Software: FreedoIIil and Cooperation 159 d acy.to d~prive him?" They say, "This is the way it's always done. Who am I to go e agaInstIt?" They say, "If I don't sigp this, someoneelse will." Various excusesto gag their consciences. But when somebodyinvited me to sign a non-disclosureagreement, my con- sciencewas already sensitized. It refllemberedhow angry I had been when some- body promised not to help me and my whole lab solve our problem. And I couldn't turn around and do the exactsame thing to somebodyelse who had neverdone me any harm. If somebodyasked me to promise not to sharesome useful information with a hated enemy, I would have s~d yes. If somebody'sdone somethingbad, he deservesit. But strangers-theyhave~'t done me anyharm. How could they deserve that kind of mistreatment?You can't ,letyourself start treating just anybody and ev- erybody badly. Then you become a!predator on society. So I said, "Thank you very much for offering me this nice softwarepackage. But I can't acceptit in good conscience,on the conditions you are demanding,so I will do without it. Thank you so much." And so, I have neverknowingly signeda non-disclosureagreement for generally useful technical inform~tion suchas software. Now there are other kinds of infopnation, which raise different ethical issues. For instance, there's personal inf~ation. If you wanted to talk with me about what was happeningbetween you and your boyfriend, and you askedme not to tell anybody-I could agree to keep that a secret for you, becausethat's not generally useful technical information. At least, it's probably not generall~useful [audiencelaughs]. There is a small chance-andit's a possibility thoughJthatyou might reveal to me some marvelous new sextechnique, [audiencelaughs] ! and I would thenfeel a moral duty [audience laughs] to pass it on to the rest of huIillanity, so that everyonecould get the benefit of it. So, I'd have to put a proviso in that promise. If it's just details about who wants this, and who's angry at whom, and things like that soapopera. ..that I cankeep! private for you; but something that humanity could tremendouslybenefit from knoJing, I mustn't withhold. You see,the purpose of science and technology is to deve~opuseful information for humanity to help people live their lives better. If we promise to withhold that information-if we keep it secret-thenwe are betraying the mission of our field. And this, I decided, I shouldn't do. I But meanwhile my community had!collapsed,and that left me in a bad situation. You see, the whole Incompatible Timesharing Systemwas obsolete, becausethe PDP-IO was obsolete, and so there ~as no way that I could continue working as an operating system developerthe WllY that I had been doing it. That depended on being part of the community, usin~ the community's software and improving it. That no longer was a possibility, and ithat gave me a moral dilemma. What was I going to do? Becausethe mostobvious possibility meantto go againstthat decision I had made. The most obvious possibIlity was to adaptmyself 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-disc~osureagreements for proprietary operating systems,and most likely writing pro~rietary 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 careerand say, "I've
Chapter20: Free Software: Freedoman~ Cooperation 161 details. The reasonis, usershate inco atible changes. If I had just designedthe systemin my favorite way-which I wou d haveloved doing, I'm sure-I would have produced something that was incompat ble. The details would be different. So, if I wrote the system, then the userswoul have said to me, "Well, this is very nice, but it's incompatible. It will be too m ch work to switch. We can't afford that much trouble just to use your systemi steadof 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 systemand enjoying the benefits of liberty and coop- eration, I had to make a systempeople would use, a system that they would find easyto switch to, that would not have an obstacle making it fail at the very be- ginning. Now, making the systemupw d compatible with Unix actually made all the immediate design decisions, becau e Unix consists of many pieces, and they communicate through interfacesthat ar more or less documented.So if you want to be compatible with Unix, you have 0 replace each piece, one by one, with a compatible piece. So the remaining des'gn decisionsare inside one piece, and they could be made later by whoeverdecide to write that piece. They didn't have to be made at the outset. All we had to do to start work was fi d a name for the system. Now, we hackers always look for a funny or naughtynam for a program, becausethinking of people being amusedby the nameis half the fu of writing the program. [audiencelaughs] And we had a tradition of recursive acr nyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing pro ram. You can give it a recursive acronym name that says: this one's not the othe. So, for instance, there were many Tico text editors in the '60's and '70's, and they were generally called something-or- other TECO. Then one clever hacker alled his Tint, for Tint Is Not TECO--the first recursive acronym. In 1975, I deve oped the first Emacs text editor, and there were many imitations of Emacs,and a ot of them were called something-or-other Emacs, but one was called Fine, for F'ne Is Not Emacs, and there was Sine, for Sine Is Not Emacs,and Eine for Eine Is Not Emacs,and MINCE for Mince Is Not Complete Emacs. [audiencelaughs] ( at was a stripped-down imitation.) And then Eine was almost completely rewri ten, and the new version was called Zwei, for Zwei Was Eine lnitially.3 [audiencelaughs] So, I looked for a recursive acrony for Something is not Unix. And I tried all 26 letters, and discovered that non of them was a word. [audience laughs] Hmm, try anotherway. I made a contr ction. That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's not Unix. nd I tried letters, and I came across the word" GNU" -the word" GNU" is e funniest word in the English language. [audience laughs] That was it. Of co se, the reasonit's funny is that according to the dictionary, it's pronounced "ne ." That's why people use it for a lot of wordplay. Let me tell you, this is the n e of an animal that lives in Africa. And the African pronunciationhad a click soun in it. [audiencelaughs] Maybe still does. And so, the Europeancolonists, when they got there, they didn't bother learning to say this click sound. So they just Ie t it out, and they wrote a 'g' which meant
3 Eine and Zwei mean oneand two in Gennan tespectively 162 Free Software,Free $ociety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
"there's anothersound that's sup osedto be here which we are not pronouncing." [audiencelaughs] So, tonight I'm eaving for SouthAfrica, and I havebegged them, I hope they're going to find someb dy who can teachme .topronounce click sounds, [audiencelaughs] so that I'll kno how to pronounce GNU the correct way, when it's the animal. But, when it's the name of ur 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. [a dience laughs] But it still is, and always will be, GNU-no matter how many peopl call it Linux by mistake. [audiencelaughs] So, in January 1984, I quit my job at MIT to start writing piecesof GNU.4 They were nice enoughto let me keepu ing their facilities though. At the time, I thought we would write all thesepieces, d make an entire GNU system, and then we'd say, "Come and get it," andpeop would start to use it. That's not what happened. The first pieces I wrote were just qually good replacements,with fewer bugs, for somepieces of Unix, but they we en't tremendouslyexciting. Nobody particularly wanted to get them and install the .But then, in September1984, I startedwriting GNU Emacs, which was my seco d implementationof Emacs,and by early 1985, it was working. I could use it for all my editing, which was a big relief, becauseI had no intention of learning to us vi, the Unix editor. [audiencelaughs] So, until that time, I did my editing on so e other machine, and savedthe files through the network, so that I could testthem. But when GNU Emacswas running well enough for me to use it, it was alsO-{)therpeople wanted to use it too. So, I had to work out the det .ls of distribution. Of course, I put a copy in the anonymousFTP directory, and t at was fine for people who were on the net-they could just pull over a .tar5file, b t even a lot of programmerswere not on the net in 1985. They were sendingme email saying" How can I get a copy?" I had to decide what I would answerthe .Well, I could have said: "I want to spend my time writing more GNU softwar , not writing tapes, so pleasefind a friend who's on the Internet and who is willin to download it and put it on a tape for you," and I'm sure people would have foun somefriends, sooneror later. They would h~ve got copies. But I had no job. In fact, I'v never had a job since quitting MIT in January 1984. So I was looking for som way I could make money through my work on free software, and therefore I staIjteda free software business.I announced,"Send me 150 dollars, and I'll mail you tape of Emacs." And the orders begandribbling in. By the middle of the year the were trickling in. I was getting 8 to 10 orders a month. And, if necessary,I could have lived on just that, becauseI've always liv d cheaply. I live like a student,basically. And I like that, becauseit meansthat oney is not telling me what to do. I can do \J.i1hat I think is important for me to do It freed me to do what seemedworth doing. So make a real effort to avoid getti g suckedinto all the expensivelifestyle habits of
4 You can read the original announce 1nt of the GNU project in "The GNU Manifesto" 5 A Unix ar:chiving program. Combine with gzip, it makes the GNU alternative to the non-free lZIP
compression format. c..
