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 <title>An interview for OUGH!
 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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 <div class="article reduced-width">
 <h2>An interview for OUGH!</h2>
 
 <div class="infobox">
 <p>This is a transcript of an interview with Richard Stallman conducted
 by Theodoros Papatheodorou&#8239;<a href="#papatheodorou"><sup>[*]</sup></a>
 in May, 2012.</p>
 </div>
 <hr class="thin" />
 
 <p>Richard Stallman, the free software activist and software
 developer, maintains a legendary status in the computing community.  He
 addresses all our questions in an interview of epic proportions that he
 gave to OUGH! in two parts.</p>
 
 <h3>PART ONE</h3>
 
 <p>While working as a &ldquo;system hacker&rdquo; in MIT's AI Lab (i.e.
 a member of the team developing the Lab's own operating system) he
 experienced the profound change that overtook the software industry.  Up
 until that point the general practice was for people to freely share,
 modify and reuse operating system software developed for the machines of
 the day.  In the 1970's the software industry stopped distributing the
 source code of these programs, making it impossible for computer users
 to study and modify them.  Furthermore new copyright laws made it
 illegal to do so.</p>
 
 <p>The change struck him as unethical, and it affected him personally as
 the hacker community in which he thrived was broken up as two competing
 companies hired most of the talent in the Lab to develop nonfree
 products.  Stallman went against the trend and decided to devote his
 life to the development of free software, where the user has the right
 to use the program in any way he sees fit, study the source code, modify
 it and even redistribute his modified versions to others.  In 1984 he
 quit the MIT AI Lab and started developing GNU, the first free operating
 system which today, with the addition of a piece of software developed
 by a young Finish student, Linus Torvalds, forms GNU/Linux.</p>
 
 <p>Today, it is run on the majority of servers on the Internet, academic
 institutions, large enterprises, the military, and on desktops of
 millions of people around the world who have rejected software licenses
 that come with Windows and Mac OS.  They choose to run a system that was
 started by Stallman and further developed by thousands of others over
 the Internet.  GNU/Linux is superior to proprietary software from a
 technical point of view, and it's available gratis, but Stallman insists
 that these are welcome, but secondary features.  Freedom is the key.  We
 start the conversation talking about electronic rights.</p>
 
 <dl>
 <dt>You've said &ldquo;in the Internet age we have less rights that in
 the physical world.&rdquo;</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Yes.  For instance in The US, Internet service providers can
 disconnect you without going to court, they don't have to prove that
 there is a reason.  And as a result they can censor you.  If you want to
 print papers and stand on the street handing them out you can do that,
 you don't have to beg some company to &ldquo;please cooperate&rdquo; so
 that you can do it.  But to do this on the Internet you need the
 cooperation of an ISP and a domain name registrar and maybe a hosting
 service, and if they don't like what you're doing or somebody threatens
 them who has a lot of power and doesn't like what you're doing, then they
 can just terminate your service and censor you.</p>
 
 <p>People should have a legal right to continued service of any of these
 kinds as long as they fulfill their side of the bargain.  I believe it's
 the case in the US that the phone company can't arbitrarily disconnect
 your phone line as long as you continue paying your bill and so on, then
 they have to keep giving you phone service, it's not their choice.  It
 should be the same with Internet connectivity.  It shouldn't be their
 choice, they shouldn't be allowed to set their own conditions for
 continuing to give you service.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>They should provide the service as a public utility?</dt>
 
 <dd><p>Exactly.</p></dd>
 
 <dt>This dependence on a corporation also extends to financial transactions.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>That's the other aspect in which the digital world gives us less
 rights than the physical world.  Suppose in addition to handing out
 papers on the street, you'd like to ask people to give money to the
 cause.  They can give cash, and you can accept the cash, and you don't
 need the cooperation of any company in order to do so.  Once you receive
 the cash, it's valid money, and you can spend it.  But, to do the same
 thing in the digital world you need the services of a payment company,
 and those companies might arbitrarily disconnect you also.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>This is what happened with <em>WikiLeaks</em>.  After it released information
 that embarrassed the US government (among others), <em>MasterCard</em>
 and <em>Visa</em> stop accepting donations for the site.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Exactly.  <em>WikiLeaks</em> showed all these vulnerabilities
 because the US government decided to silence them and did everything
 they could to do so.  It has caused a lot of harm although you can still
 access the <em>WikiLeaks</em> pages if you use the right domain name.
 They did manage to cut off most of the donations to <em>WikiLeaks</em>,
 and now it's having trouble operating.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>The organization has received a lot of bad publicity in the US.
 What's your view?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p><em>WikiLeaks</em> is doing something heroic.  A lot of the press in
 the US is subservient to the government, this is true in a lot of
 countries.  Or you might better say that it's subservient to business,
 but the US government works for business, so business wants to say good
 things about it.  I think we need laws stopping the payment companies
 from disconnecting anybody's service, except when they prove that they
 have cause.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Technology has spawned new forms of control, but it has also
 resulted in new ways of protest, self-organization, and dissent.
 <em>Anonymous</em> stands out as an example of hacktivists.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p><em>Anonymous</em> does various different things.  Most often
 <em>Anonymous</em> has a lot of people go to the door of an
 organization's website, they're a crowd, and so they may get in
 somebody's way.  This is comparable to protesting in front of the
 organization's building in the physical world.  And that we recognize as
 democratic political activity.  So <em>Anonymous</em>' web protests are
 also democratic political activity.  Of course, the forces of oppression
 want to define this as a crime rather than a protest, and they're using
 the change in technology as an opportunity effectively to criminalize
 protests.</p>
 
