Richard Stallman | Free Software and the GNU General Public License

a quick note for everyone please put on your masks and the most important part of this process is putting it on your face and not on some other part of your body with a well more or less different location [Music] it's extremely important because otherwise we are at risk of not starting the talk which gathered all of you here not only this one but still um in the very beginning of the talk we will have a 13 minutes video which will be continued with the well you know offline talk of richard okay almost ready these bright lights i'll talk i'll talk i'll talk so bright oh well i'll get used to it somehow so everyone must wear a mask here and it has to go over your nose and over your mouth and bend the mask at the top so it fills in these corners on both sides of your nose that's needed for it to work but the other thing is keep distant from each other you know fill up the space in the room at least oh it's if is there any way to get more ventilation in here there's are there any doors we could open to get air coming through because ventilation is necessary for safety is there any way of getting more air coming through here are there any doors we can open is there a door over the over there can we open it to the outside and have air come through try it try it you know try opening things see if you can this is not not a good place to hold a talk i'm sad to say don't know what it is in any case if you see somebody who doesn't have a mask on please uh say what put someone near you who doesn't have a mask on say please put a mask on or get away from me i got to be very concerned about this you see if i have an asymptomatic case of covid19 i will be blocked from traveling on and that would be a big problem even if i never feel the slightest bit sick so anyway i'm here to talk about free software and the new general public license but first to introduce it i'd like you to start the video [Music] free software is the first battle in the liberation of cyberspace who controls your computer is it you or is it some big company that's really controlling it well what is a computer a computer is a universal machine it will do any computation you want it to because you give it a program that says what the computation is that you want so the computer only knows how to get out in instruction and do it and get out another instruction and do it the program has the instructions it says what to do so you by writing the right program you can make it do anything well almost anything so who gives the instructions to your computer you might think it's obeying your instructions when really it's obeying somebody else first and you only as much as that company wants it to will let it listen to you with software there are two possibilities either the users control the program or the program controls the users it's inevitably one or the other so in order for the users to control the program they need the four essential freedoms and that's the definition of free software free software respects the users freedom and community now we often call it libra using the french or spanish word pronounce it as you like the point is that's what we mean we don't mean it's gratis we're not talking about price we're concerned with your freedom and we sometimes say free slash libra to show that so freedom zero's the freedom to run the program as you wish for whatever purpose freedom one is the freedom to study the source code of the program and change it so it does the computing you want it to do but what is the source code well every program typically will have two forms there's the form that you can read and you can understand if you know the programming language that's the source that's what programmers write and change then there's the executable which is a bunch of numbers which even a programmer can't figure out if all you get is the executable it's a horrible pain in the neck to figure out what it does and even harder to change it so to give you the real possibility to study and change it they've got to give you the source code that's a requirement well with those two freedoms each user separately can make a copy and start changing it and make it do what she wants that's individual control but what if you're not a programmer you look at the source code and you don't understand it individual control isn't enough we also need collective control which means any group of users are free to work together to adapt the program to what they want of course in the group some of them are programmers they're the ones who actually write the changes but they're doing it as part of the group for what the group wants of course the group doesn't have to be everybody so others can use it some other way they're all free to do that so collective control requires two more essential freedoms freedom two is the freedom to redistribute exact copies to make the copies and then give them away or sell them when you wish and freedom 3 is similar but it's for your modified versions you're free to make copies and then give them or sell them when you wish so if you do have these freedoms then it's free software the users control the program but if any of those freedoms is missing then the users don't control the program instead the program controls the users and the developer controls the program so that means this program is an instrument of unjust power for its developer over the users that means the users don't have freedom that's non-free proprietary software which we got to get rid of well when you've got proprietary software what happens sometimes the program snoops on the user sometimes it tracks the user sometimes it restricts the user and stops users from doing what they want to do you can see that the blu-ray is your enemy sometimes the software remotely deletes books as amazon did with 1984. sometimes the developer compels users to install a harmful upgrade by threatening to take away other functionality if it's not installed as sony did and sometimes they can even forcibly change the software at a distance as microsoft can with windows through the universal back door so sometimes they even sabotage users as microsoft does when it tells the nsa about bugs in windows so it can use them to attack people's computers well what you get is basically with proprietary software the owner has power over the users and takes advantage of this power putting in those various malicious functionalities to hurt the users of course they don't do this because they're sadist they're doing it just for money for greed they have various ways that they can profit