164 Free Software,Fr~ Society: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman the error messagesinto Navajo. y changeyou wa~t to make, you should be free to make. Now, it's obvious that profes ional programmerscan make use of this freedom very effectively, but not just the .Anybody of reasonableintelligence can learn a little programming. There are h d jobs, and there are easyjobs, and most people are not going to learn enoughto do hardjobs. But lots of people can learn enough to do easyjobs, just the way 50 years ago, lots and lots of American men learned to repair cars, which is what en bled the u.s. to have a motorized army in World War II and win. It is very impo ant to havelots of people tinkering. And if you are a people perso , and you really don't want to learn technology at all, that probably meansthat yo have a lot of friends, and you're good at getting them to owe you favors. [audi nce laughs] Some of them are probably program- mers. So you can ask one of yo programmerfriends. "Would you pleasechange this for me? Add this feature?" So, lots of people can benefit from it. Now, if you don't havethis fr edom, it causespractical, material harm to society. It makes you a prisonerof your oftware. I explainedwhat that was like with regard to the laser printer. It worked b dly for us, and we couldn't fix it, becausewe were prisoners of our software. But it also affects people's orale. If the computer is constantly frustrating to use, and people are using it, th ir lives are going to be frustrating, and if they're using it in their jobs, their job are going to be frustrating; they're going to hate their jobs. And you know, peo Ie protect themselvesfrom frustration by deciding not to care. So you end up wi people whose attitude is, "Well, I showed up for work today. That's all I haveto o. If I can't make progress,that's not my problem; that's the boss's problem." An when this happens,it's bad for those people, and it's bad for society as a whole. hat's FreedomOne, the freedom to help yourself. Freedom Two is the freedo to help your neighbor by distributing copies of the program. Now, for beings that can think and learn, sharing useful knowledg~ is a fundamental act of friendship. en thesebeings use computers,this act of friend- ship takesthe form of sharing s ftware. Friendsshare with eachother. Friends help eachother. This is the nature 0 friendship. And, in fact, this spirit of goodwill-the spirit of helping your neighbor,voluntarily-is society's most important resource.It makesthe difference between livable societyand a dog-eat-dogjungle. Its impor- tance has been recognized by e world's major religions for thousandsof years, and they explicitly try to enco agethis attitude. When I was going to kind rgarten, the teacherswere trying to teach us this attitude-the spirit of sharing- y having us do it. They figured if we did it, we'd learn. So they said, "If you b 'ng candy to school, you can't keep it all for your- self; you have to sharesome ith the other kids." The society was set up to teach this spirit of cooperation. An why do you have to do that? Becausepeople are not totally cooperative. That's one part of human nature, and there are other parts of human nature. There are 10 s of parts of human nature. So, if you want a better society, you've got to work to encouragethe spirit of sharing. It'll never get to be 100%. That's understandable.People have to take care of themselvestoo. But if we make it somewhatbigger, e're all better off. Chapter 20: Free Software: Freedom Iand Cooperation 165
Nowadays,according to the U.S. ovemment, teachersare supposedto do the exact opposite. "Oh, Johnny, you b ought software to school. Well, don't share it. Oh no. Sharing is wrong. Sharin meansyou're a pirate." What do they mean when they say" pirate"? They're sa ing that helping your neighbor is the moral equivalentof attacking a ship. [audie ce laughs] What would Buddha or Jesus say bout that? Now, take your favorite religious leader. I don't know, maybe Manson would have said somethingdifferent. [audi- encelaughs] Who knows what L. Ro Hubbard would say? But ... Question: [Inaudible] RichardM. Stallman: Of course,he's dead. But they don't admit that. What? Question: So are the others,also dead [audiencelaughs] [Inaudible] CharlesMan- son's also dead. [audiencelaughs] Th y're dead,Jesus's dead, Buddha's dead... RMS: Yes,that's true. [audiencelaug s] So I guess,in that regard,L. Ron Hubbard is no worse than the others. [audiencelaughs] Anyway -[Inaudible] Question: L. Ron always used free s ftware -it freed him from Zanu. [audience laughs] RMS: Anyway, I think this is the mo t important reasonwhy software should be free: we can't afford to pollute socie 's most important resource.It's true that it's not a physical resourcelike clean air d clean water. It's a psycho-socialresource, but it's just as real for all that, and it akes a tremendousdifference to our lives. The actions we take influence the th ughts of other people. When we go around telling people, "Don't share with ea h other," if they listen to us, we've had an effect on society,and it's not a good 0 e. That's FreedomTwo, the freedomto help your neighbor. Oh, and by the way, if you don't hav that freedom, it doesn'tjust causethis harm to society's psycho-socialresource, it also causeswaste-practical, material harm. If the program has an owner, and the wner arrangesa stateof affairs where each userhas to pay in order to be able to se it, some people are going to say, "Never mind, I'll do without it." And that's aste, deliberately inflicted waste. And the interesting thing about software, of curse, is that fewer users doesn't mean you haveto make less stuff. If fewer peopl buy cars, you can make fewer cars. There's a saving there. There are resourcest be allocated, or not allocated, into making cars. So that you can say that having price on a car is a good thing. It prevents people from diverting lots of wasted sourcesinto making cars that aren't really needed.But if eachadditional car usedno resources,it wouldn't be doing any good savingthe making of thesecars. Well, or physical objects,of course,like cars, it is always going to take resourcesto mak an additional one of them, eachadditional exemplar. But for software that's not true. nybody can make another copy. And it's almost trivial to do it. It takes no re ources, except a tiny bit of electricity. So there's nothing we can save,no resou ce we're going to allocate better by putting this financial disincentive on the use 0 the software. You often find people taking the consequencesof economic reaso 'ng, based on premises that don't apply to software,and trying to transplantthem from other areasof life where the premises may apply, and the conclusions may valid. They just take the conclusions and assumethat they're valid for software ~oo,when the argumentis basedon nothing, 166 Free Software, Free S~ciety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
in the caseof software. The premi~esdon't work in that case. It is very important to examine how you reach the conclusion, and what premises it dependson, to see where it might be valid. So, ~at is Freedom1\vo, the freedom to help your neighbor. Freedom Three is the freedom ~o help build your community by publishing an improved versionof the software. Peopleused to sayto me, "If the software'sfree, then nobodywill get paid to work o~ it, so why should anybody work on it?" Well, of course, they were confusing the!two meaningsof free, so their reasoning was based on a misunderstanding. Buti in any case, that was their theory. Today, we can compare that theory with empmcal fact, and we find that hundredsof people are being paid to write free softwaJte,and over 100,000are doing it as volunteers. We get lots of people working on nee software, for various different motives. When I first releasedGNU Ema~s-the first piece of the GNU systemthat peo- ple actually wanted to use-and when it startedhaving users, after a while, I got a messagesaying, "I think I saw a 1i>ugin the source code, and here's a fix." And I got anothermessage, "Here's code to add a new feature." And anotherbug fix. And anothernew feature. And andther,and another,and another,until they were pouring in on me so fast that just making use of all this help I was getting was a big job. Microsoft doesn't have this pr~blem. [audiencelaughs] Eventually, people noted this p~enomenon. In the 1980's a lot of us thought that maybe free software wouldn'~ be as good as the non-free software, because we wouldn't have as much moneYlto pay people. And of coursepeople like me, who value freedom and community, said, "Well, we'll use the free software any- way." It's worth making a little sacrifice in some mere technical convenienceto have freedom. But what people beganto note, around 1990, was that our software was actually better. It was more powerful, and more reliable, than the proprietary al .I ternatlves. In the early '90's, somebody f
