[Solar-general] Entrevista a RMS en la School of Informatics, Edinburgh University

[Gerardo Díaz]

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No recuerdo haber visto esto por acá, estoy buscando una traducción al
español para ahorrarme el esfuerzo de traducir.

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Free Software - Free Society! Interview with Richard Stallman
por Anarcho Babe - Indymedia Scotland Monday July 12, 2004 at 08:40 PM
anarchobabe (nospam) fempages.org

~    Transcript of an interview with Richard Stallman that took place at
the School of Informatics, Edinburgh University, on 27th May 2004. Full
audio Interview (ca. 8 MB - 22 min.) available in ogg- vorbis audio
format under

1 - A person doesn't devote his whole life to developing a new form of
freedom without some pre-existing beliefs that drive him to do so. What
drives you to spend so much time on software freedoms? First of all
growing up in the US in the 1960s, I certainly was exposed to ideas of
freedom and then in the 1970s at MIT, I worked as part of a community of
programmers who cooperated and thought about the ethical and social
meaning of this cooperation.
When that community died in the early eighties, and by contrast with
that, the world of proprietary software, which most computer users at
the time were participating in, was morally sickening. And I decided
that I was going to try to create once again a community of cooperation.
I realized that, what I could get out of a life of participation in the
competition to subjugate each other, which is what non free software is,
all I could get out of that was money and I would have a life that I
would hate.


2 - Do you think that the Free Software movement, or parts of it, could
or does benefit from collaboration with other social movements? I don't
see very much direct benefit to free software itself. On the other hand
we are starting to see some political parties take up the cause of free
software, because it fits in with ideas of freedom and cooperation, that
they generally support. So in that sense, we are starting to see a
contribution to the ideas of free software from other movements.


3 - Have you considered that the Free Software movement is vital to
oppositional movements in the world that are against corporate rule,
militarism, capitalism, etc.? Well, we are not against capitalism at
all. We are against subjugating people who use computers, one particular
business practice. There are businesses, both large and small that
distribute free software, and contribute to free software, and they are
welcome to use it, welcome to sell copies and we thank them for
contributing. However, free software is a movement against domination,
not necessarily against corporate domination, but against any
domination. The users of software should not be dominated by the
developers of the software, whether those developers be corporations or
individuals or universities or what. The users shouldn't be kept divided
and helpless. And that's what non-free software does; It keeps the users
divided and helpless. Divided because you are forbidden to share copies
with anyone else and helpless because you don't get the source code. So
you can't even tell what the program does, let alone change it.
So there is definitely a relationship. We are working against domination
by software developers, many of those software developers are
corporations. And some large corporations exsert a form of domination
through non free software.


4 - And also that Free Software developers could provide a technical
infrastructure for these movements that would be impossible to develop
using proprietary software, which are too expensive and locked into an
ideological model that reflects the interests of the dominant
world-system like commoditization, exploitation, control and
surveillance instead of sharing, justice, freedom and democracy? At the
moment I would not go quite so far as to say that non free software
couldn't be usable by opposition movements, because many of them are
using it.
It is not ethical to use non free software. Because... At least it is
not ethical to use authorized copies. But it is not a good thing to use
any copies. You see to use authorized copies, you have to agree not to
share with other people and to agree to that is an unethical act in
itself, which we should reject. And that is the basic reason why I
started the free software movement. I wanted to make it easy to reject
the unethical act of agreeing to the license of a non free program. If
you are using an unauthorized copy then you haven't agreed to that. You
haven't committed that unethical act.
But you are still... you are condemned to living underground. And, you
are still unable to get the source code, so you can't tell for certain
what those programs do. And they might in fact be carrying out
surveillance. And I was told that in Brazil, the use of unauthorized
copies was in fact used as an excuse to imprison the activists of the
landless rural workers movement, which has since switched to free
software to escape from this danger. And they indeed could not afford
the authorized copies of software. So, these things are not lined up
directly on a straight line, but there is an increasing parallel between
them, an increasing relationship.