from having this power over users which does not make it even the tiniest bit less evil but they have no shame about it they have conferences where they talk about the latest ways they can take advantage of users through the power they have basically proprietary software which in is now from almost all the users of proprietary software they're using proprietary malware it's software for suckers so how do you as how do you stop being a victim formally you had to stop using computers but not anymore now you can come join us in the free world that we've built uh in 1983 i announced i would develop a completely free software operating system called gnu in 1992 we had it almost finished but one piece was missing the colonel linus torvalds in that year freed his kernel linux which filled the last gap and gave us the first complete system you could run on a pc gnu plus linux so unfortunately having freedom at one more point doesn't guarantee you'll keep it there are over a thousand different variants of gunus linux they're called distributions a few of them are entirely free software most of them have non-free software added because they're maintained by people who aren't concerned about freedom they'd rather add convenience but at the cost of freedom so you have to check which is a free distro to keep your freedom sometimes requires a sacrifice sometimes a big sacrifice as at lexington sometimes but but in our campaign they tend to be little sacrifices anybody with a little bit of maturity can make these sacrifices for instance you want applications but some of them are non-free if you want freedom you've got to do without them so there may be some inconveniences you have to suffer for your freedom's sake then many websites send non-free programs written in javascript to the user's browser if you don't want to run non-free programs you should install libra.js which blocks keeps out non-free javascript and sometimes servers will offer to do your computing they say send us all your data obviously for suckers then the server does the computing and sends you back the results but you're not supposed to think about what's happening because it's a cloud and you don't see what's going on well you should look it's software as a service as a software substitute and it takes away control of your computing so a large fraction of the world's web servers are running slash linux and other free software but i think the most important computers to put freedom in are your computers not companies web servers they deserve freedom also but above all it's people that deserve freedom so we need to advance and to do that we have to cross obstacles one of them is there are big companies that make a lot of money by having control over users and they don't want to let us advance we have to overcome their opposition another is that the mainstream media don't talk about free software they have a term that they use to bury these ethical issues they say open source instead now it talks about more or less the same programs but with different ideas where free software activists say this is a matter of right and wrong users deserve freedom we demand freedom the people who say open source they don't want to say that so instead they say let the users change the software and redistribute it and they'll make the code better they'll fix some bugs it may be true but it's a less important issue if we want to keep our freedom we've got to talk about freedom so say free software and you're helping us every time another obstacle is that lots of schools teach non-free software which is basically like teaching the kids to smoke tobacco it's implanting dependence which is the opposite of what school should do a school should prepare citizens to live in a strong capable independent cooperating and free society which means teaching free software in the school but there's another reason to do that for education some kids want to become programmers they're curious they want to know how the programs work well the one who's studying a free software can understand it the one who's studying a non-free program can't learn anything because the knowledge in the non-free program is withheld denied to the students so to uphold the spirit of education the school should make sure its programs are free but there is an even more important reason schools should teach the spirit of goodwill the habit of helping other people so the class should say if you bring a program to class just as if you bring cookies to class you've got to share it with everyone else can't keep it to yourself you got to share the source code so other people can learn so don't bring any proprietary software to this class the school has to set a good example by following its own rule should bring only free software to class except as a reverse engineering exercise another obstacle is there's hardware we don't know how to write free software for because they won't tell us how to use the hardware that's shocking they want to sell you the product and they won't tell you how to use it they say here's a non-free program you can use run it and shut up don't bother us well how do we find out how to run that hardware with reverse engineering you've got to study all those zeros and ones to figure out what they really do and write down how to use that hardware so someone else can write the free program to do it it's hard work but it can be done if you want to make a big technical contribution that's what you should do each new area activity of life can bring with it new human rights that are necessary and the human rights depend on each other if you lose one it becomes harder to maintain the others so nowadays computing is so important in society that the freedoms of free software are among the human rights that society must establish and protect thus how to help well you can write free software you can organize groups to campaign and persuade schools and governments to move to free software you can help other people when they have trouble using free software or help them install it you can say free software and spread the philosophical ideas moving to free software is the first step in the liberation of cyberspace but of course we also use the internet we need other freedoms there like network neutrality and putting an end to surveillance of people in general [Applause] so uh that was when i squeezed it into 14 minutes uh for many years i gave talks uh with or less the same images plus additional ones and i would go through the same material in an hour because i would explain in a lot more detail and more carefully but what i'm going to do today is figure