6 In many areasof the United States9111 is the phone numberfor emergencyhelp. .. Chapter20: FreeSoftware: Free~om ~d Cooperation 167 have thesefreedoms. If you've en li tening to me, you've noticed that, speaking for the free software movement, I talk about issuesof ethics, and what kind of a society we want to live in, wh mak s for a good society, as well as practical, material benefits. They're both i port t. That's the free softwaremovement, That other group of people- hich s called the open source movement-they only cite the practical benefits. ey eny that this is an issue of principle. They deny that people are entitled to e fr~e om to sharewith their neighbor and to see what the program's doing and c ange it if they don't like it. They say, however, that it's a useful thing to let pe Ie d that. So they go to companiesand say to them, "You might make more ney i you let people do this," So, what you can see is that to some extent, they ead p ople in a similar direction, but for totally different-for fundamentally diffi rent p 'losophical reasons, On the deepestissue of all, on the e ical question,the two movementsdisagree. In the free software movement e say, "You're entitled to thesefreedoms. People shouldn't stop you from doing ese ings." In the open sourcemovement, they say, "Yes, they can stop you if ey w t, but we'll try to convince them to deign to let you to do these things. " ell, y have contributed-they have convinced a certain number of businessesto eleas substantialpieces of software as free soft- ware in our community. The op n sou ce movementhas contributed substantially to our community, and we wor toge er [with them] on practical projects. But philosophically, there's a tremen ous d'sagreement. Unfortunately, the opensourc move ent is the one that getsthe supportof busi- nessthe most, and so most articl s abo t our work describeit as opensource, and a lot of peoplejust innocently thi that e're all part of the opensource movement, So that's why I'm mentioning th s dist'nction, I want you to be aware that the free software movement, which bro ght 0 r community into existenceand developed the free operating system, is stil here and that we still stand for this ethical phi- losophy, I want you to know a ut s, so that you won't mislead someoneelse unknowingly. But also, so that you can thi abou where you stand. Which movement you suppo is up to you. You might agree with the free soft- ware movementsand my views. You 'ght agreewith the open sourcemovement. You might disagreewith them b tho )I u decidewhere you stand on thesepolitical issues, But if you agreewith the free oftw e movement-if you seethat there's an issue here that the people whose lives e co trolled and directed by this decisiondeserve a say in it-then I hope you'll sa that ou agree with the free software movement, and one way you can do that is y usi g the term "free software" and just helping people know we exist. So, FreedomThree is very i port t both practically and psycho-socially. If you don't have this freedom, it ausespractical material harm, becausethis com- munity development doesn't ha pen, nd we don't make powerful, reliable soft- ware. But it also causespsych soci harm, which affects the spirit of scientific cooperation-the idea that we're wor 'ng together to advancehuman knowledge, You see, progress in science c cially dependson people being able to work to- gether,Nowadays, though, you ften nd eachlittle group of scientistsacting as if 168 Free Softwajre,Free S~ciety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman it is a war with eachothe' gang of cientists and engineers.But if they don'1 share with eachother, they're I held ba k. So, those are the three freedoms that distinguishfree software from typical soft- ware. FreedomOne is e freedo to help yourself, by making changesto suit your own needs.Freedo Two is e freedomto help your neighbor by distributing copies. And Freedom ee is the eedomto help build your community by mak- ing changesand publish'ng them r other people to use. If you have all of these freedoms,the program i free soft are for you. Now, why do I define it that way in terms of a particular ser? Is it free software for you? [Pointing at member of audience.] Is it free soft are for y u? [Pointing at anothermember of audience.] Is it free software for yo ? [Pointi g at anothermember of audience.]Yes? Question: Can you expl .n a bit a out the difference between FreedomTwo and Three? [inaudible] RMS: Well, they cert .nly relat , becauseif you don't have freedom to redis- tribute at all, you certain y don't h ve freedomto distribute a modified version, but they're different activitie . Freedom1\'10 is: you make an xact copy, and hand it to your friends, so now your friend can use it. r maybe you make exact copies and you sell them to a bunchof people, and the they can use it. FreedomThree is wh re you m e improvements-or at least you think they're improvements,and som other pe pIe may agree with you. So that's the differ- ence. Oh, and by the wa , one cru ial point. FreedomsOne and Three depend on your having accessto th source ode. Becausechanging a binary-only program is extremelyhard [audie ce laughs --even trivial changeslike using four digits for the date7[audience laug s]-if y u don't have source. So, for compelling, prac- tical reasons,access to e source code is a precondition, a requirement, for free software. So, why do I define i in terms of whether it's free software "for you"? The reasonis that sometime the sameprogram can be free software for some people, and non-free for others. Now, tha might seemlike a paradoxical situation, so let me give you an exampleto show ou how it happens.A very big example-maybe the biggest ever-of this roblem w s the X Window System,which was developed at MIT and releasedund r a licen e that made it free software. If you got the MIT version with the MIT Ii ense, yo had FreedomsOne, 1\'10, and Three. It was free software for you. ut amon those who got copies were various computer manufacturersthat distri uted Uni systems,and they madethe necessarychanges in X to run on their syst ms. You ow, probably just a few thousandlines out of the hundredsof thousan s of line of X. And then they compiled it, and they put the binaries into their U 'x systemand distributed it underthe samenon-disclosure agreementas the rest 0 the Unix system. And then millions of people got these
7 This refers to the "Y2K" F Oblem in f hiCh many older programs stored the year in two digits; therefore it was unclear if e date "00' was 2000 or 1900, or any other year ending in 00. Millions of dollars were spent rep. .g this p oblem in thousands of computer systems before the year 2000. Chapter20: FreeSoftware: Freedom *d Cooperation 169 copies. They had the X Window Syst m, but they had non~ of thesefreedoms. It was not free software for them. So, the paradox was that whether was free software dependedon where you made the measurement. If you made the measurementcoming out of the devel- opers' group, you'd say, "I observeal thesefreedoms. It's free software." If you made the measurementsamong the us rs you'd say, "Hmm, most users don't have these freedoms. It's not free software." Well, the people who developed X didn't consider this a problem, becausethe. goal was just popularity-ego, essentially. They wanted a big professional succe s. They wanted to feel, "Ah, lots of peo- ple are using our software." And that was true. Lots of people were using their software but didn't have freedom. Well, in the GNU Project, if that s e thing had happenedto GNU software, it would have beena failure, becauseour goal wasn't just to be popular; our goal was to give people liberty, and to encourag cooperation,to permit peopleto cooperate. Remember,never force anyoneto coo erate with any other person, but make sure that everybody's allowed to cooperat everyonehas the freedom to do so, if he or she wishes. If millions of people w re running non-free versionsof GNU, that wouldn't be successat all. The whole .ng would have beenperverted into nothing like the goal. So, I looked for a way to stop that f m happening.The method I came up with is called "copyleft." It's called copyle t becauseit's sort of like taking copyright and flipping it over. [audiencelaughs] gaIly, copyleft works basedon copyright. We use the existing copyright law, bu we use it to achieve a very different goal. Here's what we do. We say, "This pr gram is copyrighted." And, of course, by default, that meansit's prohibited to c py it, or distribute it, or modify it. But then we say, "You're authorizedto distribut copiesof this. You're authorizedto modify it. You're authorizedto distribute modi ed versionsand extendedversions. Change it any way you like. " But thereis a condition. And the con. tion, of course,is the reasonwhy we go to all this trouble, so that we could put the ondition in. The conditionsays: Whenever you distribute anything that containsan piece of this program, that whole program must be distributed under these same terms, no more and no less. So you can changethe program and distribute a m dified version, but when you do, the people who get that from you must get the s e freedom that you got from us. And not just for the parts of it that you copied f m our program, but also for the other parts of that program that they got from yo .The whole of that program has to be free software for them. The freedomsto changeand redistri te this programbecome inalienable rights- a concept from the Declaration of Ind pendence.Rights that we make sure can't be taken away from you. The specific icensethat embodiesthe idea of copyleft is the GNU GeneralPublic License, a co troversiallicensebecause it actually has the strengthto sayno to people who woul be parasiteson our community. There are lots of people who don't a preciatethe ideals of freedom. And they'd be very glad to take the work that we ave done, and use it to get a head start in distributing a non-free program and te pting people to give up their freedom. The result would be-if we let people do t at-that we would be developing these free 170 Free Software,Free S?ciety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