5 - The business corporation as a social form is very closed - it
answers to no one except its shareholders for example a small group of
people with money, and its internal bureaucratic organization is about
as democratic as a Soviet ministry. Does the increasing involvement of
corporations with Free Software strike you as something to be concerned
about? Not directly. Because as long as a program is free software, that
means the users are not being dominated by its developers whether these
developers be it a large business, a small business, a few individuals
or whatever, as long as the software is free they are not dominating
people. However, most of the users of free software do not view it in
ethical and social terms, there is a very effective and large movement
called the Open Source movement, which is designed specifically to
distract the users attention from these ethical and social issues while
talking about our work. And they have been quite successfull, there are
many people who use our free software, which we developed for the sake
of freedom and cooperation who have never heard the reasons for which we
did so. And, this makes our community weak. It is like a nation that has
freedom but most of its people have never been taught to value freedom.
They are in a vulnerable position, because if you say to them: "Give up
your freedom and I give you this valuable thing", they might say "yes"
because they never learnt why they should say "no". You put that
together with corporations that might want to take away people's
freedom, gradually and encroach on freedom and you have a vulnerability.
And what we see is that many of the corporate developers and
distributors of free software put it in a package together with some non
free user subjugating software and so they say the user subjugating
software is a bonus, that it enhances the system. And if you haven't
learnt to value freedom, you won't see any reason to disbelieve them.
But this is not a new problem and it is not limited to large
corporations. All of the commercial distributors of the GNU/Linux system
going back something like 7 or 8 years, have made a practise of
including non free software in their distributions, and this is
something I have been trying to push against in various ways, without
much success. But, in fact, even the non commercial distributors of the
GNU plus Linux operating system have been including and distributing non
free software, and the sad thing was, that of all the many
distributions, untill recently there was none, that I could recommend.
Now I know of one, that I can recommend, its called "Ututo-e", it comes
from Argentina. I hope that very soon I will be able to recommend another.


6 - Why are the more technically-oriented beliefs of the Open Source
movement not enough for you? The Open Source Movement was founded
specifically to discard the ethical foundation of the free software
movement. The Free Software movement starts from an ethical judgement,
that non free software is anti-social, it is wrong treatment of other
people. And I reached this conclusion before I starteddeveloping the GNU
system. I developed the GNU system specifically to create an alternative
to an un-ethical way of using software.
When someone says to you: "you can have this nice package of software,
but only if you first sign a promise you will not share it with anyone
else", you are being asked to betray the rest of humanity. And I reached
the conclusion in the early eighties, that this was evil, it is wrong
treatment of other people. But there was no other way of using a modern
computer. All the operating systems required exactly such a betrayal
before you could get a copy. And that was in order to get an executable
binary copy. You could not have the source code at all.
The executable binary copy is just a series of numbers, which even a
programmer has trouble making any sense out of it. The source code looks
sort of like mathematics, and if you have learned how to program you
could read that.
But that intelligible form you could not even get after you signed the
betrayal. All you would get is the nonsensical numbers, which only the
computer can understand.
So, I decided to create an alternative, which meant, another operating
system, one that would not have these un-ethical requirements. One, that
you could get in the form of source code, so that, if you decided to
learn to program you could understand it. And you would get it without
betraying other people and you would be free to pass it on to others.
Free either to give away copies or sell copies. So I began developing
the GNU system, which in the early nineties was the bulk of what people
erroneously started to call Linux. And so it all exists because of an
ethical refusal to go along with an antisocial practise. But this is
controversial.

In the ninties as the GNU plus Linux system became popular and got to
have some millions of users, many of them were techies with technical
blinders on, who did not want to look at things in terms of right and
wrong, but only in terms of effective or ineffective. So they began
telling many other people, here is an operating system that is very
reliable, and is powerfull, and it's cool and exciting, and you can get
it cheap. And they did not mention, that this allowed you to avoid an
un-ethical betrayal of the rest of society. That it allowed users to
avoid being kept divided and helpless. So, there were many people who
used free software, but had never even heard of these ideas. And that
included people in business, who were committed to an amoral approach to
their lives. So, when somebody proposed the term "Open Source", they
seized on that, as a way that they could bury these ethical ideas.
Now, they have a right to promote their views. But, I don't share their
views, so I decline ever to do anything under the rubric of quote Open
Source unquote, and I hope that you will, too.