that that gives you the basic idea and go into a specific area namely namely free software licenses why does a free program have a license well it's the license that makes it free under today's rather unfortunate copyright law everything written is automatically copyrighted and that includes programs it's a very bad system it shouldn't have been done this way but it wasn't particularly harmful in the age of the printing press because it wasn't easy for ordinary people to copy anything but now it is having everything be copyrighted automatically means automatically you're forbidden to copy it whatever it is that's very bad and it makes every program non-free unless we override it and the way we override that for a particular program is to put a license on it and the license says you can do this you can do that never mind the copyright law says you can't i'm the author and i say you can that's what a free software license is for if the license gives you the four essential freedoms then it's a free software license that's the definition of a free software license it's a license that makes the program free by giving every user the four essential freedoms and what are those i'll repeat them because they're the most important point freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose of yours freedom one is the freedom to study the source code and change it so the program runs the way you wish and does the computing the way you wish freedom 2 is the freedom to make exact copies and then give or sell them to others when you wish and freedom is this not working could people hear me do i have to repeat everything i just said good that's a relief so um what did you say oh thank you well i've had a lot of practice so i learned to avoid many kinds of mistakes not all of them but many so anyway there are different you know free software licenses are not all the same they all give you the four freedoms somehow but there are different ways to do that that's the difference between various free free licenses for but the main difference the main distinction among free licenses is is copy left or not you see some free licenses basically say do whatever you like with this and that makes it free that does give users the four freedoms but it has a drawback it lets a users who want to subjugate others to turn the free program into a non-free program they could modify the code of that free program perhaps add some other stuff and turn the whole thing into a non-free program and then the users do get the code that was originally free but they don't get it with freedom they get it as a non-free program they don't get freedom at all now when i started writing software for gnu in 1984 i wanted every user to get freedom which meant i had to make sure that some greedy jerk could not take my free programs and turn them into non-free programs perhaps adding some improvements to attract people away from my version and then they'd be using those users would be using my program but they would not get the freedom i wanted to give them and that would mean failure you know maybe there would be a million people using my software but if they were not getting freedom it would be a failure in the sense that really mattered so i came up with a way to stop that and that's called copy lift the idea is to put conditions into the license that say basically yes you've got the four freedoms but you're not allowed to take away those freedoms from anybody else with this software so it works through conditions mainly on freedoms two and three that involve redistributing copies either exact copies freedom two or modified copies freedom three copy left says when you distribute copies of this program you have to pass it along under the same license which means that the people who get copies from you have to get the same freedoms and when they pass it along to others they have to pass along the same freedoms so wherever the software goes the freedoms go with it that's the idea of copylift it's to free the whole world that's the goal so copy left is a general idea but you can't release a program under a general idea of a license you have to have a specific text which is the license of the program the text i wrote well i initially had a version of it for each program so on gnu emacs i put the gnu emacs general public license and then when i had another program like make i i put it under the guinea make general public license it was basically the same but a few words were changed like one said this is the license of genuine x and the other said this is the license of ganumake but it was basically the same thing obviously it was inconvenient that it had to have a few words changed so in 1989 i figured out a way to use the exact same words and you could just drop it into any program in order to release that program under this license and that would make it easy for hundreds or thousands of other developers to release under that license too they wouldn't have to in fact they weren't allowed to alter any word of the license itself but you didn't have to you just had to put it into a program and in the files of the program itself the source files you would put a notice a license notice which says this program such and such like go to emacs is released under the new general public license version one and it said version one or any later version released by the free software foundation because we had to have an upgrade path if if no one else you know if if people who release programs this way could never upgrade the license to a new version well almost everything made by humans eventually needs changing there had to be a way to make a gpl version 2 and a gpl version 3 and maybe someday a gpl version 4 because laws change technology changes when the context changes sometimes you need different rules so we had to have a way to upgrade the gpl and here's what i worked out in 1989 because at that time the idea of versions of a license meant for upgrades was unheard of i don't think anyone had ever done that so what i said was if you're the author of the program or more generally the copyright holder you can say to the users of your program you the user are allowed to redistribute and change this program under the conditions of gnu general public license version n or any later version published by the free software foundation and that way if that for if that was for version one well some day later the free software foundation might publish a version two and the users will be allowed to use that same code under version two but they would still be allowed to use it under version one because that's what it actually