programs,and we'd constantlyhav to competewith improved versions of our own programs. That's no fun. A lot of people also feel, "I'm illing to volunteer my time to contribute to the community, but why should I vol nteer my time to contribute to improving that company's proprietary program?" Some people might not even think that that's evil, but they want to get paid if the 're going to do that. I, personally, would rather not do it at all. But both of thesegroups of peop e-both the oneslike me who say, "I don't want to help that non-free program to g .t a foothold in our community" and the ones that say, "Sure, I'd work for them, ut then they'd better pay me "-both of us have a good reasonto use the GNU Ge eral Public License. Becausethat says to that company, "You can't just take my work, and distribute it without the freedom." Whereas,the non-copyleft licenses like the X Windows license, do permit that. So that is the big division betwe n the two categoriesof free software, license- wise. There are the programs that are copylefted so that the license defends the freedom of the software for every u er. And there are the non-copylefted programs for which non-free versions are all wed. Somebodycan take those programs and strip off the freedom. You may get hat program in a non-free version. And that problem exists today. ere are still non-free versions of X Windows being used on our free operating sy terns. There is evenhardware that is not really supportedexcept by a non-free ver ion of X Windows. And that's a major problem in our community. Nonetheless,I ouldn't say that X Windows is a bad thing. I'd say that the developersdid not do t e bestpossible thing that they could havedone. But they did releasea lot of softw e that we could all use. There's a big difference betwee less than perfect, and evil. There are many gradationsof good and bad. We h ve to resist the temptation to say, if you didn't do the absolutebest possible thing, en you're no good. The people that developed X Windows made a big contribu 'on to our community. But there's something better that they could have done. ey could have copylefted parts of the program and preventedthose freedom-denyi g versionsfrom being distributed by others. Now, the fact that the GNU Gen ral Public License defends your freedom, uses copyright law to defend your fre dom, is, of course, why Microsoft is attack- ing it today. See, Microsoft wo ld really like to be able to take all the code that we wrote and put it into pro rietary programs, have somebody make some improvements. ..or even just inc mpatible changesis all they need. [audience laughs] 1111: With Microsoft's marketing clou , they don't needto make it better to have their version supplant ours. They just h ve to make it different and incompatible. And then put it on everybody'sdesktop. 0 they really don't like the GNU GPL. Because the GNU GPL won't let them do at. It doesn;t allow "embrace and extend." It says, if you want to share our cod in your programs,you can. But you've got to shareand sharealike. The changesthat you make we have to be allowed to share. So it's a two-way cooperation,whi h is real cooperation. Many companies-evenbig com allies like IBM and HP-are willing to use our software on this basis. IBM and contribute substantialimprovements to GNU software. And they develop other free software. But Microsoft doesn't want to Chapter20: FreeSoftware: Freedom ~d Cooperation
do that, so they give it out that busin ssesjust can't deal with the GPL. Well, if businessesdon't include IBM and HP d Sun, then maybethey're right. [audience laughs] More about that later. I should finish the historical story. ou see,we set out in 1984 not just to write s~mefree software but to.do somethi g much more coherent: to developan oper- atIng systemthat was entirely free so ware. So that meantwe had to write piece after piece after piece. Of course, we ere always looking for shortcuts. The job was so big that people said we'd nev~rbe able to finish. I thought that there was at leasta chancethat we'd finish it but, 0 viously, it's worth looking for shortcuts.So we kept looking around. Is there any rogram that somebodyelse has written that we could manageto adapt,to plug int here, and that way we won't have to write it from scratch?For instance,the X W ndow system. It's true it wasn't copylefted, but it was free software, so we could u e it. Now, I had wanted to put a windo system into GNU from day one. I wrote a couple of window systems at MIT fore I started GNU. And so even though Unix had no window system in 1984, I decided that GNU would have one. But we neverended up writing a GNU wi dow system,because X came along. And I said: "Goody! One big job we don't ave to do. We'll use X." I said, let's take X, and put it into the GNU system. A d we'll make the other parts of GNU work with X, when appropriate. And we £ und other pieces of software that had been written by other people, like the text ormatter TEX, and some library code from Berkeley. At that time there was Berk ley Unix, but it was not free software. This library code, initially, was from a diffi rent group at Berkeley, which did research on floating point. And so we fit in thes pieces. In October 1985, we founded the Fr e Software Foundation.So pleasenote, the GNU Project came first. The Free S ftware Foundationcame almost two years after the announcementof the GNU P ~ect. And the Free Software Foundationis a tax-exemptcharity that raisesfunds promote the freedomto shareand change software. And in the 1980's, one of e main things we did with our funds was to hire people to write parts of GNU. And essentialprograms, such as the shell and the C library, were written this w y, as well as parts of other programs. The tar program, which is absolutely esse tial, although not exciting at all [audience laughs], was written this way. I belie e GNU grep was written this way. And so we're approachingour goal. By 1991,there was just one major p ece missing, and that was the kernel. Now, why did I put off the kernel? Probably becauseit doesn't really matter what order you do the things in, at least technic lly it doesn't. You've got to do them all anyway. And partly becauseI'd hop d we'd be able to find a start at a kernel somewhereelse. And we did. We f, und Mach, which had been developed at CarnegieMellon. And it wasn't the hole kernel; it was the bottom half of the kernel. So we had to write the top h f; things like the file system, the network code, and so on. But running on top f Mach they're running essentially as user programs, which ought to make them asier to debug. You can debug with a real source-leveldebugger running at the s e time. I thought that way we'd be able to get these,the higher-level parts of the ernel, done in a short time. It didn't work out that way. These asynchronous,mu ti-threaded processes,sending messages to
l71 172 Free Software, Free SoFiety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
eachother, turned out to be very h d to debug. And the Mach-basedsystem that we were using to bootstrap with ha a terrible debuggingenvironment, and it was unreliable. It took us years and year to get the GNU kernel to work. But, fortunately, our community id not have to wait for the GNU kernel. Be- causein 1991,Linus Torvaldsdevel ped anotherfree kernel, called Linux. He used the old-fashionedmonolithic desig and it turns out that he got his working much faster than we got ours working. S maybe that's one of the mistakes that I made: that design decision. Anyway, at rst we didn't know about Linux, becausehe never contactedus to talk about it, though he did know about the GNU project. But he announcedit to other peop e and other places on the net. And so other people then did the work of combi ing Linux with the rest of the GNU systemto make a complete free operating sys em. Essentially,to make the GNU plus Linux combination. But they didn't realize that's wha they were doing. You see,they said, "We have a kernel-let's look aroundand seew at otherpieces we canfind to put togetherwith the kernel." So, they looked around and 10and behold, everything they neededwas alreadyavailable. What good fortu e, they said. [audiencelaughs] It's all here. We can find everything we need. Let' just take all these different things and put it together,and have a system. They didn't know that most of at they found was piecesof the GNU system. So they didn't realize that they w re fitting Linux into the gap in the GNU sys- tem. They thought they were takin Linux and making a systemout of Linux. So ,\ !'i they called it a Linux system. [An audiencemember says, ] "But it's more good Ii! If' fortune than finding the X Windo System, and Mach?" [Stallman respondsand 11 continues,] Right. The difference s that the people who developedX and Mach I{,' didn't have the goal of making a c mplete free operating system. We're the only ",I! ones who had that. And, it was ou tremendouswork that made the systemexist. We actually did a larger part of the systemthan any other project. No coincidence, becausethose people-they wrote eful parts of the system. But they didn't do it becausethey wanted the systemto e finished. They had other reasons. Now the people who develope X-they thought that designing an across-the- network window systemwould be a good project, and it was. And it turned out to help us make a good free opera ng system. But that's not what they hoped for. They didn't eventhink aboutthat. t was an accident. An accidentalbenefit. Now, I'm not saying that what they did as bad. They did a large free softwareproject. That's a good thing to do. But y didn't have that ultimate vision. The GNU Project is where that vision was. And, so, we were the oneswhos -everylittle piece that didn't get done by some- body else, we did it. Becausewe ew that we wouldn't have a complete system without it. And evenif it was tot lly boring and unromantic, like tar or mv8 [au- dience laughs], we did it. Or ld-y u know there's nothing very exciting in ld, but I wrote one. [audience laughs] nd I did make efforts to have it do a minimal amountof disk I/O so that it woul be fasterand handle bigger programs. I like to do a good job; I like to improve v 'ous things aboutthe program while I'm doing
