Given the floor to himself, Stallman gave a full speech on his life,
his reasons for creating the Free Software Foundation, and his plans
for the future.  I do not know, but I expect, that this was not his
first telling of this particular speech.  Nonetheless, it was new to
me.

Stallman spoke of his years working at the M.I.T. AI laboratory and of
the society around him, developing free software, sharing, helping
each other.  He spoke of the collapse of this society in the face of
commercial software for which they had no access to the code to solve
their problems and help each other.  He spoke of the betrayal he saw
when a colleague of his got access to the source code, but only under
a non-disclosure agreement.  When Stallman asked for the code, his
colleague said, "Sorry, I promised not to give it to you."  Stallman
saw this as a betrayal, that someone would say, "I know you need this,
but I promised not to give it to you in order to get it myself."
Ever since, Stallman has seen all non-disclosure agreements as
betrayal, promises to withhold knowledge from people who may need it.

In his talk, to convey the idea of how important the sharing of
knowledge is, he gave an example of a Japanese Marine biology
laboratory during World War II.  When it became apparent that the
Americans would take the island, they put all their research in order,
documented it carefully, and left a note for the soldiers asking them
to preserve the knowledge so that scientists could learn from it.
Scientists.  American scientists, Japanese scientists, it didn't
matter who had the knowledge, as long as the knowledge itself
continued.  He pointed out how the patenting of knowledge, the
copyrighting of software, teaches us to hoard knowledge, to see it as
something that we own as opposed to something that we know and should
therefore share.

Stallman outlined three levels of the freedoms he wishes to support.
The first level is the freedom to help yourself.  If there is a
problem or a difficulty that you need to overcome for your work, your
life, etc., you need the ability to fix the problem, with the best
tools available.  Binaries without source code remove this freedom
from you.  You can only resolve the problem by starting from scratch
or convincing the owners of the software to change it for you.

The second level is the freedom to help others.  This meant giving
them a tool when they needed it, even if that tool was a program, a
book, whatever.  If you don't have the right to distribute, free of
cost, that which you have purchased, then you are not free to
help your neighbor.

The third level is the ability to help your community, to contribute
to it.  This included the ability to accumulate knowledge and freely
share it with your community and with the world.

Removal of any of these freedoms results in psychosocial damage, that
is, we are creating a society where helping yourself, helping others,
helping your community is not acceptable, not approved, not supported.


Some questions came to me as I listened to him talk.  Surprisingly
enough, he answered most of them in his actual talk:

    Where does he see Linux fitting in?  He would phrase it more
distinctly:  where does the Linux kernel fit in?  It was the missing
piece that allowed people to take the free software already created
and create an entire free system for it.  However, GNU is continuing
with the creation of the HURD.  This is not a political decision but
a technical one.  The Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel; the HURD is
not.  Unfortunately, I had to leave before he finished this portion of
his talk, so I cannot give you all the reasons he felt that made HURD
better, but it is the reason that the HURD is being created.

    What do you think of MIT's licensing changes?  Although he did not
directly answer it, he talked about X windows.  The X Consortium
created a paradox.  X Windows was not released under the GPL, but the
source code could be had for free directly from the X Consortium.
Software vendors took the free software and sold binaries to users
without including the source code.  That means that users could not
fix their own problems, could not help their neighbors, etc.  The
lesson: if it is free for me but not for you, then it is not free.
Period.

I enjoyed his presentation tremendously.  I found that I admire
his choice not to just accept the disintegration of a wonderful
community, but to fight for its recreation and expansion for the
rest of the world.  They call him a zealot; I'm glad we have him.
Peaceful zealots, advocating for freedom and working for it with
words and hard work, are a powerful source of good, even if you
choose not to agree with everything they believe.  Thank you, Richard
Stallman.


Liz Coolbaugh
Co-editor, Linux Weekly News
cool@eklektix.com