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+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.86 -->
+<title>Introduction to Free Software, Free Society
+- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/lessig-fsfs-intro.translist" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+
+<h2>Introduction
+to <a href="http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/"><i>Free
+Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard
+M. Stallman</i></a></h2>
+
+<p>
+by Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every generation has its philosopher &mdash; a writer or an artist who
+captures the imagination of a time. Sometimes these philosophers are
+recognized as such; often it takes generations before the connection
+is made real. But recognized or not, a time gets marked by the people
+who speak its ideals, whether in the whisper of a poem, or the blast
+of a political movement.
+</p>
+<p>
+Our generation has a philosopher. He is not an artist, or a
+professional writer. He is a programmer. Richard Stallman began his
+work in the labs of <abbr title="Massachusetts Institute of Technology">MIT</abbr>,
+as a programmer and architect building operating system software. He
+has built his career on a stage of public life, as a programmer and an
+architect founding a movement for freedom in a world increasingly
+defined by &ldquo;code.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+&ldquo;Code&rdquo; is the technology that makes computers run. Whether
+inscribed in software or burned in hardware, it is the collection of
+instructions, first written in words, that directs the functionality
+of machines. These machines &mdash; computers &mdash; increasingly
+define and control our life. They determine how phones connect, and
+what runs on TV. They decide whether video can be streamed across a
+broadband link to a computer. They control what a computer reports
+back to its manufacturer. These machines run us. Code runs these
+machines.
+</p>
+<p>
+What control should we have over this code? What understanding? What
+freedom should there be to match the control it enables? What power?
+</p>
+<p>
+These questions have been the challenge of Stallman's life. Through
+his works and his words, he has pushed us to see the importance of
+keeping code &ldquo;free.&rdquo; Not free in the sense that code
+writers don't get paid, but free in the sense that the control coders
+build be transparent to all, and that anyone have the right to take
+that control, and modify it as he or she sees fit. This is &ldquo;free
+software&rdquo;; &ldquo;free software&rdquo; is one answer to a world
+built in code.
+</p>
+<p>
+&ldquo;Free.&rdquo; Stallman laments the ambiguity in his own
+term. There's nothing to lament. Puzzles force people to think, and
+this term &ldquo;free&rdquo; does this puzzling work quite well. To
+modern American ears, &ldquo;free software&rdquo; sounds utopian,
+impossible. Nothing, not even lunch, is free. How could the most
+important words running the most critical machines running the world
+be &ldquo;free&rdquo;? How could a sane society aspire to such an
+ideal?
+</p>
+<p>
+Yet the odd clink of the word &ldquo;free&rdquo; is a function of us,
+not of the term. &ldquo;Free&rdquo; has different senses, only one of
+which refers to &ldquo;price.&rdquo; A much more fundamental sense of
+&ldquo;free&rdquo; is the &ldquo;free,&rdquo; Stallman says, in the
+term &ldquo;free speech,&rdquo; or perhaps better in the term
+&ldquo;free labor.&rdquo; Not free as in costless, but free as in
+limited in its control by others. Free software is control that is
+transparent, and open to change, just as free laws, or the laws of a
+&ldquo;free society,&rdquo; are free when they make their control
+knowable, and open to change. The aim of Stallman's &ldquo;free
+software movement&rdquo; is to make as much code as it can
+transparent, and subject to change, by rendering it
+&ldquo;free.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+The mechanism of this rendering is an extraordinarily clever device
+called &ldquo;copyleft&rdquo; implemented through a license called
+GPL. Using the power of copyright law, &ldquo;free software&rdquo; not
+only assures that it remains open, and subject to change, but that
+other software that takes and uses &ldquo;free software&rdquo; (and
+that technically counts as a &ldquo;derivative work&rdquo;) must also
+itself be free. If you use and adapt a free software program, and
+then release that adapted version to the public, the released version
+must be as free as the version it was adapted from. It must, or the
+law of copyright will be violated.
+</p>
+<p>
+&ldquo;Free software,&rdquo; like free societies, has its
+enemies. Microsoft has waged a war against the GPL, warning whoever
+will listen that the GPL is a &ldquo;dangerous&rdquo; license. The
+dangers it names, however, are largely illusory. Others object to the
+&ldquo;coercion&rdquo; in GPL's insistence that modified versions are
+also free. But a condition is not coercion. If it is not coercion for
+Microsoft to refuse to permit users to distribute modified versions of
+its product Office without paying it (presumably) millions, then it is
+not coercion when the GPL insists that modified versions of free
+software be free too.
+</p>
+<p>
+And then there are those who call Stallman's message too extreme. But
+extreme it is not. Indeed, in an obvious sense, Stallman's work is a
+simple translation of the freedoms that our tradition crafted in the
+world before code. &ldquo;Free software&rdquo; would assure that the
+world governed by code is as &ldquo;free&rdquo; as our tradition that
+built the world before code.