 <p>Another thing that I think maybe <em>Anonymous</em>' members have
 done, is changing the text in the websites so as to criticize the
 organization whose site it is.  This is the virtual equivalent of
 writing a critical slogan on a poster, which is pretty normal democratic
 political activity, but they call it &ldquo;attacking&rdquo; the site.
 The word &ldquo;attack&rdquo; is meant to give people the idea that this
 is something other than a political protest and put people in prison for
 protesting.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Among hackers the term &ldquo;hacker&rdquo; means something
 completely different than what it means to the general public.  Could
 you explain that difference?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Starting from 40 years ago, when I joined the hacker community at
 MIT, I've been proud to call myself a hacker.  I was hired by MIT to be
 a system hacker, meaning to make the system better.  At the time, we
 used an operating system called ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing
 System, which had been developed by the team of hackers at the
 Artificial Intelligence Lab; and then they hired me to be part of the
 team.  My job was to make the system better.  Hacking had a more general
 meaning, which meant basically being playfully clever and pushing the
 limits of what was possible.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Hacking doesn't even have to involve computers.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Hacking was not limited in improving the operating system.  You could
 hack in any media, it didn't have to involve computers.  Hacking, as a
 general concept, is an attitude towards life.  What's fun for you?  If
 finding playful clever ways that were thought impossible is fun then
 you're a hacker.  One thing that was supposed to be impossible was
 breaking the security on computers.  So some people who were inclined to
 be hackers got into that medium of breaking security.  Then journalists
 found about hackers around 1981, misunderstood them, and they thought
 hacking was breaking security.  That's not generally true: first of all,
 there are many ways of hacking that have nothing to do with security,
 and second, breaking security is not necessarily hacking.  It's only
 hacking if you're being playfully clever about it.</p>
 </dd>
 </dl>
 
 <h4>Software Patents</h4>
 
 <dl>
 
 <dt>Apart from electronic rights you are also a campaigner against
 software patents.  Companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, to name a
 few, are currently engaged in heated patent wars.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Patents are like land mines for software developers.  It doesn't
 surprise me that a product such as an <em>Android</em> phone is accused
 of violating a tremendous number of patents, because it's a complicated
 software system.  Any such complicated software system is going to have
 thousands of ideas in it, and if 10% of these ideas are patented that
 means hundreds of those ideas are patented.  So any large program is
 likely to run afoul of hundreds of patents, and a system that's a
 combination of many programs is likely to run afoul of thousands of
 patents or more.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>As the law stands, these patents have an expiration date of 20 years
 from the moment they were filed.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>This is a very long time in the software field.  Keep in mind that
 any time the technological context changes, then we need to adapt our
 way of doing many things to fit the new context.  Which means they will
 all need new ideas, and if those new ideas are patented it's yet another
 disaster.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>What's special about software that you think it should not have the
 patent system apply to it?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Software is not the usual kind of case for patents.  Let's look at
 the usual case: patents for something that's made in a factory.  Those
 patents only affect the companies that have the factories and make the
 products.  If they can all live with the patent system the rest of us
 have no reason to care. But with software, the problem is that it is
 much more complicated than anything else.  The reason is software is
 inherently easier to design than physical products.</p>
 
 <p>Software is simply mathematics, whereas physical products have to
 cope with the perversity of matter.  And lots of unexpected things will
 happen, we have models to try to predict what will happen with physical
 systems, but they're not guaranteed to be right.</p>
 
 <p>With software you're using mathematical constructs, and they do what
 they're defined to do, and if they don't then you go to the compiler
 developer, and you say, &ldquo;There's a bug in your compiler.  Fix it
 so that this construct does what is supposed to do.&rdquo;</p>
 
 <p>You can't do that to the physical world, but you can do that to the
 compiler developer.  Because of this it's easier to design software, but
 people push every ability to its limit.  So you give people an easier
 kind of design, and they make bigger systems.</p>
 
