În mai 2009, am avut plăcerea deosebită să fiu invitat la eLiberatica, întâlnirea anuală dedicată Software-ului Liber în România. Amabilii organizatorii ai acestei conferințe - o întâlnire care se ridică la cote de pasiune intelectuală ce ating efervescența, greu de egalat la noi în țară - sunt Agora Media și dl. Lucian Savluc.
La eLiberatica 2009, publicul a putut urmări și o prezentare video trimisă special de Richard M. Stallman, președintele și fondatorul Free Software Foundation. Pentru cei interesați, iată aici textul acestei prezentări, pe care sper să v-o pot oferi, cu altă ocazie, și în varianta tradusă în românește.
Licența materialului este Creative Commons 3; transcrierea de pe video a fost realizată de mine.
Richard M. Stallman: Video Presentation at eLiberatica 2009 Free Software Conference - Bucharest, Romania
Please see video (4 parts) at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F76DCDADA970F6B0
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbvUG9zvVjw
Who controls your
computer? Forty years ago people used to be very worried that
computers would take over the world. They were very afraid but now we
know that computers do what people tell them to do - and nothing
else. Which people tell your computer what to do? Is your computer
doing what you tell it to do or is it doing what Microsoft tells it
to do? If you're running Windows, it's Microsoft that really tells
your computer what to do. But if you're using MacOS, then it's Apple
that really tells your computer what to do. Or maybe some of the time
it's Adobe that tells your computer what to do. Or a bunch of other
companies that make proprietary software. Because if you are using
proprietary software on your computer, that means the program's
developer controls what it does and you, the user, don't. And that's
why it's vital to use Free Software, ”free” as in ”freedom”.
Free Software means software that respects the users' freedom and the
social solidarity of the users' community. So, it's ”free” as in
”freedom” , not as in price: think of ”free speech”, not
”free beer” if you want to understand the word ”free” when it
appears in the combination ”Free Sofware”. Free Software
respects the user's freedom, but proprietary software keeps the users
divided and helpless. Divided, because they're forbidden to share it;
and helpless, because they don't have the source code, so they can't
change it, they can't even independently check what it's really doing
to them – and, often, it does something rather nasty. However, what
I've said is rather general: software should respect your freedom:
what exactly this that mean? I need to say something more specific.
A program is Free Software if you, the user, have the four essential
freedoms. Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish.
Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code and then change it
to make the program do what you wish. Freedom 2 is the freedom to
help your neighbour – that's the freedom to make and distribute
exact copies of the program to others, when you wish. And Freedom 3
is the freedom to contribute to your community: that's the freedom to
distribute copies of your modified versions, when you wish. If the
program gives you all four of the essential freedoms, than it's Free
Software, which means that the social system of its distribution and
use is ethical, because it respects the users' freedom and the users
community. But, if one of these freedoms is missing or insufficient,
then the program is proprietary software, users subjugating software,
because the social system of its distribution and use puts the
developer in a position of power over the users, which means it
doesn't respect their freedom: the users of that program are not
fully in control of what it does. Thus, to develop a free program and
make it available to others is a contribution to society – how much
of a contribution, that depends of all the details, but, at least is
being offered to society in an ethical way. But, when a program is
proprietary software, its use is a social problem. If the program has
attractive features, those are the bait for the trap: they attract
users to give up their freedom and become users of this program –
and, really, that shouldn't happen, it shouldn't be done at all. The
aim of the Free Software Movement is to put an end to this social
problem: all software should be free, so that all users can be free.
But why are these four freedoms essential? Why define Free Software
this way? Each of these freedoms is essential for a reason. Freedom
2, the freedom to help your neighbour, is essential on fundamental
moral grounds, so that you can lead an upright ethical life, as a
good member of your community. If you use a
program that does not give you Freedom no. 2, the freedom to
redistribute exact copies when you wish, then you are in danger of
falling into a moral dilemma. At any moment, whenever your friend
says: ”This program is nice, could I have a copy?”, at that
moment you would face a choice between two evils. One evil is to give
your friend a copy and violate the license of the program; the other
evil is to deny your friend a copy and comply with the license of the
program. If you're in the dilemma, you ought to choose the lesser
evil which is to give your friend a copy and violate the license of
the program. What makes this evil the lesser evil? Well, if you can't
avoid doing wrong to somebody or other, it's better to do wrong to
the one who deserves it: the developer of the program. You see, we
can assume that your friend is a good friend and a good member of
your community and normally deserves your cooperation. By contrast,
the developer of this proprietary program has deliberately attacked
the social solidarity of your community. So, if you're stucked doing
wrong either to your friend or the developer, do it to the developer.