said you can use this under gnu general public license version one or any later version so each user would have the choice so the result of this upgrade method is that the free software foundation cannot take away any freedoms granted already all it can do is offer a new version with uh some of somewhat different set of rules and then the users get the choice so i released version 2 in 1991 and the main change there i think was that it took it it uh it was able to handle unix distributions that didn't come with a c library you could link against because some companies were distributing their proprietary unix systems without a c library and separately they would sell the c compiler and that would come with the c library so i had to change the gpl to pro beca to permit compiling and building new programs and other gpl covered programs on those systems using the c library that didn't come with the operating system because it came with a compiler instead now those were non-free operating systems and non-free compilers that was all there was we hadn't finished the gnu system yet we didn't have a complete free system so we all had to use these non-free unix variants to do the development or do anything and that continued to be the case until uh until after linux became free see linux was the colonel the was the first free kernel that we could use but initially it was not free when torvalds released linux for the first time in 1991 it was not free software its license was too restrictive it was in february 1992 that he changed the license and that's when linux became free software as long as it was non-free software it was no better ethically than any unix kernel you know we had to treat it as non-existent in terms of what we could recommend but once it became free software that changed morally this it changed the moral situation completely and people started working on uh changing linux and changing various gnu packages so they would all work together smoothly and easily and this led to distributions of gnu linux and at that point eventually we stopped using any of those non-free unix variants and we just used gnu plus linux for our computing but meanwhile people did keep running various canoe programs on non-free systems in fact there was so much demand to do that and so many people who wanted to work on that that there was a danger it would just sort of run away with the whole project and distract developers from the goal of getting rid of the non-free systems people would say hey how about making this change it will make gnu whatever it is work better on windows and my response is we want to get rid of windows not enhance it so everything is supposed to run best on gnu of course developing windows was such a big sin that microsoft eventually was compelled to xp8 it uh oh well didn't go over that joke didn't work [Applause] too bad [Music] so gpl version 2 worked pretty well but over the years various drawbacks showed up uh ways in which either laws had changed or technology had changed so that they did the gpl didn't fit them anymore for instance in the late 90s bittorrent was invented and bittorrent was a very convenient way to distribute large files such as entire gnu linux distributions but there's a funny thing about it when you receive a torrent normally you're also redistributing the torrent now there are particular if what if you're distributing a binary distribution of a free operating system well under the gpl if you're distributing binaries you must in certain approved ways distribute the source code also if we didn't have that rule freedom one would be lost you know if someone were permitted to make a version of the system and compile it and distribute just the binaries that would be non-free software binary without source code is non-free software it is never ethically legitimate so the goal of the gnu gpl is to make sure that doesn't happen to so it requires if you're distributing binaries you must be providing the source code in an acceptable way and there are a few different acceptable ways but suppose you thought you were just receiving it there are no rules about downloading something the rules only apply to those who who distribute the thing about bittorrent is if you're downloading it you're also distributing it so downloading a torrent of compiled free binaries would violate the gpl well that wasn't intentional there's nothing wrong with downloading a tar into free software we didn't intend to put any requirements on that but the gpl version 2 which had been written before bittorrent had requirements applying to any kind of distribution well this was not good uh anybody should be allowed to download a torrent so that was something we had to change and that's one of the things that i changed in gpl version 3. to make to have a special rule saying yes normally when you distribute binaries you have to make the source available but there's a special exception when you're just downloading a torrent so there are no requirements about you're distributing the source whoever launches the tolerance still has to distribute the source but for all the users downloading it there's no requirement on them well this was obviously the right thing to do but the reason we were able to fix it was that we had the upgrade path unfortunately the developers of linux did not adopt gpl version 3. so what that means is anybody distributing a gnu plus linux distribution through bittorrent a binary compiled one through bittorrent is violating the gpl on linux too bad well i tried i wish they would advance to gpl version 3. there are various other changes that have been made i better get out my see i don't know how long i've been going here and i don't know when i'm supposed to stop what well i've got to stop sometime i've got other work and you probably want to go eat at some point today and then go to sleep and at some point i'd fall asleep we didn't come here to sleep together so [Applause] so assuming that i started at two o'clock i got quite a bit of time so so now one of some of the other changes in gpl version three include we talked with lawyers from a bunch of other countries and we made sure that the license was designed to work in all the countries we could find out about and not solely based on united states law and we made sure it would be reasonable if you used it on something that wasn't a piece of software it should in principle work on any kind of document whatsoever and we put in something to try to stop to prevent a disgusting hack that is used to make free software effectively impossible to change on a certain computer it's called tivoization