 <p>So with software, a few people in a few years can design something
 that has a million elements in its design.  That would be a mega-project
 if it had to be made with physical matter.  So you make the system so
 complicated, and it's going to have lots of ideas in it, and that means
 that it's going to infringe lots of patents or at least be accused of
 infringing lots of patents.</p>
 
 <p>In other words, the burden of the patent system on software is much
 higher that it is on anything else.  All software developers are in
 danger, and what you see with the patent wars that have broken out in
 the past year or so is if you develop a big complicated software package
 you're going to be sued.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>How is it different, say, to the patent for a drug?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Patents on medicine are another special case.  Because when you force
 poor countries to have patents on medicines, which is what the World
 Trade Organization does, that makes medicine so expensive that people
 can't afford it and they die.</p>
 
 <p>The people who founded the WTO and its executives should be sent to
 the Hague to be tried for mass murder.  We should organize to demand
 that our governments stop their support for the WTO; there are thousands
 of reasons for that.  That organization's purpose is to give business
 more power to turn democracy into a sham.</p>
 
 <p>All so-called &ldquo;free trade treaties&rdquo; are actually aimed to
 weaken democracy and transfer political power to business.  Therefore in
 the name of democracy we must abolish those treaties.  There are good
 arguments that international trade can make both countries wealthier,
 and if these countries are democratic enough that the wealth will spread
 to everyone in both countries then they really are better off.  However,
 the so-called &ldquo;free trade treaties&rdquo; are designed to make the
 countries less democratic and ensure that the wealth won't spread
 around.</p>
 
 <p>That means that they cancel out whatever benefit they might produce
 <em>even if the GNP of both countries increases</em>.  What good is that
 if the increases all go to the rich, which is what they've done in the
 US <em>at least</em> since 1980.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>These patent wars have seen companies buying up an arsenal of
 software patents just to protect themselves from litigation&hellip;</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>You know they might be, but it could be that <em>Google</em> has
 fewer patents because it hasn't existed so long.  This may be one case
 where they're not all in the same position and not all interdependent,
 and if so, that would be unfortunate, because after all <em>
 Android</em> is the only smartphone operating system still in use that
 is mostly free software, and that at least gives us a starting point to
 try to run phones without proprietary software.</p>
 
 <p>If <em>Android</em> becomes dangerous and is crushed by patents, then
 we might never be able to run smartphones with free software.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Google is about to buy Motorola, which is not doing great
 financially, just in order to get access to its patents.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>This shows how the patent system becomes an obstruction to progress.
 When there are enough patents applying to one product it becomes hard to
 cope with the patent system at all.  I hope that they (Google) succeed
 that way, in protecting themselves, because by doing so they are to some
 extent sheltering the free software community as well.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Do you believe in the complete abolition of software patents?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Right, patents should not apply to software.  Keep in mind that you
 can't always classify patents as either software patents or non-software
 patents.  Sometimes the same patent will apply both to programs and to
 circuits.  What I recommend is to change the law to say &ldquo;by
 definition, if it's a program, it does not infringe any
 patents.&rdquo;</p>
 </dd>
 </dl>
 
 <h4>P2P File Sharing and the Music/Film Industry</h4>
 
 <dl>
 <dt>You've often spoken against the use of the word
 &ldquo;piracy.&rdquo;</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>It's a smear term!  They want to say that sharing is the moral
 equivalent of attacking ships.  I don't agree with that position, so I
 don't call sharing &ldquo;piracy.&rdquo;  I call it
 &ldquo;sharing.&rdquo;</p>
 
 <p>I am not against profit in general.  I'm against mistreating people.
 Any given way of doing business may or may not involve mistreating
 people.</p>
 
 <p>The example of the struggling artist is a ridiculous example because
 the existing system does very little for struggling artists.  It's
 lousy.  And if we just legalize sharing it won't make any difference to
 struggling artists.  It might even help them.</p>
 
 <p>I think artists should release music with licenses that explicitly
 permit sharing, and some of them do.  The point is that this argument
 against sharing is bogus.</p>
 
 <p>These giant multinational companies want more money for themselves,
 and they use the artist as an excuse.  Little bit trickles down to the
 artists, and then there are few stars that get treated very well.  But
 we don't need to make them richer.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>People should have the right to non-commercially share and
 redistribute music?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Music and any published work.  Because sharing is good, sharing
 builds community, so sharing must be legal, now that sharing is feasible
 and easy.</p>
 
 <p>Fifty years ago making copies and redistributing them
 non-commercially was so hard that it didn't matter whether it was legal
 or not.  But now that it's so easy, to stop people from doing it can
 only be achieved using nasty, draconian measures, and even those don't
 always work.</p>
 
 <p>But, I guess, when they get nasty enough they may work, but why
 should we tolerate such nastiness?</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>The music and film industry campaigned very hard on PIPA, SOPA, and
 ACTA.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>They want unjust laws all around the world, and in some countries
 they've succeeded getting them.  I read that Ireland adopted a law
 similar to SOPA, at least described that way, but I don't know any
 details yet.</p>
 