8 A simple program that moves or renaniesfiles. Chapter20: FreeSoftware: Freedom ~d Cooperation 173 it. But the reasonthat I did it wasn't that I had brilliant ideas for a better ld. The reasonI di.d it is that we neededone at was free. And we couldn't expectanyone else to do It. So we had to do it, or fin someoneto do it. So, although at this point thousan s of people and projects have contributed to this system,there is one project that i the reasonthat this systemexists, and that's the GNU Project. It [the system] is asically the GNU System, with other things addedsince then. , The practice of calling the syste Linux has been a great blow to the GNU Project, becausewe don't normally g t credit for what we've done. I think Linux, the kernel,.is a very useful piece of f ee software, and I have only good things to say about It. Well, actually, I can fin a few bad things to say about it. [audience laughs] But, basically, I have good ings to say about it. However, the practice of calling the GNU system "Linux" 's just a mistake. I'd like to ask you please to make the small effort necessaryto all the systemGNU/Linux, and that way to help us get a shareof the credit. [A personin the audienceyells out, " You needa mascot! Get yourself a stuffed animal!" [Stallman responds,] We h ve one. [Audience member replies,] "You do?," [Stallman replies, provoking m ch laughter,] We have an animal-a gnu. So, yes, when you draw a penguin, draw gnu next to it.(53) But, let's savethe ques- tions for the end. I have more to go ough. So, why am I so concernedabout is? Why do I think it is worth bothering you and perhapslowering your opinion 0 me [audiencelaughs] to raise this issue of credit? When I do this, some people think that it's becauseI want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not asking ou to call it "Stallmanix," right? [audience laughs] [applause] I'm asking you to call it GNU, be ause I want the GNU Project to get credit. And there's a very specific reason £ r that, which is a lot more important than anybodygetting credit, in and of itsel .You see,these days, if you look around in our community most of the people tal .ng about it and writing about it don't ever mention GNU, and they don't ever m ntion thesegoals of freedom-thesepolitical and social ideals-either. Becausethe lace they [i.e., those] come from is GNU. The ideas associatedwith Linux-th philosophy is very different. It is basically the apolitical philosophy of Linus To alds. So, when people think that the whole systemis Linux, they tend to think: 'Oh, it must have been all started by Linus Torvalds. His philosophy must be the one that we should look at carefully." And when they hear about the GNU philo ophy, they say: "Boy, this is so idealistic, this must be awfully impractical. I' a Linux-user, not a GNU-user." [audience laughs] What irony! If they only knew! If they knew that the system they liked-or, in somecases, love and go wild over-is ur idealistic, political philosophy madereal. They still wouldn't have to agree w.th us. But at leastthey'd seea reasonto take it seriously,to think about it carefully to give it a chance. They would see how it relatesto their lives. If they realized, " 'm using the GNU system.Here's the GNU philosophy. This philosophy is why th.s systemthat I like very muchexists," they'd at least consider it with a much more open mind. It doesn't mean that everybody will agree.People think different thin s. That's okay-people should make up their 74 Free Software, Free $ociety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
own minds. But I want this philos phy to get the benefitof the credit for the results it has achieved. If you look around in our co unity, you'll find that almost everywhere, the institutions are calling the syste Linux. Reporters mostly call it Linux. It's not right, but they do. The companie that packagethe systemmostly say it [Linux]. Oh, and most of these reporters, hen they write articles, they usually don't look at it as a political issue, or soci issue. They're usually looking at it purely as a businessquestion or what comp "es are going to succeedmore or less, which is really a fairly minor question for society. And, if you look at the companies that packagethe GNU/Linux system£ r peopleto use,well, most of them call it Linux. And they all add non-free softw e to it. See, the GNU GPL says that f you take code, and some code out of a GPL- coveredprogram, and add some ore code to make a bigger program, that whole program has to be releasedunde the GPL. But you could put other separatepro- grams on the same disk (hard dis or CD), and they canhave other licenses. That's consideredmere aggregation, , essentially, just distributing two programs to somebodyat the sametime is n something we have any say over. So in fact, it is not true-sometimes I wish it ere true-that if a companyuses a GPL-covered program in a product, the whole roduct has to be free software. It's not-it doesn't go to that range-that scope. It's e whole program. If there are two separatepro- grams that communicate with ea h other at arm's length-like by sendingmessages to each other-then they're legall separate,in general. So, these companies, by adding non-free software to the ystem, are giving the users, philosophically and politically, a very bad idea. Th y're telling the users, "It is OK to use non-free software. We're evenputting it 0 this as a bonus." If you look at the magazines bout the use of the GNU/Linux system, most of them have a title like "Linux-so ething-or-other." So they're calling the system Linux most of the time. And ey're filled with ads for non-free software that you could run on top of the GN /Linux system. Now those ads have a common message. They say: "Non-free software is good for you. It's so good that you might evenpay to get it." [audie ce laughs] And they call these things" ue-addedpackages," which makes a statement abouttheir values. They're sayin : Value practical convenience,not freedom. And, I don't agree with those values so I call them "freedom-subtractedpackages." [audiencelaughs] Becauseif yo have installed a free operating system, then you now are living in the free world. You enjoy the benefitsof liberty that we worked for so many years to give you. ose packagesgive you an opportunity to buckle on a chain. - And then if you look at the tr de shows dedicatedto the use of the GNU/Linux system, they all call themselve "Linux" shows. And they're filled with booths exhibiting non-free software,ess ntiall y putting the sealof approval on the non-free software. So, almost everywhe e you look in our community, the institutions are endorsing the non-free software totalling negatingthe idea of freedom that GNU was developedfor. And the only place that peopleare likely to come acrossthe idea of freedom is in connection wi GNU, and in connectionwith free software, the Chapter20: Free Software: Freedom!and Cooperation 175 ternl, free software. So this is why I ask you: Pleasecall the systemGNU/Linux. Pleasemake people awarewhere the ystem came from and why. Of course,just by using that nam , you won't be making an explanationof the history. You can type four extra char cters and write GNU/Linux; you can say two extra syllables. But GNU/Linux is fe er syllables than Windows 2000. [audience laughs] You're not telling them a lot, ut you're preparing them, so that when they hear aboutGNU, and what it's all ab ut, they'll seehow that connectsto them and ,theirlives. And that, indirectly, make a tremendousdifference. So pleasehelp us. You'll note that Microsoft called GPL an "open sourcelicense." They don't want people to be thinking in ternlS f freedom as the issue. You'll find that they invite peopleto think in a narrow way as consumers,and, of course,not eventhink very rationally as consumers,if they e going to chooseMicrosoft products. But they don't want people to think as ci .zens or statesmen.That's inimical to them. At leastit's inimical to their current b sinessmodel. Now, how does free software. ..ell, I can tell you about how free software relatesto our society. A secondaryto ic that might be of interestto someof you is how free software relatesto business. Now, in fact, free software is trem ndouslyuseful for business. After all, most businessesin the advancedcountries use software. Only a tiny fraction of them developsoftware. And free softwareis tremendously dvantageousfor any companythat usessoft- ware, becauseit means that you're in control. Basically, free software meansthe users are in control of what the pro am does. Either individually, if they care enoughto be, or, collectively, when th y care enoughto be. Whoevercares enough can exert some influence. If you do 't care, you don't buy. Then you use what other people prefer. But, if you do car , then you have some say. With proprietary software, you have essentiallyno say. With free software, you can chang what you want to change. And it doesn't matter that there are no programmers n your company; that's fine. If you wanted to move the walls in your building, yo don't haveto be a carpentrycompany. You just haveto be able to go find a carpen r and say, "What will you chargeto do this job?" And if you want to change aro nd the software you use, you don't have to be a programming company. You just have to go to a programming company and say, "What will you chargeto implem nt thesefeatures? And when will you have it done?" And if they don't do the job, you can go find somebodyelse. There's a free market for support. S any businessthat cares about support will find a tremendousadvantage in free so tware. With proprietary software, supportis a monopoly, becauseone companyha the source code-or maybe a small number of companiesthat paid a gigantic am unt of money have the source code, if it's Microsoft's shared source program-b t, it's very few. So there aren't very many possiblesources of supportfor you. A d that meansthat unlessyou're a real giant, they don't care aboutyou. Your comp y is not important enoughfor them to care if they lose your business.Once you're singthe program,they figure you're locked in to getting the support from them, b causeto switch to a different program is a gigantic job. So you end up with thin s like paying for the privilege of reporting a bug. [audiencelaughs] And once yo 've paid, they tell you, "Well, OK, we've 176 Free Software,Free S~ciety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman noted your bug report. And in a fe months, you can buy an upgrade,and you can seeif we've fixed it." [audiencela ghs] Supportproviders for free softw e can't get away with that. They haveto please the customers. Of course, you can get a lot of good support gratis. You post your problem on the Internet. You m y get an answer the next day. But that's not guaranteed,of course. If you want 0 be confident,you better make an arrangement with a company and pay them. d this is, of course, one of the ways that free software businessworks. Another advantageof free soft are for businessesthat use software is security and privacy. And this appliesto ind viduals aswell, but I brought it up in the context of businesses.You see, when a pr gram is proprietary, you can't eventell what it really does. It could have features deliberat ly put in that you wouldn't like if you knew about them. For example, it migh have a back door to let the developer get into your machine. It might snoop on hat you do and send information back. This is not unusual. SomeMicrosoft soft are did this. But it's not only Microsoft. There are other proprietary programstha snoopon the user. And you can't eventell if it does this. And, of course, evenas uming that the developer's totally honest, every programmermakes mistakes. The could