But, being the lesser evil, this not mean it's good. It's never a
good thing to make an agreement and break it – not even in cases
like this, where the agreement is inherently evil and keeping it is
worse than breaking it; still, breaking it is not good. And, if you
give your friend a copy, what would she have? She would have an
unauthorised copy of a proprietary program - and that's something
rather nasty, almost as nasty as an authorised copy would be.
So, once you have fully
understood this dilemma, what should you really do? What you should
do is make sure you are never in this dilemma. I know of two ways to
do that. One is: don't have any friends. That's the method implicitly
suggested by the proprietary software developers. The other method
is: reject proprietary software! If you don't have the program, you
don't have to worry what you will do if your friend asks for a copy
from you. That is my method. If someone offers me an attractive,
convenient program on the condition I promise not to share with other
people, I say ”No”, I say ”My conscience will not allow me to
accept such a condition”. And that's you should say, too. And you
should also reject the propaganda terms that the proprietary software
developers use to demonize the act of cooperation - terms like
”pirate”. When they compare people who share software with
pirates, what are they really saying? They're saying that helping
your neighbour is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship. Morally
speaking, nothing could be more wrong than that, because attacking
ships is very bad, but helping your friends and your neighbours is
good. So, don't call it ”piracy”. When they call it ”piracy”,
say ”No”. When people ask me what do I think of ”piracy”, I
say ”Attacking ships is very bad”. And when they ask me what I
think of ”software piracy” or ”music piracy” I say ”As far
as I know, pirates don't attack using computers or by playing musical
instruments badly, they use arms”. Don't fall into the trap of
repeating the enemy's propaganda.
So, that's the reason for
Freedom 2, the freedom to help your neighbour, the freedom to
redistribute exact copies of the program when you wish. Freedom 0,
the freedom to run the program as you wish is essential for a
different reason, so you can control your computing. It may be
surprising, but there are proprietary programs that restrict even how
people, the authorised users, use the authorised copies. That's
obviously not having control of your computing! So Freedom 0 is
essential, but it's not enough, because that just means you can
either do or not do whatever the code of the program is set up to
permit, and it's the developer who decides that, so the developer
still controls you. Not through the license, but instead through the
code of the program, but it comes to the same thing. So, in order to
control your computing, you also need Freedom 1, which is the freedom
to study the source code and then change it, to make the program do
what you wish – this way, you decide what your computing is gonna
be, instead of letting the developer decide and impose his decisions
on you. Now, if you use a program without Freedom 1, you can't even
tell what it's doing: many of these programs have malicious features,
to do things like spy on the user, restrict the user, even attack the
user. One proprietary program you may of heard of, that does all
three, is called Microsoft Windows: we know of features to spy on the
user, we know of Digital Restrictions Management or DRM features,
designed to restrict users and we know of a backdoor that enables
Microsoft to attack the user; in fact, this backdoor is so gaping
that Microsoft has total control over the user, because Microsoft can
forcibly change the software at any time, without asking the user's
permission. So that user may think he controls his computer, but,
really, Microsoft has total power!
But, please don't think
that Microsoft is uniquely evil and only Microsoft would do this. In
fact, MacOS X is pretty much the same: we know of features to
restrict the user - Digital Restrictions Management – and there is
a backdoor which allows Apple to forcibly change the software in any
way, at any time, without asking the user's permission. So it's just
as bad, there's nothing to choose from between them.
And this appears to be
the natural endpoint of proprietary software: many cellphones are set
up the same way. There is a company that can change the software
whenever it wishes and the user who supposedly owns the cellphone has
nothing to say about it. What it's happening here is: proprietary
software is a system that gives the developer unjust power over the
users. Now, when someone greedy has unjust power over others, what is
he going to do with this power? He's gonna use it to try to get more
power, more and more, until he has total power. And that's what
they've done! Several different companies, in parallel. So, this is
what proprietary software tends to lead to: total power, not just
power that they shouldn't have.
Now, I won't claim that
all the developers of proprietary software put in malicious features:
I suppose some do and some don't. But, when a program doesn't give
you Freedom no. 1, there is no way to tell if it has malicious
features - in general. Once in a while we discover some, but, there
are many programs in which we don't know of any malicious features.
But maybe they have them or maybe they don't: we can't identify among
all the programs without Freedom 1, we can't identify any that
certainly have no malicious features – cause there's no way to
check! But I presume they are some. The problem is: you never know
if the program you're using is one of them! But, even, know, we can
identify those programs, I can make a statement about them all: their
developers are humans, so they make mistakes. And the code of those
programs has bugs, and a user of a program without Freedom 1 is just
as helpless facing an accidental bug as facing an intentional
malicious feature. If you use a program without Freedom 1, you are a
prisoner of the software you use.