 <p>These laws are an injustice.  They are meant to subject people more
 to the media companies, so of course they're wrong, of course people
 hate them.  The only question is; is there enough democracy left in any
 given country for people to be able to stop them?</p>
 
 <p>European citizens should take action and organize with others so as
 to get your country not to ratify ACTA and convince the European
 Parliament to vote it down.  Save the world from that injustice.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Recently government agencies acted to shut down a few sites, such as
 Mega-Upload.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>I don't know whether Mega-Upload ultimately would deserve to be shut
 down.  Remember Mega-Upload is a business, not an example of sharing.
 Sharing means non-commercial redistribution of exact copies.  So I don't
 have a conclusion about Mega-Upload in particular.</p>
 
 <p>I do think there was something outrageous about the way it was shut
 down, before a court got to decide whether it's legal or not.  But
 meanwhile there's been a law suit against (I guess it's called) Hotfile
 and the plaintiffs are claiming that &ldquo;this has to be bad because
 it's similar to Mega-Upload which we shut down.&rdquo;  Which is a
 swindle because no court has decided whether Mega-Upload was legal.  So
 they're citing this premature shutdown as proof that it's bad.</p>
 
 <p>I don't know, maybe it is bad.  That's not the issue I'm strongly
 concerned with.  I'm more concerned with peer-to-peer sharing because
 that's clearly good.</p>
 </dd>
 </dl>
 
 <h4>On Privacy</h4>
 
 <dl>
 <dt>What about services like Facebook and Gmail?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>There are many issues of freedom in life, and having control of your
 computing is my contribution&mdash;I hope&mdash;to the idea of what
 human rights are.  There are many other human rights people deserve, and
 many of them that apply in other areas of life carry over to the virtual
 world.</p>
 
 <p>So for instance, what are the bad things about Facebook? Well, it
 gives people a false impression of privacy.  It lets you think that you
 can designate something as to be seen only by your friends, not
 realizing that it's actually to be seen by your Facebook friends and not
 your actual friends.  And any of them could publish it, so it could be
 seen by anybody; it could be published in the newspaper.  Facebook can't
 prevent that.</p>
 
 <p>What it could do is warn the users every time they start a session
 &ldquo;Watch out, anything you post here&mdash;even if you say that only
 certain people should see it&mdash;it could get published due to events
 beyond your control.  So think twice about anything you are going to
 post here.  And remember that, the next time you try to apply for a job,
 the company might demand that you show everything in your account.  Your
 school might also demand this.  And if you really want your
 communication to be private, do not send it this way.&rdquo;  That's one
 thing that they should do.</p>
 
 <p>Facebook is a surveillance engine and collects tremendous amounts of
 personal data, and its business model is to abuse that data.  So you
 shouldn't use Facebook at all.</p>
 
 <p>And worse than that, Facebook even does surveillance on people that
 don't have Facebook accounts.  If you see a &ldquo;Like&rdquo; button in
 a page then Facebook knows that your computer visited that page.  And
 it's not the only company that's doing this; I believe that Twitter does
 this and Google+ does this, so it's a practice that's being imitated.
 And it's wrong no matter who does it.</p>
 
 <p>The other thing that Facebook does, is that it uses people's pictures
 in commercial advertisement and gives them no way to refuse.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Eric Schmidt of Google fame said a couple of years ago that if you
 have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be
 doing it.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>That's ridiculous.  What kind of things would you not anyone to
 know?</p>
 
 <p>Maybe you are planning a protest.  It is common nowadays for
 governments to label dissidents as terrorists and use electronic
 surveillance on them to sabotage their protests in order to effectively
 sabotage democracy.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>These social media also claim that they have had a very strong,
 subversive role in the Middle-East uprisings.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Maybe they do, but remember that these are not located in these
 Middle-Eastern countries so they have no strong motive to care to those
 governments.</p>
 
 <p>When, say, the US government wants to crush dissent these companies
 are likely to volunteer to help.  If they don't, they will be compelled
 to anyway.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>You're also known to not use a mobile phone in order to protect your
 privacy.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Of course.  Every mobile phone is a tracking and surveillance device.
 You could stop your phone from transmitting your GPS location if you've
 got a phone that's controlled by free software, although those are very
 few.  Still the system can determine pretty accurately where the phone
 is even without any active cooperation from the phone.</p>
 
 <p>The US government says it should be able to collect all that
 information without even a warrant.  Not even a court order, that is.
 So that shows how much US government respects human rights.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Some people have been using <em>TOR</em> and other software to hide
 their identities online.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p><em>TOR</em> is a very good thing.  It helps protect people from Big
 Brother.  And by Big Brother I mean perhaps the government of Iran or
 Syria or the US or any other country that doesn't recognize human
 rights.</p>
 </dd>
 </dl>
 