and it was used to implement digital restrictions management drm in a product called the tivo now they were not allowed to add non-free code to linux they were distributing linux in the tivo uh and maybe some pieces of gnu as well but i'm not sure but the point is they wanted to change linux so that it would decrypt certain files in a secret way and restrict you what users could do with them they were files of video and so they wanted to change a free program so that it would impose restrictions on users well in general that's impossible when the users are free to change the program the program doesn't you know when the users control the program the program doesn't control them so what they've worked out a way to do was that they would uh they put something in lower levels of the design to restrict the encryption and then they adapted linux to work with that we put something in gpl version three so that it says if you're distributing binaries of of a gpo 3 covered program and there are certain installation information like a signature key that is needed in order to make it work properly then you have to give the user the everything needed in order to sign per modified versions so that those modified versions would work fully in the hardware so that in order if linux moved to gpl version 3 then tivo would be required to provide each user with the signature key for per own machine so that the user could modify linux and recompile it and then sign it and put it into the tivo and it would control all the facilities of the hardware meaning it couldn't really restrict users with drm it couldn't stop users from doing with their hardware whatever they wanted to do well we hoped that linux would switch to gpl version 3 so that linux would not become a trojan horse for imposing drm on users but they didn't well it's not our fault but the overall important thing is we didn't succeed in defeating drm that way drm never completely disappeared and now there's a threat that it's it's coming back further the world wide web consortium gave its blessing to drm as part of the web standards and there is a very slowly growing campaign to put drm in the form of non-free software into web browsers that's one of the things we change we don't use firefox as it's released for several reasons but one of them is that firefox contains a program specifically to load other software to do the drm non-free software and we don't want to give our cooperation to drm even the slightest bit so our modified version icecat doesn't have that it's for people who want freedom and tolerating drm means you lose your freedom now i have never played a blu-ray disc in my life because blu-ray discs all implement drm i've heard that there's no way to write a blu-ray disc which doesn't have drm you know with the dvd you can write a dvd that doesn't have drm in it if if you want to uh but i believe with blu-ray discs there's no way to protect yourself from the evil blu-ray so except don't use blu-ray discs and that's my solution i hate drm so much no matter what the movie is i'd rather not see it than surrender to drm i have the strength to refuse to see any movie or every movie if that's what it takes anyway um we also put something in gpl version 3 to reduce some of the dangers of patented computational ideas you know it's a bad thing for patent systems to permit patenting of computational ideas and part of the reason is that this means that any software package can infringe patents and a large software package probably infringes thousands of patents and there's no way to find out what they are practically speaking there's no way you could look through the the database of all patents and try to find which ones might cover something in your program because there's so many there are many different ways of describing the same computation and they use different words if you try to do a search for keywords you couldn't expect to find them all it's just not possible and besides there's so many it's once you find a patent how do you know whether that applies to something in your program it's very hard to figure out what the patent actually means in fact you'd probably have to pay a lawyer to spend hours or maybe weeks helping you figure out what that patent actually covers you can't afford that and even at the end the answer might not be really certain so allowing patents to apply to software is a recipe for at first legal chaos but then the chaos gets resolved in a simple way the big companies all have lots of patents and they cross license with each other so they are safe and everybody else is in danger and so like so many other things in politics it turns into a scheme that keeps the big companies powerful and helps them keep down the competition and anybody independently doing anything so there's a it's limited to what extent a license like the gpl can try to stop this after all we can't make patent law go away we can't exempt our work from patent law with our own license it just can't be done what we could do was say if a company contributes to a program and then distributes it then it's granting a license at least for its own patents to those who use it and redistribute it later the downstream users and just redistributing it there are certain patent requirements in that so that at least it protects people in some circumstances [Music] and there are various other smaller improvements as well so this is these are reasons why you should switch to gpl version three you can find more information about these topics and lots of other licensing topics in gnu.org licenses first of all you'll find license list.html in which we list lots of licenses and we say which ones are free and we also say for the free ones what their advantages or disadvantages are and whether there are situations where we think they're good to use that is put them on your own work and specifically for the question of how to license your own work we have licensed recommendations dot html which describes various circumstances and what we would recommend in the way of licenses for those circumstances so please take a look there there's also a complete list of the improvements in gpl version 3 and various other useful articles about following and choosing and applying licenses now copy left can be thought of in two different ways on the one hand in terms of why i chose to use copy to have why i chose to develop copyleft and what what its purpose is what it's meant to achieve well on the one hand it's meant to facilitate and encourage making more free software because if you want to make a free program you can use my code in it i want