be bugs that affect your security that are nobody's fault. But the point is: I it's not free software, you can't find them. And you can't fix them. Nobody has the time to check e sourceof every program he runs. You're not going to do that. But with free so ware there's a large community, and there are people in that community who are hecking things. And you get the benefitof their checking, becauseif there's an ac idental bug, there surely are, from time to time, in any program, they might find i and fix it. And people are much less likely to put in a deliberate Trojan horse, 0 a snoopingfeature, if they think they might get caught. The proprietary software evelopersfigure they won't get caught. They'll get away with it undetected.But a free softwaredeveloper has to figure that people will look at that and see it's ther .In our community, we don't feel we can get away with ramming a feature do n the users' throats that the users wouldn't like. We know that if the usersdon't li it, they'll make a modified version that doesn't have it. And then they'll all start sing that version. In fact, we can all reasonenou h, we can all figure this out enoughsteps ahead, that we probably won't put in that feature. After all, you're writing a free program; you want people to like your ver ion; you don't want to put in a thing that a lot of people are going to hate, and h ve anothermodified version catch on insteadof yours. So you just realize that the useris-king in the world of free software. In the world of proprietary software, th customeris not king. Because you are only a customer. You have no say in the oftware you use. In this respect,free softwareis new mechanismfor democracyto operate.Pro- fessorLessig,9 now at Stanford, n ted thatcode functions as a kind of law. Whoever gets to write the code that just ab ut everybodyuses for all intents and purposesis writing the laws that run people's lives. With free software, these laws get written
9 Lawrence Lessigwrote the introductitn for this book Chapter20: Free Software: Freedorpand Cooperation 177 in a democraticway. Not the classic fonn of democracy-we don't have a big elec- tion and say, "Everybody vote whi h way should this featurebe done." [audience laughs] Insteadwe say,basically, th se of you who want to work on implementing the feature this way, do it. And if ou want to work on implementing the feature that way, do it. And, it getsdone one way or the other, you know? And so, if a lot of people want it this way, it'll get do this way. In this way, everybodycontributes to the social decision by simply taki g steps in the direction that he wants to go. And you're free to take as many st ps, personally,as you want to take. A business is free to commissionas many stepsas they find useful to take. And after you add all thesethings up, that says which irection the software goes. And it's often very useful to be ab to take pieces out of someexisting program- presumablyusually large pieces,of urse-and then write a certain amountof code of your own, and make a program at does exactly what you need, which would have cost you an arm and a leg to de elop if you had to write it all from scratch,if you couldn't cannibalizelarge piece from someexisting free softwarepackage. Another thing that results from th fact that the useris king is that we tend to be very good about compatibility and s andardization. Why? Becauseusers like that. Users are likely to reject a program at has gratuitous incompatibilities in it. Now, sometimesthere's a certain group 0 users who actually have a need for a certain kind of incompatibility, and then the '11have it. That's OK. But when users want to follow a standard,we developers ave to follow it, and we know that. And we do it. By contrast,if you look at pro rietary software developers,they often find it advantageousto deliberately not foll w a standard,and not becausethey think that they're giving the user an advantage hat way, but rather becausethey're imposing on the user,locking the userin. And ou'll evenfind them making changesin their file formats from time to time, just to force people to get the newestversion. Archivists1° are finding a problem ow, that files written on computersten years ago often can't be accessed;they we e written with proprietary software that's es- sentially lost now. If [they] were writt n with free software, then it could be brought up to date and run. And thoserecord would not be lost, would not be inaccessible. They were evencomplaining about is on National Public Radi011recently in cit- ing free software as a solution. In effi ct, by using a non-freeprogram to store your own data, you are putting your headi a noose. So, I've talked about how free so tware affects most business. But how does it affect that particular narrow area at is software business?Well, the answeris, mostly not at all. And the reasonis th t 90% of the softwareindustry, from what I'm told, is developmentof custom soft are, software that's not meant to be re~eased at all. For custom software, this iss e, or the ethical issue of free or propnetary, doesn't arise. You see,the issueis, ar you usersfree to changeand redistribute the software?If there's only one user,an that userowns the rights, there's no problem. That useris free to do all thesething. So, in effect, any customprogram that was
10 Many archivistsstore and sharethousand *f files over the Internet. 11 National Public Radio is a private,non-pr t organizationthat has, at the time of this speech,620 public radio stationsthat broadcastnews d music daily. 178 Free Software,Free Spciety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman developed by one company for us in-houseis free software, as long as they have the senseto insist on getting the so rce code and all the rights. The issue doesn't really arise fo software that goes in a watch or a microwave oven or an automobile ignition sy tern, becausethose are places where you don't download softwareto install. It's n t a real computer,as far as the useris concerned, so it doesn't raise theseissues eno gh for them to be ethically important. So, for the most part, the software indus will go along just as it's beengoing. And the interesting thing is that since such large fraction of the jobs are in that part of the industry, even if there were no po sibilities for free software business,the devel- opers of free software could all g t day jobs writing custom software. [audience laughs] There are so many; the rati is so big. But, as it happens,there is free oftware business.There are free software com- panies, and at the press conferenc that I'm going to have, people from a couple of them will join us. And, of co rse, there are also companies that are not free software businessesbut do develo useful pieces of free software to release,and the free software that they produceis substantial. Now, how do free software bus nesseswork? Well, some of them sell copies. You're free to copy it but they c still sell thousandsof copies a month. And others sell supportand various kin s of services.I, personally, for the secondhalf of the '80's, I sold free software su port services.Basically I said, for $200 an hour, I'll change whateveryou want me 0 changein GNU software that I'd written. Yes, it was a stiff rate, but if it was a rogram that I was the author of, people would figure that I might get the job don in a lot fewer hours. [audiencelaughs] And I madea living thatway. In fact, I m de more than I'd evermade before. I also taught classes.And I kept doing that unti 1990, when I got a big prize12and I didn't have to do it any more. But 1990was whenthe first co oratefree-software-business was formed, which was Cygnus Support. And their b sinesswas to do, essentially,the samekind of thing that I'd beendoing. I certai ly could have worked for them, if I had needed to do that. Since I didn't need to, I felt it was good for the movementif I remained independentof anyone company. at way, I could say good and bad things about the various free software and non free software companies, without a conflict of interest. I felt that I could serve e movementmore. But if I had neededthat to make a living, sure, I would have orked for them. It's an ethical businessto be in. No reason I would have felt ash ed to take a job with them. And that company was profitable in its first year. It w s formed with very little capital, just the money its three founders had. And it ke t growing every year and being profitable every year until they got greedy and I ked for~outside investors, and then they messed things up. But it was severalyear of success,before they got greedy. This illustrates one of the exc.ting things about free software. Free software demonstratesthat you don't need 0 raise capital to developfree software. I mean, it's useful; it can help. If you do aise somecapital, you can hire people and have
12 The "big prize" he is referring to is~e MacArthur Fellowship, also referred to by some as the "genius grant." It is a five-year grant g vento individuals who showexceptional merit andpromise for continued and enhancedcreative ork. Chapter20: Free Software: Freedo~ and Cooperation 179
them write a bunch of software. But ou can get a lot done with a small number of people. In fact, the tremendouseffici ncy of the processof developingfree software is one of the reasonsit's important r the world to switch to free software. And it also belies what Microsoft says, en they say the GNU GPL is bad becauseit makes it harder for them to raise cap tal to developnon-free software and take our free software and put our code into eir programs that they won't share with us. Basically, we don't need to have th raising capital that way. We'll get the job done anyway. We are getting the job one. People used to say we could neve do a complete free operating system. Now we've done that and a tremendous ount more. And I would say that we're about an order of magnitude away from eveloping all the general purpose published software needsof the world. And .s is in a world where more than 90% of the users don't use our free software yet. This is in a world where more than half of all the Web serversin the world are ru ing on GNUILinux with Apache as the Web server.(58) Question: [Inaudible] ...What did y say before, LinUx?
