You compared the works of Beethoven and Mozart to software development in your speech.
I made a specific analogy between software and symphony which is a useful analogy in certain ways. The analogy is that they're both large collections of details, but they embody ideas… and you combine many ideas to make one piece, and even more different ideas to make one program.
Imagine if music can be patented, like a patent on a technique or a chord progression. Then imagine you want to write a symphony without being sued. Beethoven is a great composer because of his ability to combine many known music customs and create his own unique symphony. Nobody can re-invent music from ground zero, likewise in software development. It's an unfair challenge for anyone to put that requirement on anyone.
A software program can contain thousands of ideas, and if only 10 percent of those are patented, it is harder to develop software safely without breaching the patents. That hampers improvements to software. Users will find themselves like Gulliver, being held down by different ropes.
Software developers share the same interest -- to be able to develop freely without having to worry about patents. Sustainable software is only found in free software.
So if you composed a piece of music, would you expect the same things of it that you do of the free software movement?
Absolutely. I put on a licence on anything that I publish that gives the kind of freedoms that I believe is the ethical requirement for that kind of work. If it's a program or a manual or a reference work, something that's useful for doing a practical job, then I make it free with the four freedoms.
If it's an essay of opinions, I don't think it's a socially useful thing for people to rewrite other people's opinions. I put on a notice giving permission for verbatim copies. If it's art, I'll probably make the art free as well, though I don't feel all art has to be free in the same sense as a software, manual or encyclopaedia has to be free.
There has to be a minimum freedom that everyone must always have for any kind of written or artistic work, and that is, the freedom to non-commercially redistribute exact copies. It's tyranny to take that away, and only a police state could succeed. You can see the worldwide campaign for the war on copying gradually being ramped up… more and more harsh punishment, more and tighter restrictions on what people are allowed to do. And I think that's completely wrong and it has to be stopped.
For works that you use for a practical job, those have to be free, you have to be free to publish a modified version of those, even commercially. Because that's the only way that they become fully useful to society… that's when people are free to take advantage of them in all the useful ways.
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