 <h3>PART TWO</h3>
 
 <p>The second part of the interview is about free software and its
 functions.</p>
 
 <p>In the second part of the interview we started off by speaking about
 free software and asked for a definition.</p>
 
 <p>Free software means software that respects user's freedom and user's
 community.  With software there are just two possibilities; either the
 user controls the program or the program controls the users.</p>
 
 <p>The first case is free software because, in order for the users to
 have effective control of the programs, we need certain freedoms.  Those
 freedoms are the criteria of free software.</p>
 
 <p>If the users don't control the program, then the program controls the
 users, and the developer controls the program.  That means that program
 is an instrument of unjust power.</p>
 
 <p>So free software is software that respects user's freedom, and the
 idea of the free software movement is: nonfree software is an injustice,
 let's put an end to it.  First let's escape, and then let's help
 everyone else escape.  Let's put an end to that injustice.</p>
 
 <dl>
 <dt>And by free of course, you don't just mean just
 &ldquo;gratis,&rdquo; you mean a lot more than that.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>I mean &ldquo;free&rdquo; as in freedom.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>You mentioned that there are certain freedoms that a piece
 of software should respect in order to be called free.  What are these
 freedoms?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <dl>
 <dt>Freedom zero</dt>
 <dd>The freedom to run the program as you wish.</dd>
 
 <dt>Freedom one</dt>
 <dd>The Freedom to study the source code and change it to make the
 program do your computing the way you wish.</dd>
 
 <dt>Freedom two</dt>
 <dd>The freedom to help others, which means, redistribute exact copies
 when you wish.</dd>
 
 <dt>Freedom three</dt>
 <dd>The freedom to contribute to your community&mdash;the freedom to
 distribute copies of your modified versions when you wish.  (That's
 assuming that you've made modified version, because not everybody does
 that.)</dd>
 </dl>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>And in order to support this you started a foundation, the Free
 Software Foundation.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Well, remember the goal is not just theoretical.  I wanted to make it
 possible to use a computer in freedom.  That's impossible if you're
 required to use nonfree software, and when I started this in 1983 that
 was the only way you could make a computer run.  It had to have an
 operating system, and all the operating systems were proprietary, so you
 had to have nonfree software.  (Proprietary means nonfree; they're
 synonymous.)</p>
 
 <p>So to make freedom a real option it was necessary to develop a free
 software operating system.  I wanted to make it a real possibility to
 use a computer and have freedom, and that meant launching a software
 developing project to develop all the software that you need to have,
 and that's an operating system called GNU.  That's why there was actual
 work to be done.  I wanted to go beyond simply stating a philosophical
 point in the abstract, and proceed to the practical work of making
 freedom a real possibility.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>And why do you feel that it's an inherent right of people to have
 access to the source code of a program?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Why should people be free? There are people that don't believe in
 freedom, and you can't logically argue with them.  There's a fundamental
 difference in values.  Once you recognize that having control over your
 software is the only way to live in freedom and use computers, if you
 want freedom you've got to insist on free software.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>But why is software unlike other products? When a vendor sells a
 chair he expects&hellip; [Stallman interrupts]</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Software isn't like those things.  Software does complicated things,
 and chairs don't.  There's no way to design a chair to do things to you
 and control what you do.  You normally sit on a chair and you control
 how you sit.  The chair might be more or less comfortable, but it's not
 going to move you into a different building or dump you into the street
 or all sorts of other surprising things that you might not expect.  It's
 not likely to have a needle hidden in it which would inject some kind of
 drug into you.</p>
 
 <p>Software, on the other hand, does things far more complicated than
 that, and proprietary software commonly has malicious features
 comparable to that needle.  In Windows, people have found spy features.
 There are also back doors which allow those who know how to control them
 to do things to the user.</p>
 
 <p>In other words, Microsoft can do absolutely anything to the users of
 Windows: it has total control over their computers, it can take anything
 from them, it can sabotage them in any way at all.  If you use nonfree
 programs you are defenseless against its developer, and the developers
 basically say &ldquo;you should simply trust us because of course a big
 corporation like this would never hurt you.&rdquo;</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Apart from software, companies today try to interfere with what
 users can actually store in their devices.  One of their tools for
 controlling the user is by using proprietary e-book formats.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>These are attacks on the traditional freedoms of readers.  The
 example I would use is the Amazon &ldquo;<a
 href="/philosophy/why-call-it-the-swindle.html">Swindle</a>&rdquo;
 (a play on words
 on Amazon's e-book tablet, the &ldquo;Kindle&rdquo;) because that's the
 one I know the most facts about.  I call it the &ldquo;swindle&rdquo;
 because it is set up so that it swindles readers out of the traditional
 freedoms of readers of books.</p>
 