Richard M. Stallman: I said GNVIL. ux. 1 Question: You did? Richard M. Stallman: Yes, if I'm t .ng about the kernel, I call it Linux. You know, that's it's name. The kernel as written by Linus Torvalds, and we should only call it by the name that he chose,out of respectfor the author. In general, in businessmost users are not using GNUILinux. Most home users are not using our systemyet. When t ey are, we should automatically get 10 times as manyvolunteers and 10 times as m y customersfor the free softwarebusinesses that there will be. And so that will e us that order of magnitude. So at this point, I am pretty confident that we can do e job. And this is important, becauseM crosoft asks us to feel desperate. They say, IIThe only way you can have softwar to run, the only way you canhave innovation, is if you give us power. Let us domi ate you. Let us control what you can do with the software you're running, so that e can squeezea lot of money out of you, and use a certain fraction of that to devel p software,and take the rest aspI1ofit. II Well, you shouldn't everfeel that d sperate.You shouldn't everfeel so desperate that you give up your freedom. That' very dangerous. Another thing that Microsoft, well, not just Microsoft, people who don't support free software generally adopt a valu systemin which the only thing that matters is short-termpractical benefits: How much money am I going to make this year? What job can I get done today? Short term thinking and narrow thinking. Their as- sumptionis that it is ridiculous to ima ine that anybodyever might make a sacrifice for the sakeof freedom. Yesterday13,a lot of people were aking speechesabout Americans who made sacrificesfor the freedomof their co patriots. Someof them made greatsacrifices. They evensacrificed their lives for th kinds of freedom that everyonein our coun- try has heard about. (At least in so e of the cases;I guesswe have to ignore the war in Vietnam.)
13 The day before was Memorial Day, a u.s. Iholiday on which war heroesare commemorated. I,
~ Chapter20: Free Software: Freedomand ~ooperation 181
If Microsoft is split up in this way... se ices and software, they will not be able to use their softwareto crush competition ith Microsoft services.And they won't be able to use the servicesto crush comp tition with Microsoft software. And we will be able to make the free software, an maybe you people will use it to talk to Microsoft services,and we won't mind. Because, after all, althoughMicrosoft s the proprietary software company that has subjugatedthe most people-the otll s have subjugatedfewer people, it's not for want of trying; [audiencelaughs] they just haven't succeededin subjugatingas many people. So, the problem is not Mi rosoft and only Microsoft. Microsoft is just the biggest exampleof the problem e're trying to solve, which is proprietary software taking away users' freedomto c operateand form an ethical society. So we shouldn't focus too much on Microso , even though they did give me the op- portunity for this platform. That doesn't ake them all-important. They're not the be-all and end-all. Q: Earlier, you were discussingthe philo phical differences betweenopen source software and free software. How do you £ el aboutthe current trend of GNU/Linux distributions as they head towards suppo .ng only Intel platforms? And the fact that it seemsthat less andless programme s areprogramming correctly, and making software that will compile anywhere? d making software that simply works on Intel systems? RMS: I don't see an ethical issue there. Although, in fact, companies that make computers sometimesport the GNU/Lin { systemto it. HP apparentlydid this recently. And, they didn't botherpaying £ r a port of Windows, becausethat would have cost too much. But getting GNU/Li ux supportedwas, I think, five engineers for a few months. It was easily doable. Now, of course, I encouragepeople t use autoconf, which is a GNU package that makes it easierto make your progr s portable. I encouragethem to do that. Or when somebodyelse fixes the bug th t it didn't compile on that version of the system, and sendsit to you, you should ut it in. But I don't see that as an ethical issue. Q: 1\vo comments. One is: Recently,yo spoke at MIT. I read the transcript. And someoneasked about patents, and you sai that IIpatents are a totally different issue. I have no commentson that. II RMS: Right. I actuallyhave a lot to saya ut patents,but it takesan hour. [audience laughs] Q: I wanted to say this: It seemsto me at there is an issue. I mean, there is a reasonthat companiescall both patents d copyrights things like hard property in trying to get this concept which is, if th y want to use the power of the State to create a courseof monopoly for themsel es. And so, what's common about these things is not that they revolve around th same issues, but that motivation is not really the public serviceissues but the m tivation of companiesto get a monopoly '"~ for their private interests. ~!1 RMS: You're right that that's what they ant. But there's another reasonwhy they want to use the term intellectual propert .It's that they don't want to encourage people to think carefully aboutcopyright ssuesor patentissues. Because copyright
~ 182 Free Software,Free ISociety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
law and patent law are totally di erent, and the effects of software copyrights and software patentsare totally differ nt. Software patentsare a restricti n on programmers,prohibiting them from writing certain kinds of programs, wher as copyright doesn't do that. With copyright, at least if you wrote it yourself, yo 're allowed to distribute it. So, it's tremendously ~ Ii important to separatethese issue. i ! They have a little bit in comm n, at a very low level, and everything else is dif- ferent. So, please,to encouragec ear thinking, discusscopyright or discusspatents. But don't discussintellectual pro erty. I don't havean opinion on intellectual prop- erty. I have opinions on copyrigh s and patentsand software. Q: You mentioned at the beginnin that a functional language,like recipes,are com- puter programs. But there is a b g cross over from food recipes to computerpro- grams, and from English langua e to computerprograms-the defintion of IIfunc- tionallanguage II is very broad. This is causing problems in the DeCSS, DVD, case. RMS: The issuesare partly simil but partly different, for things that are not func- tional in nature. Part of the issu transfersbut not all of it. Unfortunately, that's another hour speech.I don't hav time to go into it. But I would say that all func- tional works ought to be free in e samesense as software. You know, textbooks, manuals,dictionaries, and recipe, and so on. Q: I was just wondering on on 'ne music. There are similarities Iand differences createdall through. RMS: Right. I'd say that the mini um freedomthat we should have for any kind of published information is the free om to non-commerciallyredistribute it, verbatim. For functional works, we need e freedom to commercially publish a modified version, becausethat's tremendo sly useful to society. For non-functional works- things that are to entertain, or to be aesthetic,or to state a certain person's views, you know-perhaps they should 't be modified. And perhaps that means that it's OK to have copyright covering a I commercial distribution of them. Please rememberthat accordi g to the U.S. Constitution, the purpose of copy- right is to benefit the public. It i to modify the behavior of certain private parties, so that they will publish more oks. And the benefit of this is that society gets to discussissues and learn. And you know, we have literature. We have scientific works. The purposeis to encou age that. Copyrights do not exist for the sake of authors, let alone for the sakeof publishers. They exist for the sakeof readersand all those who benefit from the ommunicationof information that happenswhen people write and othersread. d that goal I agreewith. But in the age of the comput r networks, the method is no longer tenable, be- causeit now requiresdraconian aws that invadeeverybody's privacy and terrorize everyone. Years in prison for sh "ng with your neighbor. It wasn't like that in the age of the printing press. Then opyright was an industrial regulation. It restricted publishers. Now it's a restrictio imposed by the publishers on the public. So the power relationshipis turned aro nd 180 degrees,even if it's the samelaw. Q: SOyou can have the samethi g, but like in making music from other music? RMS: Right. That is an interesti g. ... Q: And unique, new works, you know, it's still a lot of cooperation. Chapter20: FreeSoftware: Freedoman~ Cooperation 183
RMS: It is. And I think that probably re uires some kind of fair use concept. Cer- tainly making a few seconds of sampl and using that in making some musical work, obviously that should be fair use. Even the standard idea of fair use includes that, if you think about it. Whether co agree, I'm not sure, but they should. That wouldn't be a real change in the system as it has existed.
Q: What do you think about publishing ublic information in proprietary formats?
RMS: Oh, it shouldn't be. I mean, the g vernment should never require citizens to use a non-free program to access, to CG unicate with the government in any way,
in either direction. Q: I have been, what I will now say, a /Linux user. ..
RMS: Thank you. [audience laughs] Q: ...for the past four years. The one 'ng that has been problematical for me and
is something that is essential, I think, to all of us, is browsing the Web.
RMS: Yes. I I Q: One thing that has been decidedly a eakness in using a GNU/Linux Sr stem has
been browsing the Web, because the pr vailing tool for that, Netscape. .. RMS: ...is not free software. !
Let me respond to this. I want to g~t 0 the point, for the sake of getting in more.
So, yes. There has been a terrible tend ncy for people to use Netscape Navigator
on their GNU/Linux systems. In fact al the commercially packaged systems come
with it. So this is an ironic situation: e worked so hard to make a free operating
system, and now, if you go to the stor , and you can find versions of GNU/Linux
there, most of them are called Linux, they're not free. Oh, well, part of them is.
But then there's Netscape Navigator, d maybe other non-free programs as well.
So it's very hard to actually find a free s stem, unless you know what you're doing.
Or, of course, you cannot install Netsc pe Navigator. Now, in fact, there have been free WI b browsers for many years. There is a free
Web browser that I used to use called ~nx. It's a free Web browser that is non-
graphical; it's text-only. This has a tre endous advantage, in that you don't see the
ads. [audience laughs] [applause] But anyway, there is a free graphical roject called Mozilla, which is now getting
to the point where you can use it. And occasionally use it.