7 - Given that it helps users to understand the freedoms in free
software when the ambiguous use of the word free in english is
clarified, what do you think of use of name FLOSS as in Free/Libre Open
Source Software? There are many people, who, for instance, want to study
our community, or write about our community, and want to avoid taking
sides between the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement.
Often they have heard primarily of the Open Source movement, and they
think that we all support it. So, I point out to them that, in fact, our
community was created by the Free Software movement. but then they often
say that they are not addressing that particular disagreement, and that
they would like to mention both movements without taking a side. So I
recommend the term Free/Libre Open Source Software as a way they can
mention both movements and give equal weight to both. And they
abbreviate FLOSS once they have said what it stands for. So I think
that's a ... If you don't want to take a side between the two movements,
then yes, by all means, use that term. Cause what I hope you will do is
take the side of the free software movement. But not everybody has
to.The term is legitimate.


8 - Are you happy with the development of the community which has grown
out of your vision of a free operating system? In what way did it
develop differently from the vision you had at the beginning? Well, by
and large, I am pretty happy with it. But of course there are some
things that I am not happy with, mainly the weakness that so many people
in the community do not think of it is an issue of freedom, have not
learned to value their freedom or even to recognize it.
That makes our future survival questionable. It makes us weak. And so,
when we face various threats, this weakness hampers our response. Our
community could be destroyed by software idea patents. It could be
destroyed by treacherous computing. It can be destroyed simply by
hardware manufacturers' refusal to tell us enough about how to use the
hardware, so that we can't write free software to run the hardware.
There are many vulnerabilities, that we have over the longterm. And,
well the things we have to do to survive these threats are different, in
all cases, the more aware we are, the more motivated we are, the easier
it will be for us to do whatever it takes. So the most fundamental
longterm thing we have to recognize and then value the freedom that free
software gives so that the users fight for their freedoms the same like
people fight for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of
assembly, because those freedoms are also greatly threatened in the
world today.


9 - So what in your opinion threatens the growth of free software at the
moment? I have to point out that our goal is not precisely growth. Our
goal is to liberate cyber-space.
Now that does mean liberating all the users of computers. We hope
eventually they all switch to free software, but we shouldn't take mere
success as our goal, that's missing the ultimate point.
But if I take this to mean "what is holding back the spread of free
software" . Well partly at this point it is inertia, social inertia.
Lots of people have learnt to use windows. And they haven't yet learned
to use GNU/Linux. It is no longer very hard to learn GNU/Linux, 5 years
ago it was hard, now it is not. But still, it is more than zero. And
people who are ., you know,.. if you never learned any computer system,
than learning GNU/Linux is as easy as anything, but if you already
learned windows it's easier. It's easier to keep doing what you know. So
that's inertia. And there are more people trained in running windows
systems than in running GNU/Linux systems. So, any time you are trying
to convince people to change over, you are working against inertia.
In addition we have a problem that hardware manufacturers don't
cooperate with us the way they cooperate with Microsoft. So we have that
inertia as well.
And then we have the danger in some countries of software idea patents.
I would like everybody reading this to talk to all of - or anybody
listening to this - to talk to all of their candidates for the European
Parliament and ask where do you stand on software idea patents? Will you
vote to reinstate the parliament's amendments that were adopted last
September and that apparently are being removed by the Council of
Ministers? Will you vote to bring back those amendments in the second
reading?
This is a very concrete question. With a yes or no answer. You will
often get other kinds of - you may get evasive answers if you ask "Do
you support or oppose software idea patents?" The people who wrote the
directives claim that it does not authorize software idea patents, they
say that this is because the directive says, that anything to be
patented must have a technical character.
But, somebody in the European Commission involved in this, admitted
that, that terms means exactly what they want it to mean, humpty-dumpty
style, so, in fact, it is no limitation on anything.
So if a candidate says: I support the commissions draft because it won't
allow software idea patents you can point this out.
And press the question: "Will you vote for the parliaments previous
amendments?"

Okay thanks very much.


Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire interview is permitted
in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Audio Download:
http://www.scotland.indymedia.org/usermedia/application/3/rms-interview-edinburgh-270504.ogg

Homepage: http://www.scotland.indymedia.org/newswire/display/266/index.php

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