 <p>For instance, there is the freedom to own a book, which Amazon says
 the users can't.  They can only get a license to read the book under
 Amazon's choice of conditions.  Then there's the freedom to acquire the
 book anonymously, which is basically impossible for most well-known
 books with the &ldquo;Swindle.&rdquo;</p>
 
 <p>They're only available from Amazon, and Amazon requires users to
 identify themselves, as it doesn't allow any way to pay anonymously with
 cash, the way you could buy a printed book.  As a result Amazon
 maintains a database showing all the books that each user has ever read.
 That database is a threat to human rights.  Then there's the freedom to
 give the book to someone else, perhaps after reading it, the freedom to
 lend the book to people when you wish, and the freedom to sell the book
 to a used book store.</p>
 
 <p>Amazon eliminates these freedoms, partially by means of digital
 handcuffs (malicious features in the software designed to restrict users
 so they can't do these things) and partially through having said that
 users can't own a book, because Amazon makes them sign a contract saying
 they won't give away, lend or sell the book.  And then there's the
 freedom to keep the book as long as you wish.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>There was an Orwellian twist to the tale&hellip;</dt>
 <dd>
 <p>Yes, because they deleted thousands of copies of &ldquo;1984.&rdquo;
 That was in 2009.  Those copies were authorized copies until the day
 Amazon decided to delete them.  After this, there was a lot of
 criticism, and so Amazon promised it would never do this again unless
 ordered to by the state. I do not find that comforting.</p>
 
 <p>Any one of these makes the &ldquo;Swindle&rdquo;&mdash;an outrageous
 attack on our freedom and something that we must refuse to use.  I don't
 know all the details about the competitors, but all of them share at
 least some of these unacceptable characteristics.  Except for some where
 you can only install books that are in documented, non-secret
 formats.</p>
 
 <p>Some of them maybe you could buy with cash somewhere if the author is
 selling copies.  But the problem is, for digital books in general, there
 is no way to buy them for cash, or anonymously, because of the fact that
 there is no anonymous payment system on the Internet.</p>
 
 <p>Bitcoin can be used for that, but Bitcoin is somewhat speculative
 because its value fluctuates.  I don't think it has arrived at the point
 of being a convenient easy, anonymous, digital payment system.</p>
 
 <p>And it's not inherently anonymous.  You can make a Bitcoin payment
 anonymously but you have to go to some extra trouble.  I don't remember
 the details, but it was complicated enough that I didn't think I would
 do it.  I would just continue not buying things online.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>There is another aspect to using nonfree software: you are being a
 bad neighbor as well.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>When you are asked to promise not to share with other people, what
 does that mean?  You are being asked to betray your community.  Now,
 what's your community?  It's the people you know, the people you
 normally cooperate with.  These software licenses invite you to betray
 the people you normally cooperate with.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>People use the terms free &amp; open source indiscriminately, but
 they are different things.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>The term &ldquo;open source&rdquo; was coined in 1998 by people in
 the free software community.  Remember that I started the free software
 movement in 1983.  By 1998 we had already achieved a considerable
 amount, there were many people writing free software and many people
 using it.</p>
 
 <p>But not all of them agreed with the philosophy of the free software
 movement.  Many of them, although they liked using and developing free
 software, considered our philosophy too radical and shocking.  They
 coined a different term so that they could avoid any reference to our
 philosophy and avoid presenting the issue as a matter of justice versus
 injustice.</p>
 
 <p>So that's the purpose of the term &ldquo;open source.&rdquo;  It's to
 talk about more or less the same category of software but without
 presenting it as an ethical issue.  They don't say that if a program is
 not open source then it's an injustice and you must try to escape from
 it.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>You've said in the past that the &ldquo;the agenda of the free
 software movement has been subverted and even nearly lost.&rdquo;  Are
 you referring to cases such as Android (the mobile phone operating
 system)?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Android is just one example of the general tendency for most people
 in a community not to think of this in terms of freedom and justice.
 &ldquo;Open source&rdquo; is a large part of that too.</p>
 
 <p>And then look at the more than 1000 different distributions of the
 GNU/Linux OS: there around ten of them which are entirely free software,
 whose developers keep them free software as a matter of principle, and
 the other thousand-or-so include nonfree software or steer the user
 towards nonfree software, which in an instant grants legitimacy to the
 nonfree software and directly rejects the philosophy of the free
 software movement.</p>
 
 <p>And these speak a very loud voice.  Most people coming into the
 community formulate their ideas of what it's all about based on those
 distributions and from other people who are happy with those, and
 basically only a minority of the free software community regards nonfree
 software as an injustice that we shouldn't tolerate.  And these views,
 of course, propagate.</p>
 
 <p>Strictly speaking Android is free software but it's not complete: in
 order to actually run a phone you need other software which isn't free.
 Every Android phone needs some nonfree software too.</p>
 