We, the developers of
Free Software, are humans too, so we also make mistakes and the code
of our free programs has bugs. But, if you encounter a bug in our
code – or anything you don't like – you are free to change it,
cause we didn't make you a prisoner. We can't be perfect, we can
respect your freedom. Thus, Freedom 1 is essential, but it's not
enough, because that's the freedom to personally study and change the
source code. What if you're one of those millions of users that don't
know how to program? Than you can't study and change the source code
yourself; but even for programmers like me, Freedom 1 is not enough,
because there is so much Free Software in the world that nobody is
capable of studying and mastering all the source code and personally
making all the changes that she may want - because that is more work
than any one human being can do. So the only way we can fully have
control of our computing is to do it working together, cooperating –
and for that we need Freedom 3, the freedom to contribute to your
community, the freedom to distribute copies of your modified
versions, when you wish. This allows people to cooperate. Here's an
example: suppose a few people release a free program and a lot of us
use it because we like it, but we wish it has certain additional
features; or someone can start with this version, add some of those
features and release his modified version; and someone else can start
with that, add some more features and release her modified version;
and then a few people can start with that, add the rest of these
features and release their modified version; and then we'll have
those features and we'll say ”Thank you for cooperating to make
these improvements”.
And thus, when we have
all four freedoms, we, the users, are in control of our own computing
lives. Now, all the users get the benefit of the four freedoms. Every
user can directly exercise Freedoms 0 and 2, the freedom to run the
program as you wish and freedom to redistribute exact copies, because
these don't require programming: anybody who can use the program can
figure out how to do these things and they do them. Freedoms 1 and 3,
the freedom to study and change the source code and then optionally
distribute copies of your modified versions, these entail
programming, so not everybody knows how to do them. And so there are
people who can directly exercise these freedoms. But, when others,
the programmers, exercise these freedoms and when they publish their
modified versions, all the rest of us can then install those modified
versions or not, as we prefer. So we all receive the benefits of
living in a society where people have the four freedoms, even when we
don't exercise them directly. In addition, those who don't know how
to program and can't directly exercise Freedoms 1 and 3, can
indirectly take advantage of them. Suppose that you run a business
which uses computers, as most businesses do, but supppose that you
don't know anything about programming, cause your business is in some
other field. Most businesses are not in the software field: they use
computers, but they use them to do other things. Well, if you
recognise that, supposing a program were changed, your business would
run more efficiently and you'd make more money, it would be worth it
to you to pay a programmer to implement that change, if the price is
right. So, if it's Free Software, you can look around for a
programmer who's willing to undertake the changes you want, or some
fraction of them, for a price you think it's suitable. Then you
exercise your Freedom no. 2 to give that programmer an exact copy of
the version that you are using. Then that programmer exercises his
Freedom 1, studying the source code of that version and changing it
to implement the changes you wanted. And then, he exercises his
Freedom no. 3, to give you a copy of his modified version. An then,
assumming it works, you pay him for this work.
So, in this scenario, you
use the fact that other users have Freedoms 1 and 3, you pay them to
exercise those freedoms for you, and so you get the benefit. An
important part of Free Software business works this way, and this is
why Free Software is a tremenduos benefit to all businesses that use
computers: they deserve the four freedoms, just as individuals in
their non-commercial lives deserve the four freedoms, just as every
user deserves the four freedoms.
And the end, combined
result of the four freedoms is democracy. A free program develops
democratically, under the control of its users. Because all the users
can participate as much as they wish in the social decision about the
future of this program, which is simply the sum total of all the
individual decisions that people make about what to do with the
program. By contrast, a proprietary program develops under the
dictatorship of its developer, the autocracy of its developer, who
uses that program as an instrument to impose his power on users who
he can then bully, command and mistreat – and exploit. So, on one
hand we have individual freedom, social solidarity and democracy; on
the other, we have a dictatorship. Society must choose Free Software
and reject proprietary software. There is no excuse for anyone to
have the unjust power that proprietary software gives to its
developer. You shouldn't let anyone have that kind of power over you,
so you need to reject proprietary software. But society also should
reject it.
The aim of the Free
Sofware movement is the liberation of the cyberspace and all his
inhabitants – we should all have freedom!
This is why, in 1983, I
announced the plan to develop the GNU Operating System. It wasn't
just that I've felt like developing an operating system; of course, I
knew any programming project would be fun if I succeded in doing it,
but that's not what it was about – the reason was for freedom.