you to be able to use my code in your free programs i do not want you to be allowed to use my code in a non-free program and part of the purpose is to encourage people to make their programs free rather than non-free i want all software to be free i want there to be lots of free software around and i'd prefer if non-free software did not get developed at all so my influence over that is limited but to the extent that my code is useful i've made it clear how you were allowed to use it you can use it in free software if your software is under the gpl you cannot use it in non-free software at all but there's also another emotional way of seeing it which is if someone wants to be a jerk and take my code and put it into a non-free modified version that makes me angry that's taking advantage of my code to mistreat people with it i don't want that to happen i i'd rather be able to stop them so uh and there are other people who say uh well sometimes i'm willing to work on non-free software but when i do i want to get paid why should i let you use my code in your non-free program and not even pay me you can look at it whichever way you wish from my point of view the last one is is the least important because i wouldn't let you use my code in your non-free program even if you offered to pay me because what i want is the freedom more than money but people who [Applause] but there are people with views closer to open source who like using the gpl because that way at least they'll get paid when they contribute to somebody's non-free program so we have this this spectrum of views in our community uh there are the people with open source views who uh think it's good to develop technology they they'd actually rather have a non-free program than no program and then there are free software campaigners like me and the only programs that really exist as far as we're concerned are the free ones a non-free program is a program you had better not use so it might as well not exist and the result of this since almost everybody starts out with society's usual idea that a program is good if it's convenient uh constantly they find free software views strange and surprising and it's necessary to explain them over and over that we're not judging by the same criteria they're accustomed to the ones they will find always taken for granted in the media that a program is good if it's convenient we say no a program is good if it is convenient and respects your freedom and if it doesn't respect your freedom it's not safe and the reason it's not safe is at the deeper level because you're not going to control it you're not you're going to pay for it with your freedom but at a more practical immediate level the reason it's not safe is because it's almost certainly malware now in the video i showed you some examples i know lots more examples of non-free software that is actually malware it has functionalities designed to mistreat the users in fact it's almost always true somebody did a study of i think it was a thousand or more most popular android apps and there is one particular kind of surveillance that the investigators could check for without seeing the source code of the app they could externally detect that kind of surveillance and they found that for the paid apps uh 60 percent were doing that kind of surveillance and for the gratis apps note i do not say free they're not free software but they were gratis zero price well ninety percent were doing that kind of surveillance and that's just one kind of surveillance you know you can program surveillance in lots of ways that nobody can detect externally so maybe they're all snooping but the investigators could only show that most of them were snooping so uh when i say that non-free software is usually malware there's a basis for that and there are many nasty kinds of things that they can do in addition to snooping and uh and restricting users with drm and back doors another common thing is tethering a product to a server there are products you can buy uh it's part of the internet of mal things where the only way to give commands to you to the thing you bought is to go through a particular server you through your uh personal tracking and surveillance device send a command to that server and the server sends it to the product that's in your home and then the response goes back through the same path so the server is watching all your commands and all the responses it knows everything that you do with the device that's as long as the server keeps running but this is the other nasty aspect of a tethered device if the manufacturer decides that that product is no longer selling very well and it doesn't care about that product anymore it can save money by switching off the server and then you'll find that you can no longer send a command to the product you bought maybe it's three years old and the manufacturer has decided that that's too old and it doesn't matter anymore so it just cuts everybody off they all those products stop working well they only they maybe work to a limited extent if you can push buttons on the device but often you can't do everything by pushing buttons the only way to do some things is to go through that server that doesn't run anymore you're basically asking for that if you buy those and uh and then sometimes they make the products artificially addictive or there are a lot of things look at gnu.org malware and you will see lists of hundreds of examples categorized according to type of malicious functionality and type of product or company that did it so this is something that wasn't the case 30 years ago maybe not much even 20 years ago it said things have gotten qualitatively worse in that it's not just potentially the case that a non-free program would stop you from doing what you want to do they're now designed they're designed from the very beginning to mistreat users that's their purpose if you allow them into your life you're making a fundamental mistake and you're going to suffer for it i believe we need laws prohibiting the collection of personal information we need to have digital payment systems implemented with free software that allow anonymous payment fortunately the software already works it's called gnutoler t-a-l-e-r look at tyler.net now we just need to get it interfaced to banking systems and approved and put into use so we can have systems where you could pay digitally but no one knows who you were in the meantime when i buy something i pay cash it's that simple i always carry some cash but if i needed more i would go to a bank machine and get out some cash note the difference the practical difference