Q: Konqueror 2.01 has been very good RMS: Oh, OK. So that's another free raphical browser. So, we're finally solving
that problem, I guess. Q: Can you talk to me about that phil sophical/ethical division betweed free soft-
ware [Recordingand open switchessource? Dotapes; you endfeel of thq estionthose andare irreconcilable?start of answer is missing]
RMS: ...to a freedom, and ethics. 0 whether you just say, Well, I hope that you
companies will decide it's more profit Ie to let us be allowed to do these things.
But, as I said, in a lot of practical w rk, it doesn't really matter what a person's
politics are. When a person offers to elp the GNU project, we don't say: "You
have to agree with our politics." We s y that in a GNU package, you've got to call
the system GNU/Linux, and you've go to call it free software. What you say when
you're not speaking to the GNU Proje t, that's up to you. 184 Free Software, Free ~ociety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
Q: The companyIBM starteda c paign for governmentagencies, to sell their big new machines,that they used Linu as selling point, and say Linux. RMS: Yes. Of course,it's really th GNU/Linux systems. [audiencelaughs] Q: That's right! Well, tell the top s lesperson.He doesn't know anything for GNU. RMS: Oh yes. The problem is that ey've alreadycarefully decidedwhat they want to say for reasonsof their advanta e. And the issue of what is a more accurate,or fair, or correct way to describeit is not the primary issue that mattersto a company like that. Now, some small comp .es, yes, there'll be a boss. And if the boss is inclined to think about things like that, he might make a decision that way. Not a giant corporationthough. It's a sh e. There's anothermore importan and more substantiveissue about what IBM is doing. They're saying that they.re putting a billion dollars into "Linux." But per- haps I should also put quotes arou d "into," as well, becausesome of that money is paying peopleto developfree s ftware. That really is a contribution to our com- munity. But other parts are payi g people to write proprietary software, or port proprietary software to run on top of GNU/Linux, and that is not a contribution to our community. But ffiM is lump ng that all together into this. Some of it might be advertising, which is partly a c ntribution, even if it's partly wrong. So, it's a complicated situation. Someof w at they're doing is contribution and someis not, and some is somewhat,but not ex ctly. And you can't just lump it altogetherand think, "Wowee! A billion dollars from IBM." [audiencelaughs] That's oversim- plification. Q: Can you talk a little bit more a ut the thinking that went into the GeneralPublic License? RMS: So, the thinking that went i 0 the GNU GPL? Part of it was that I wanted to protect the freedomof the commu ity againstthe phenomenathat I just described with X Windows, which has hap ened with other free programs as well. In fact, when I was thinking about this i sue, X Windows was not yet released. But I had seenthis problem happenin er free programs. For instance,TeX. I wanted to make sure that the users woul all have freedom. Otherwise, I realized that I might write a program, and mayb a lot of people would use the program, but they wouldn't havefreedom. And wha 's the point of that? But the other issue I was thin ng about was, I wanted to give the community a feeling that it was not a doorm t, a feeling that it was not prey to any parasite who would wander along. If yo don't use copyleft, you are essentiallysaying: [speakingmeekly] "Take my code Do what you want. I don't sayno." So anybody can come along and say: [speaki g very firmly] "Ab, I want to make a non-free version of this. I'll just take it." nd, then, of course, they probably make some improvements,those non-free ver ions might appealto users, and replace the free versions. And then, what haveyo accomplished?You've only madea donation to some proprietary software project And when people see that that' happening,when people see, other people take what I do, and they don't evergive back, it canbe demoralizing. And, this is not just speculation. I had seenthat happ n. That was part of what happenedto wipe out the old community that I belonge to in the '70's. Some people startedbecoming uncooperative. And we assumed at they were profiting thereby. They certainly Chapter20: Free Software: Freedomand qooperation 185 acted as if they thought they were profiting And we realized that they can just take our cooperationand not give back. And ere was nothing we could do about it. It was very discouraging. We, those of u who didn't like the trend, even had a discussionbut we couldn't come up with y idea for how we could stopit. The GPL is designed to stop that. It s ys: Yes, you are welcome to join the community and use this code. You can u e it to do all sorts of jobs. But, if you releasea modified version, you've got to r lease that to our community, as part of our community, as part of the free world:- - So, in fact, there are still many ways tha people can get the benefit of our work and not contribute, like you don't have to rite any software. Lots of people use GNU/Linux and don't write any software. There's no requirement that you've got to do anything for us. But if you do a certai kind of thing, you've got to contribute to it. So what that meansis that our co unity is not a doormat. And I think that that helped give people the strength t feel, Yes, we won't just be trampled underfoot by everybody.We'll stand up to .s. Q: Considering free but not copylefted sofiware, since anybodycan pick it up and make it proprietary, is it not possiblealso £ r someoneto pick it up and make some changesand releasethe whole thing under e GPL? RMS: Yes, it is possible. Q: Then that would make all future copies en be GPL'ed. RMS: From that branch. Here's why we do 't generallydo that. Let me explain. We could, if we wantedto, take X Windows, d make a GPL-covered copy and make changesin that. But there's a much larger oup of people working on improving X Window and not GPL-ing it. So, if we di that, we would be forking from them. And that's not very nice treatmentof them. And, they are a part of our community, contributing to our community. Second,it would backfire againstus, bec usethey're doing a lot more work on X than we would be. So our versionwould b inferior to theirs, and people wouldn't use it, which means,why go to the trouble tall? So when a personhas written some impr vementto X Windows, what I say that person should do is cooperatewith the X evelopmentteam. Send it to them and let them use it their way. Becausethey ar developing a very important piece of free software. It's good for us to cooperate ith them. Q: Except, consideringX, in particular, abo t two yearsago, the X Consortiumthat was far into the non-free opensource. ... RMS: Well, actually it wasn't open-sourc .They may have said it was. I can't rememberif they said that or not. But it w sn't open source. It was restricted. You couldn't commercially distribute, I think. you couldn't commercially distribute a modified version, or somethinglike that. ere was a restriction that's considered '::\~j unacceptableby both the FreeSoftware mo ementand the OpenSource movement. And yes, that's what using a non-copyl ft license leaves you open to. In fact, the X Consortium had a very rigid policy. ey say: If your program is copylefted evena little bit, we won't distribute it at all We won't put it in our distribution. So, a lot of peoplewere pressuredin this ay into not copylefiting. And the result was that all of their software was wide ope, later on. When the samepeople who 186 Free Software,Free ~ociety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman
had pressureda developerto be t 0 all-permissive, then the X people later said: " All right, now we can put on res' ctions," which wasn't very ethical of them. But, given the situation, woul we really want to scrape up the resourcesto maintain an alternateGPL-covere versionof X? And it wouldn't make any sense to do that. There are so many 0 r things we need to do. Let's do them instead. We can cooperatewith the X deve opers. Q: Do you have a comment,is the GNU a trademark?And is it practical to include it as part of the GNU GeneralPub 'c License allowing trademarks? Richard M. Stallman: We are, actually, applying for trademark registration on GNU. But it wouldn't really hav anything to do with that. It's a long story to explain why. Q: You could require the tradem k be displayed with GPL-coveredprograms. RMS: No, I don't think so. The I censescover individual programs. And when a given program is part of the GNU Project, nobody lies aboutthat. The name of the systemas a whole is a different is ue. And this is an aside. It's not worth discussing more. Q: If there was a button that you could push and force all companiesto free their software, would you pressit? RMS: Well, I would only use this for published software. I think that people have the right to write a programpriva ly and use it. And that includes companies.This is privacy issue. And it's true, the e can be times when it is wrong to do that, like if it is tremendouslyhelpful to hu anity, and you are withholding it from humanity. That is a wrong but that's a diffe nt kind of wrong. It's a different issue, although it's in the samearea. But yes, I think all published oftware should be free software. And remember, when it's not free software,that's becauseof governmentintervention. The govern- ~ ment is intervening to make it n n-free. The governmentis creating special legal ~!IiII :1 powers to hand out to the owner of the programs,so that they can have the police stop us from using the programs in certain ways. So I would certainly like to end i that. Ed Schonberg: Richard's prese tation has generatedan enormous amount of in- tellectual energy. I would sugge t that someof it should be directed to using, and possibly writing, free software. We should close the proceedi gs shortly. I want to say that Richard has injected into a professionthat is known i the generalpublic for its terminal political nerdi- tude a level of political and mor I discussionthat is, I think, unprecedentedin our profession. And we owe him ve big fer this. [Audience applause]
,i,!'