Nearthwort Obtain interviews Richard M Stallman - a transcript of the interview

Nearthwort Obtain is a website with a difference. While most websites concentrate on providing content in the form of text and graphics, this site's principal content is in the form of podcasts. That is right, it features interviews with famous personalities which you can listen to. And the quality of the content is also quite high. Nearthwort obtain is the brain child of Marc Fiszman who calls his podcast website the "Multidimensional Adventurer's Handbook".

Marc recently interviewed none other than Richard . M . Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement. This is the transcript of an excerpt from this interview - made available with prior permission from Marc.

Interview with Richard . M . Stallman

Nearthwort Obtain interviews Richard M Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Movement and the man who put the GNU into GNU/Linux. There are two main parts to this interview. In part I, Richard introduces Free Software and explains what that is all about. And that leads into some quite heavy criticisms of the popular tech heroes, well they are probably heroes of quite a few you out there certainly not of Richard's. The first is lord of Linux, Linus Torvalds and next stop is Steve Jobs of Apple who, Richard claims, is as evil as Microsoft. In the second part of the interview, we move into some multidimensional discussions which focuses on the impact of freedom on the evolution of consciousness.

Marc : Could you briefly explain what you mean by the definition of Free Software ? There may be a lot of tech savvy people who will be listening to the show and they won't be aware of what that means and your involvement with that.

RMS: First of all, Free refers to Freedom here and not price. So you should think of Free speech and not free beer. When you understand the proper meaning of the word Free, you understand Free software. Free software means software that respects the user's freedom. It is not a matter of what the program does in the technical sense, but it is a matter of the social system that the program's developers use. In fact the social system respects your freedom, then it is free software. It is decided by the program's life and not it's code. Any program could be free software but most of them are not. So specifically, Free software means you the user has four essential freedoms.

Freedom 0 : Run the program as you wish
Freedom 1 : the freedom to study the source code and change it to do what you wish
Freedom 2 : the freedom to distribute the copies of the program to others.
Freedom 3 : the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions as you wish

If the program gives you these four freedoms, it is Free software. If one of them is substantially missing, then it is proprietary software or user subjugated software and that shouldn't exist.

Marc: And what is the difference between Free software and open source software ?

RMS: The term open source was coined many many years later by people who were in the Free Software community and liked Free software but they didn't like the ethical and political approach of the Free software movement. They liked Free software in a practical sense. They appreciated it , they enjoyed the benefits of these freedoms. They didn't want to use the term freedom, they didn't want to look at these as an ethical question. they didn't want to ask whether it is wrong for a program not to respect your freedom.

So they coined another term more or less saying category software. That which enabled them to take a purely practical approach to the question. So they have an official definition of open source which is pretty similar to the definition of Free software in its practical resolve of those differences and they encourage the saying 'practice' but they don't say it is an ethical area instead they present practical benefits only. they present the question as purely practical.

They don't say that ethically speaking, software should be open source but we say that ethically speaking software should be Free.

Marc: Are you saying that Free software is a political movement where as open source is not ?
RMS: Absolutely.

Marc: But I have listened to another interview that you gave to about a year ago. I think you were talking about the development of the famous project Linux developed by Linus Torvalds.

RMS: He is in the open source camp.

Marc: Do you have beef with him or do you get along with him ?

RMS: Well we still have some disagreement because in the past few months he has been actively ridiculing the idea of freedom as something that shouldn't exist.

Marc: And that is your main problem with him...
RMS: Absolutely.

Marc: He claims that he doesn't take a political stand. Right?

RMS: He calls himself apolitical. I call him amoral.

But when you say that you are apolitical, that is itself a kind of political stand that is, ignore all those political questions.

Marc: Why should we care about Free software.

RMS: If you are using computers and using software and if you are using software which is not free, then you don't control what it does. Not you personally and not your whole community. A non-free program is controlled by its developer. The developer decides what it will do and also decides what it won't do. And so it is a tool for the developer to maintain control over society, to gain a power of the kind nobody should have. It is dangerous for the society to allow people, to allow anyone that kind of power. Someone I am not sure who it was, said code is law. What it means is that if you are doing software then the software decides what you are allowed to do. So that has the effect of being laws. These laws are being written by software companies which they can arbitrarily decide by fiat, the laws that are bound to you if you use that non-free software. I don't.

You can listen to the rest of this interesting interview where RMS apart from talking about Free software explains why Apple is as evil as Microsoft.