between getting out cash from a bank and paying cash versus paying with any kind of digital payment system if you get the cash out well the bank knows where you were when you got cash out of your account but it doesn't know where you spent it doesn't know what you bought whereas if you use today's digital payment systems various companies know that it was you what you bought and where that's more surveillance and that's why i refuse to use those systems and you can teach yourself once again to resist surveillance of what you do in your life how about what well in theory they might be okay but uh for the most part uh they're not really anonymous for the payer another problem is on the other side which is that they're very convenient for laundering money very convenient for hiding profits and thus evading taxes now tax evasion or avoidance you know that's just a question of whether it's illegal or not that's a side issue the point is rich people take a lot of money outside of taxation lots of rich people's income is not being taxed and as a result governments are impoverished and that means they can't do what we need them to do we need to have a state because there are many jobs that can only be done by a state but in order to do them it needs money and well one of the ways it gets that money is from taxes and we've got to make sure that rich people pay taxes and that's a big fight a big political fight and also legal fight there's a campaign that makes slow progress against the tax havens that invite rich people to park their money there and pay no taxes and help them hide the fact that they're doing so because they might get in trouble at home if it were found out what they're doing so a gnu toddler can't be used for that because the store has to identify its payments the purchaser is anonymous the store is not so by the way at what time should i stop half hour okay it's almost time for me to uh start questions i need the plat the transparent plastic bag where is the transparent plastic bag that was brought in with me okay i'm going to answer a few questions i received by email this morning so it will only take me a few minutes to answer them and i think that that's this is a good time to do that hello what i'm looking for the message we're oh boy this is unfortunate i can't find that message i don't know where it is too bad so now i'm going to pre present my other identity oh what do you know [Applause] ah here's the other one i didn't understand why it wasn't in there uh stop stop stop please i know you're trying to help but wait till i ask [Applause] [Music] i am saint ignucius of the church of emacs i bless your computer my child [Applause] emacs started out as a text editor that became a way of life for many users and then eventually a church so and so we have uh some rituals at least in theory and we also have saints that's why i'm saint ignosius now uh to be a member of the church of emacs you must write recite the confession of the faith you must say there is no system but gnu and linux is one of its kernels [Applause] then if you become a true expert you can become a saint to be a saint in the church of emax you must not run anything any non-free software in and on your system um and uh you the way you s you you formally establish your membership in the church is through a ceremony called the fubar mitzvah [Applause] in which you recite a portion of our sacred scriptures that is to say the system source code so we have rejected the priesthood of technology everyone is free to read our sacred scriptures now it's been a long time since i've presented saint ignucius we also have we also have the cult of the virgin of emax which refers to anyone who has never known or used emacs and offering someone the chance to lose emac's virginity which you can do by teaching per how to use emacs is a blessed act according to the church of emacs [Music] there is also a breakaway sect there's a tibetan variant of the church of emacs which uh believes in uh reciting the confession of the faith automatically over and over again with a script but the mother church holds that in order this for this to have spiritual value you have to say it yourself with your voice so so uh i guess that's all i remember of this obviously i'm going to have to watch it this is the first speech i've given in person since 2019. [Applause] i will answer questions in just a moment but i want to try to find i know it's in my mailbox but it's that was that's pretty big unfortunately ah here it is so uh i was mailed a few questions let's see what do i think of the worldwide organization of hackerspaces unfortunately i don't know how they are organized so i know nothing about that what do i think about the fact that hackers and programmers are creating their communities in every city around the world i think that would be great if they had a firm idea of free software and made sure that their communities that they're creating uphold free software and freedom and i always eagerly look for opportunities to try to spread that idea to the maker community what role should hacker spaces play now and in the future in your opinion well basically they should say if you're if you're working on a project that is meant to be released in some way to the public or put into systematic use we insist that to use our facilities you have to make it free you've got to be treating the community right and then we'll cooperate with you so now i'd like to take questions were p did people give out pieces of paper did you give out pieces of paper to people oh well that was an unfortunate thing uh i'd really appreciate it if you would do it now yeah what do you have i don't understand i have hearing problems and so i figure handing in questions on paper will enable me to read them uh is anyone handing out pieces of paper hello organizers are you here wake up you can give out a bunch at each end and people will pass them across that's fast okay we'll write it write your question on it and give it to me so oh just put it down put it down thank you ah why is linux still under gpl version 2. i can't speak for torvalds you have to ask him that have you ever been using any smartphone well i have occasionally used somebody else's portable phone uh you know i'd say hey could you lend me your phone and i'd make a call a few times i've sent a text message but i don't have one and there are two levels of reasons for that one is it's a computer filled with non-free software i don't want to have a computer with non-free software not if it's going to have software changed and it is going to have software changed then at the