 <p>In addition, many of those are &ldquo;tyrant products&rdquo; which
 don't allow users to replace the system.  So the software in them may
 have been made from free source code, but if the user can't replace the
 software, then those executable programs are not free.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Despite your technical achievements when it comes to coding, one of
 your greatest hacks was the inception of GNU GPL, a seminal license that
 influenced a lot of others.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Well, it's better to say that most other free software licenses were
 written as reaction against the ideas of GNU GPL.</p>
 
 <p>You see, the GNU GPL is a copyleft license.  Every free software
 license, in order to be one, has to give you the four freedoms.  The
 only way to get these freedoms is if the work is released under a
 license that gives them to you.</p>
 
 <p>Copyright law today has been made too restricted, everything is
 copyrighted by default.  Therefore the only way a program can be free is
 if the copyright holders put on a formal declaration that gives the four
 freedoms.  This formal declaration is what we call a free software
 license.</p>
 
 <p>There are many ways to do that.  Copyleft says that there is a
 condition placed on freedoms two and three (remember those were the
 freedoms to distribute exact copies and copies of your modified
 versions).  The condition which is copyleft says that when you're
 distributing them, you have to do it respecting the same freedoms for
 the next person.</p>
 
 <p>So people who get copies from you, whether they're modified or not,
 must get the same four freedoms.  If you put some of this code into
 another program with other code so that you've made changes, the
 conditions say that that entire program must give people the four
 freedoms, so you cannot convert the code into effectively proprietary with
 the excuse that you've made some changes in it.  If you want to use any
 of this code in your program, you must make your whole program free.</p>
 
 <p>I did this because I realized that there was a choice: either people
 would be able to convert my code into nonfree software and use it to
 subjugate others, perhaps by making changes in it, or I would stop them
 from doing that.</p>
 
 <p>I realized then, if I didn't stop them, then my code would be
 converted to nonfree software, users would get my code, but they
 wouldn't get freedom, and that would be self defeating, it would defeat
 the whole purpose of writing the code, which was to make a system that
 they could use in freedom.</p>
 
 <p>So I invented a way to prevent that, and that way is copyleft.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>And how do these ideas of copyleft translate in today's world of
 web services and so called &ldquo;cloud computing&rdquo;?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>These issues apply to a program, which is a work you can have a copy
 of; but a service isn't something you get a copy of, so these issues
 don't apply to it.</p>
 
 <p>On the other hand, when you're doing your own computing you must not
 use any web service to do that, because if you do so you lose control of
 that computing.  If your computing is done on somebody else's server, he
 controls it and you don't.</p>
 
 <p>So the general issue that the user should have control on their
 computing does apply to web services but in a different way.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Despite it's practical advantages there isn't yet mass migration to
 free software in the public sector.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Proprietary software developers have lots of money.  They use that
 money to buy governments.  There are two ways that they can use money to
 influence governments.</p>
 
 <p>One way is by bribing specific officials.  That's typically illegal
 but in many countries they can do it anyway.</p>
 
 <p>The other way is bribing the state itself or some other jurisdiction,
 and that's not illegal, but it is equally corrupt.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Despite being in dire financial straights, there is no national
 policy in Greece regarding the use of free software in the public
 sector.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>I don't want to focus narrowly on the agendas of possibly saving
 money because that's a secondary reason.  The real reason why the Greek
 and any other government should insist on using free software is to have
 control of its own computing, in other words, its information and
 computing sovereignty.  And this is worth spending money for.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Let's talk a bit about the role that free software should have in
 education.  There's been a lot of debate recently.</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>Schools must teach exclusively free software because schools have a
 social mission: to educate good citizens for a strong, capable,
 independent, cooperating and free society.  In the computing field that
 means teaching people to be skilled free software users.</p>
 
 <p>Teaching the proprietary program is implanting dependence.  Why do
 you think many software companies hand gratis copies of their nonfree
 programs to schools? Because they want schools to spread this
 dependence.  That's the opposite of the social mission of schools, they
 shouldn't do it.</p>
 
 <p>It's like giving students addictive drugs.  The companies that make
 these drugs would love the schools to do that, but it's the school's
 responsibility to refuse even if the drugs are gratis.  But there is a
 deeper reason too: for education and citizenship.</p>
 
 <p>Schools are supposed to teach not just facts and skills, but also the
 spirit of good will.  A habit of helping others.  Every class should
 have this rule: &ldquo;Students, if you bring software to class you may
 not keep it for yourself.  You must share copies with the rest of the
 class, including the source code, in case someone here wants to learn
 about that software.  Which means bringing nonfree software to class is
 not permitted.&rdquo;  For the school to set a good example, it must
 follow its own rule: it should bring only free software and share copies
 with everyone in the class.</p>
 
