The man behind GNU/Linux -- not just Linux, he stresses -- is relentless in his quest to help users worldwide free themselves from the shackles of proprietary software.
He speaks three languages -- English, French and Spanish -- and has also studied Bahasa Indonesian. But the language he is most famous for is one that has helped create a platform that has touched communities and nations worldwide: the GNU/Linux operating system.
Richard M. Stallman, 51, is one of the industry's most controversial figures, known for his strong and very vocal convictions that the existence of proprietary software is perilous to software development.
Stallman was recently in Singapore to speak at an event organised by the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. He caught up with ZDNet UK sister site CNETAsia and explains why the free software movement should not be confused with the push for open-source applications, and how writing software is much like creating a musical symphony.
Q: What's your impression of Asia's take on the free-software movement?
A: Most people everywhere have never come across the idea that there is something wrong with proprietary software. They accept it as normal and it has never occurred to them that it's depriving them of human rights. Human rights that are appropriate to people using software, that is. And that's because they've been encouraged to think it's normal to be kept divided and helpless.
Once I gave a speech and someone in the audience came up and said: "I've been working with GNU/Linux software for years, and this is the first time I've heard anyone tell me that the whole point is freedom."
And of course you'll notice that most people who talk about Linux software treat it as if it were just another technical alternative, nothing deeper than that. So my task is to tell people about the issue of freedom that they usually won't hear.
Maybe we're having a little more success in spreading the word now, at least, I hope so.
You're very particular about referring to it as free software, as opposed to open-source software. Why is that?
Don't say open source. They [the open-source community] have done a good job of putting their name on what we do, which is what I take exception to.
The free software movement has been working for your freedom for 21 years now and after we've had some success, after we had developed the GNU/Linux system and people were starting to use it in the millions, some of them [the open-source community] in fact, it can be many of them didn't care about freedom. They were only interested in getting powerful, reliable, convenient software.
So in 1998 they made up the term 'open source' and used it as a way to talk about free software and not mention freedom, which is part of why so many people who use these software have never heard about freedom and why we have so much work to do.
Talkback
Richard Stallman is not responsible for Linux which was created by Linus Torvalds and contributed to by many people across the world. According to Stallman, Linux should be called GNU/Linux because it consists of the Linux kernel plus GNU software. This is simply not true - if that was all Linux consisted of it would be largely useless. A Linux distribution consists of a lot of open source software which is not exclusive to Linux but which is key to its success and has nothing to do with the GNU project. Software which is not completed in a timely fashion, such as the GNU kernel (called the Hurd) may be of interest to programmers but is of no real value. Linus Torvalds' genious was to invent a method of working which produced such remarkable results.
Software was shared long before Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation. Much of it came out of academic and research institutions and was distributed by user groups. The narrow focus of the GNU project excludes the Internet - without which Linux would just be another student project. The X Window System, which is a key part of desktop Linux, was produced by a consortium of computer manufacturers and academic researhers and ows its success to being an open source project (well before the term was invented).
Today the work of the Mozilla Foundation promises to enable millions of users to reclaim the iternet from the virus and spyware writers. The success of the Firefox project shows just what open source development can do.
I gratefully run Mr. Stallman's software every day, but on the topic of "open source software" he is confused. When a bunch of us met in Palo Alto in 1998 and decided to call it "open source" rather than "free", it was to be inclusive of the BSD license. Under a BSD style license, software is usable by anyone for any purpose, even if they don't share their subsequent improvements with the community. Mr. Stallman's "GPL" is far more restrictive, and the Open Source community is far larger than Mr. Stallman's important corner of it.
At ISC we publish BIND and other software under a BSD style license, and I hope that Mr. Stallman agrees that our work has been helpful in creating and expanding the industry, beneficial to the public, and will be relevant going forward -- in spite of our unwillingness to follow the FSF/GPL ideology.
I started using freely distributable software in 1969, through the facilities of the Digital Equipment Corporation's User's Society (DECUS). It was kept in a library, listed in a catalog, and delivered for a small copying fee on paper tape. Most software in those days was owned by either the person or company who wrote it or who paid to have it written. Most software was very expensive, and as a college student I was grateful for having access to software and its source code that was contributed by DECUS members.
In the 1980s the "production software market" started up, and people began to produce software for the masses. By this time the Unix operating system had a great following in engineering, scientific and academic circles, with the University of California hosting a huge effort to create what became known as the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). But this distribution's license allowed vendors to create different "spin-offs" of code, and did not require them to ship the source code, so their customers could not (for the most part) change the code to meet their needs or even fix bugs they found. They were dependent on the manufacturer's programmers, who were often overloaded with work.
Lots of people continued to write software that they distributed without charge, and with the source code available. But Richard Stallman decided to write an entire operating system called "GNU" (for "GNU is Not Unix"). And he wrote a software license (GPL) that guaranteed the freedoms that he enjoyed:
o Freedom to read the source code
o Freedom to change the source code
o Freedom to distribute the source code
would be available to anyone who used or modified his code.
Richard, as the evangelist of Free Software, build an army of followers and believers. He then founded the Free Software Foundation.
The software tools, compilers, libraries, and other things that the Free Software Foundation wrote was not what most people would consider a complete system, but it was headed that way. And along the way millions of people benefited from using the exisiting GNU code on top of other operating systems.
In 1991 Linus Torvalds started his kernel project. It was the right project at the right time, and mated with the GNU code and other free software code such as sendmail, BIND, the X Window System sparked people's imaginations as to what could be done.
At first I did not understand Richard's insistance on inserting the word "Free" in the equation. The Open Source people felt that the word "Free" was confusing business people, since they thought that the software was gratis, and should always be gratis. Somehow the software would appear by "magic". However, in the twenty years I have known Richard, I have never heard him say that you should not get paid for writing software. He only feels that after the software is written, the source code should be available to those who want it.
After ten years as executive director of Linux International, and thirty-five years in the computer industry, I agree with Richard that not having the source code freely available to the customer is an impediment to doing business. Not everyone will agree with the GPL license, just as not everyone agrees with BSD. That is their right. That is their "freedom".
We do not live in the same environment of the 1980s that spawned the proprietary system market. Software then was expensive and the people who wrote software for those expensive computers were few. Knowledge about how to write whole systems was scarce and communications were much slower than today.
Now there are too many customers with too many unique needs for any company to meet those needs. the companies' "telephone support lines" today just get busy signals, dropped lines and intollerable waits. Free Software's insistance on the availability of source code offers competition and choice that proprietary software does not allow. It offers freedom. When p