+</p>
+<p>
+For example: A &ldquo;free society&rdquo; is regulated by law. But
+there are limits that any free society places on this regulation
+through law: No society that kept its laws secret could ever be called
+free. No government that hid its regulations from the regulated could
+ever stand in our tradition. Law controls. But it does so justly only
+when visibly. And law is visible only when its terms are knowable and
+controllable by those it regulates, or by the agents of those it
+regulates (lawyers, legislatures).
+</p>
+<p>
+This condition on law extends beyond the work of a legislature. Think
+about the practice of law in American courts. Lawyers are hired by
+their clients to advance their clients' interests. Sometimes that
+interest is advanced through litigation. In the course of this
+litigation, lawyers write briefs. These briefs in turn affect opinions
+written by judges. These opinions decide who wins a particular case,
+or whether a certain law can stand consistently with a constitution.
+</p>
+<p>
+All the material in this process is free in the sense that Stallman
+means. Legal briefs are open and free for others to use. The
+arguments are transparent (which is different from saying they are
+good) and the reasoning can be taken without the permission of the
+original lawyers. The opinions they produce can be quoted in later
+briefs. They can be copied and integrated into another brief or
+opinion. The &ldquo;source code&rdquo; for American law is by design,
+and by principle, open and free for anyone to take. And take lawyers
+do &mdash; for it is a measure of a great brief that it achieves its
+creativity through the reuse of what happened before. The source is
+free; creativity and an economy is built upon it.
+</p>
+<p>
+This economy of free code (and here I mean free legal code) doesn't
+starve lawyers. Law firms have enough incentive to produce great
+briefs even though the stuff they build can be taken and copied by
+anyone else. The lawyer is a craftsman; his or her product is
+public. Yet the crafting is not charity. Lawyers get paid; the public
+doesn't demand such work without price. Instead this economy
+flourishes, with later work added to the earlier.
+</p>
+<p>
+We could imagine a legal practice that was different &mdash; briefs
+and arguments that were kept secret; rulings that announced a result
+but not the reasoning. Laws that were kept by the police but
+published to no one else. Regulation that operated without explaining
+its rule.
+</p>
+<p>
+We could imagine this society, but we could not imagine calling it
+&ldquo;free.&rdquo; Whether or not the incentives in such a society
+would be better or more efficiently allocated, such a society could
+not be known as free. The ideals of freedom, of life within a free
+society, demand more than efficient application. Instead, openness
+and transparency are the constraints within which a legal system gets
+built, not options to be added if convenient to the leaders. Life
+governed by software code should be no less.
+</p>
+<p>
+Code writing is not litigation. It is better, richer, more
+productive. But the law is an obvious instance of how creativity and
+incentives do not depend upon perfect control over the products
+created. Like jazz, or novels, or architecture, the law gets built
+upon the work that went before. This adding and changing is what
+creativity always is. And a free society is one that assures that its
+most important resources remain free in just this sense.
+</p>
+<p>
+For the first time, this book collects the writing and lectures of
+Richard Stallman in a manner that will make their subtlety and power
+clear. The essays span a wide range, from copyright to the history of
+the free software movement. They include many arguments not well
+known, and among these, an especially insightful account of the
+changed circumstances that render copyright in the digital world
+suspect. They will serve as a resource for those who seek to
+understand the thought of this most powerful man &mdash; powerful in
+his ideas, his passion, and his integrity, even if powerless in every
+other way. They will inspire others who would take these ideas, and
+build upon them.
+</p>
+<p>
+I don't know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a
+hard man to like. He is driven, often impatient. His anger can flare
+at friend as easily as foe. He is uncompromising and persistent;
+patient in both.
+</p>
+<p>
+Yet when our world finally comes to understand the power and danger of
+code &mdash; when it finally sees that code, like laws, or like
+government, must be transparent to be free &mdash; then we will look
+back at this uncompromising and persistent programmer and recognize
+the vision he has fought to make real: the vision of a world where
+freedom and knowledge survives the compiler. And we will come to see
+that no man, through his deeds or words, has done as much to make
+possible the freedom that this next society could have.
+</p>
+<p>
+We have not earned that freedom yet. We may well fail in securing
+it. But whether we succeed or fail, in these essays is a picture of
+what that freedom could be. And in the life that produced these words
+and works, there is inspiration for anyone who would, like Stallman,
+fight to create this freedom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<strong>Lawrence Lessig</strong><br />
+<strong>Professor of Law, Stanford Law School.</strong>
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+<blockquote id="fsfs"><p class="big">Learn more about
+<a href="http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/"><cite>Free
+Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard
+M. Stallman</cite></a>.</p></blockquote>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
+
+<p>Please send general FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to
+<a href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org">&lt;gnu@gnu.org&gt;</a>.
+There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
+the FSF. Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent
+to <a href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org">&lt;webmasters@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
+<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
+ We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
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+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Copyright &copy; 2002, 2013, 2017, 2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
+Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2018/12/15 14:02:38 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
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