 <p>There is also another reason, for the sake of education, specifically
 education of the best programmers.  For natural born programmers to
 become good programmers, they need to read lots of code and write lots
 of code.  Only free software gives you the chance to read the code of
 large programs that people really use.  Then you have to write lots of
 code.  Which means you've got to write code in large programs.</p>
 
 <p>You have to start small.  That doesn't mean writing small programs,
 because small programs do not even start to present the difficulties of
 large programs.  So the way you start small is by writing small changes
 in existing large programs, and only free software gives you the chance
 to do that.</p>
 
 <p>So, for several reasons, doing an ethical and good education means
 doing education with free software and only free software.  There are
 many who say, &ldquo;Let's give the children Windows and the GNU+Linux
 system so that they can learn both.&rdquo;  This is like saying
 &ldquo;let's give children at lunchtime some whiskey or ouzo as well as
 water, so they can learn both.&rdquo;</p>
 
 <p>The school is supposed to teach good habits, not addiction, not
 dependence.  Microsoft knows that if you deliver computer with Windows
 and GNU+Linux, most of the kids in their families see Windows in use, so
 they are going to mostly use Windows.</p>
 
 <p>We need to change that, that's a bad habit of society, it's
 dependence.  A school should actively put an end to that dependence.
 They should redirect society down to a path where people have
 freedom.</p>
 
 <p>But remember, the problem we want to correct is bigger than
 Microsoft.  Apple is actually nastier than Microsoft, and it seems to be
 having a very disappointing success in the area of mobile devices with
 the iThings.</p>
 
 <p>And remember that the iThings pioneered a tyrannical practice that
 Microsoft only tried afterwards.  That is designing products as jails,
 so that users can't even choose what applications to install freely,
 they can only install programs that have been approved by the
 dictator.</p>
 
 <p>And the horrible thing is that the evil genius Steve Jobs found a way
 to make lots of people clamor to be imprisoned by these products.  He
 made jails and made them so shiny that people want to be locked up.</p>
 
 <p>There's been a tremendous PR industry keen to make him sound good,
 and Apple was working very hard to take advantage of his death.  Of
 course Apple's PR worked while he was alive also, and there seem to be a
 lot of people in magazines and newspapers who want to direct the public
 attention away from these issues of freedom.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>Speaking of education, when you were part of the MIT AI Lab,
 you were part of a community. This was eventually broken up and you
 were the only one to go against the trend and not work for a big
 company developing proprietary software. What gave you the strength to
 fight, alone, like a guerrilla in the mountains?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>I was alone already.  The community I've been part of had already
 split up in a rather hostile fashion.  So I was most definitely alone no
 matter what I was going to do.</p>
 
 <p>But the other thing was that the revulsion of my mind to the idea of
 using and developing proprietary software meant that that was even
 worse.  I had no alternative that would lead to a life I wouldn't be
 ashamed of and disgusted with.</p> </dd>
 
 <dt>What were your major influences in your upbringing and education
 would you credit for influencing your belief system?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>I don't know.  I guess the ideas of free software were
 formulated from the community around me at MIT, because we practiced
 free software, and they were doing that before I joined them.</p>
 
 <p>What was different for me was that whereas the others liked doing
 free software, but they were willing to do nonfree software when that
 was somehow more convenient or satisfied other goals such as to make the
 software successful or whatever.</p>
 
 <p>For me that was the thing that made it good rather than bad, and it
 was useless to throw that away.  But it took years for me to formulate
 those ideas, something like ten years.  In the mid-70's, even late 70's,
 I still hadn't reached the conclusion that nonfree software was simply
 unjust.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>You've described yourself as a pessimist so I won't ask you to look
 into your crystal ball&hellip;</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>I wouldn't see anything, anyway.  The future depends on you.  If I
 could tell you what's going to happen then it would be futile for you to
 try to change it.</p>
 </dd>
 
 <dt>So, what software projects or social movements are you excited to
 see emerging?</dt>
 
 <dd>
 <p>At the moment there isn't an existing software project that's making
 me excited, but I'm trying to convince someone to work on a particular,
 rather specialized piece of free software that is the last thing we need
 in order to make the use of ATI video accelerators possible in the Free
 World.</p>
 
 <p>As for social movements, I'm very excited by the Occupy movement, by
 the opposition to austerity in Greece and Spain, and the movements
 against corporate tax-evasion, and basically I'm excited to see more
 people fighting against the domination of society by the rich few.</p>
 </dd>
 </dl>
 
 <div class="infobox extra" role="complementary">
 <hr />
 <p id="papatheodorou">[*] Theodoros Papatheodorou &lt;<a
 href="mailto:marinero@gmail.com">marinero@gmail.com</a>&gt; holds a PhD
 in Computer Science, and is teaching at the Athens School of Fine Arts.</p>
 </div>
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