Because, at the time, it was impossible to use a computer and have
freedom. Because a computer won't run without an operating system and
all the operating systems for the modern computers of the day were
proprietary, so there was no way to buy an new computer and run it
and have freedom. You always had to install a proprietary operating
system and that meant giving up your freedom. So, how can I change
that? I didn't think I could change it by organizing a protest
movement, because too few people agreed with me. So, instead, I had
the idea that I could change the situation by developing another
operating system and I stood a chance of succeding at that because
operating system development was my field; and then, being the
author, I could legally make it free, giving all users freedom and
then, everybody will be able to use their computers in freedom with
the system I would write. So, I decided to invite other people to
join in the development to make it Free Software... [sorry]... to get
it done sooner and... [I guess I should take that over]... I decided
to invite others to join in the development to get it finished
sooner, I decided to follow the design of Unix so that it would be a
portable system, capable of running on various different kinds of
computers, cause I knew that in five or ten years computers would be
different, I wanted the system to continue to be capable of running
on future computers. And then I decided to make it compatible with
Unix, so that the many users of Unix would find it easy to switch.
And then I gave it the name GNU, as a joke, because GNU it's a
recursive acronym: it stands for ”GNU's Not Unix”. Now, this
follows a custom among certain programmers and community which I
belong to, that when you had to write a new program similar to some
existing program, a humorous way of giving credit to the older
program was you could give your program a name which is a recursive
acronym saying that your program is not the other one. So, I've
followed that tradition, especially since it gave me the opportunity
to use the funniest word in the English language as the name. The
reason this word is so full of humour is because, according to the
dictionary, the G is silent and is pronounced ” 'NU ” (”new”),
so any time you wanted to write the word ”GNU”, you can spell it
”G.N.U” and you've got a joke – maybe not a very good joke, but
there are lots of them. However, when it's the name of our system,
please do not follow the dictionary: if you talk about the ”New”
Operating System, you'll get people confused. You see, we've been
working on it for 25 years now, so it's not new anymore, but it still
is GNU. And it will be always be GNU, even if some people make the
mistake of calling it Linux. But how that strange error get started?
Well, what happened was, in 1990, we had almost all of the system but
one important piece was missing, so the Free Software Foundation
hired somebody to write that piece. That piece is called the kernel:
it's the program that allocates the computer's resources to the other
programs that it run. Well, our kernel project took a long time, it
sort of runs but it doesn't works very well, so we don't use it. And
someone else wrote a kernel, in 1991, and it released it under the
name ”Linux”. Initially, it was not Free Software, but in 1992 he
changed the license and he made it Free Software; so, at that point,
the combination of the almost complete GNU system and Linux, this one
other program, made a complete free operating system. And this is
what made it possible, for the first time, to buy a PC and use it in
freedom by installing a complete free operating system – a system
which is basically the GNU system but which also contains this
program, Linux. So, if you call it ”GNU/Linux” or ”GNU+Linux”
you give credit to the people who started the development, as well as
to the person who developed the last piece that finished it.
Today, tens of millions
of people run the GNU/Linux system, maybe more than a hundred
million. Unfortunately, that's still a small fraction of computer
users and, even worse, most of those people still use some
proprietary programs, so they have not completely attained freedom.
Nearly all of the hundreds of distributions of GNU/Linux contain
proprietary programs or install proprietary programs or stirr users
toward proprietary programs, which means that they're not entirely
ethical. So on
gnu.org or
fsf.org
you can find the list of the few GNU/Linux distributions which are
entirely free, which don't recommend the people give up their
freedom. If you value freedom, you need to use one of them; but,
above all, if you you value freedom, you need to teach other people
to value freedom. Because if they are few of us and we try to fight
to defend our freedom, our chances of winning are smaller, but if we
teach other people to appreciate freedom also and they join in, our
chances are greater. This is why I don't participate in advocating
Open Source. You see, Open Source is basically a way of talking about
Free Software, but hushing up the issue of freedom. The people who
chose to start saying ”Open Source” in 1998 were the people in
the Free Software community that didn't want to raise this question
at all: somehow, it made them feel unconfortable or they thought they
would make other people feel unconfortable or, some of them, wanted
to distribute proprietary software and they didn't want their
potential customers to see any reason to say ”No” to it. So, for
their various reasons, they chose to forget about freedom, they chose
to construct a different discourse but never raise this issue. Well,
if people develop Free Software for those motives, their contribution
is still good; but, in the long term, our future depends above all on
what we value. If we value freedom, we will make an effort to gain
freedom and to hold on to our freedom; if we don't know what freedom
means, if we've never even heard the concept, we're not likely to
make that effort. So, I came to the conclusion that there's simply no
use in promoting Open Source, it was a distraction, because it failed
to mention the most important point. That's why I give speeches like
this, talking about Free Software. I hope you'll join me in spreading
the ideas of Free Software; for more information, look at
gnu.org
and
fsf.org. We also have sister
organizations, FSF Europe, which is at
fsfeurope.org,
FSF Latin America, which is at
fsfla.org
and FSF India, which is at
gnu.org.in.
Thank you very much!