more practical level every portable phone sends out signals saying here i am and the phone network recognizes where it is and records that and keeps those records for months or years and i don't like that kind of surveillance also in the software of basically every portable phone there is a universal back door the software can be replaced remotely uh specifically it's the software in them in a smartphone it's the modem processor that has the universal back door now there are a few models that have been designed to stop this but they're unusual and almost all portable phones you will find have the universal back door and that can be used to convert them into listening devices that listen all the time and transmit all the conversation they hear so this is an orwellian device and my response to it is much stronger than no thanks it's what do you take me for so i use them occasionally but i won't have one so will gnu church conflict with rust cult i know about the language rust but i don't know what the rust cult is unfortunately well i mean i know that rust is a programming language but he said the rust cult and i don't know what that means do i like something the crab i don't know what that is sorry it asks what linux distribution is on your machine it's not a linux distribution that term is a misnomer they are new plus linux distributions and i implore you please don't call them linux distributions because if you do you're talking about our work and giving us none of the credit and that is not only unfair but it's bad for our work in the future please recognize us when you talk about the gnu system anyway the new plus linux distribution i run is called tree scale and it's one of the entirely free distributions the ones that contain no yeah could you pick all those yeah it's one of those that contain no non-free software one of the ones we can recommend to others if you look at gnu.org distros you'll see what we say about various distributions how can hackerspaces help develop the free software community mainly by adopting principles about freedom so that when they so that the products they do and their own communications with the community teach the importance of freedom if machine learning tool is used to train a system on several oh he says open source i don't active advocate open source projects with different licenses which would apply to tools output code that's not that's a misunderstanding machine learning's produced machine learning systems produce trained neural nets that's not code it doesn't really have an author and in any case the training examples are not being copied they're being thought about but not copied as far as i know it doesn't matter what they are it has nothing to do with copyright and if any of them are programs again the output of those programs is not covered by the copyright on the program itself that's a general principle of copyright law if you write a program and it generates some output someone else runs it to generate some output that output in general was not a derivative work of the program code so the author of the program and any license on it that has nothing to do with that output or who has the copyright on it if anyone or whether it can be used please tell about political obstacles on your way of a free software evangelist well i don't think i've found a lot of well it's such a broad question unfortunately it doesn't bring anything to mind specific i wish i wish i could see how to say something relevant what about the vine users i'm not sure what vine is is that a variant of vi what windows what [Music] oh is vine free software well okay there's nothing wrong there then the next question is what program are you emulating oh well that's bad see but i wouldn't blame vine for that those programs are unjust and they're equally unjust if you run them on vine or if you run them on windows or anything else a non-free program that you are using takes away your freedom uh you hold on for a moment i i have a large buffer here and i'm tr the light here is very bad for reading anything it's all coming at me like this and it bounces off the paper in a funny way with shadows what about what about the herd the herd contains some code the herd is a bunch of server programs and they come from different places some of them were developed by the free software foundation some of them contained code copied from linux like file systems so they actually have different licenses and since they're separate programs they can have different licenses they're not actually linked together or combined they they communicate by message passing this was the idea of the guinner herd you'd have lots of servers doing various jobs communicating by message passing and this way they would be separate programs as far as copyright is concerned and also as far as execution is concerned uh well what cpu do you consider the most open nowadays well i don't judge things in terms of open i'm not an advocate of open i'm an advocate of freedom so the question is which cpus respect freedom the most and unfortunately they're all going the way of injustice uh the main cpus these days have malicious back door modules such as intel's management engine and amd has something like that and apple's machines processor has something like that and i use an old thinkpad which doesn't have that well it has a an early version which we can turn off totally so it's safe now i think that there should be laws against that can i predict the next challenge to free software no there are so many challenges already in existence and getting worse that our hands are totally full trying to do anything about them tyler and oppressive governments the payment system open to government even one direction just kills small business in ukraine uh i don't understand unfortunately uh i'm not sure which payment system that whoever wrote that is referring to maybe someone can explain it oh this laptop was made in something like 2008 do i steal coding what would that mean you mean plagiarize no what does that mean oh do i still program uh not much occasionally i do but that's not most of my work what do you think of the right to repair movement i support it but i think it doesn't go far enough the right to repair movement is basically like the beginning of understanding that the software and products should be free they're complaining about some of the consequences of non-free software in their products that they buy and noticing how that non-free software is used to prevent users from helping themselves prevent users from fixing things and basically to subjugate users well yes that's what non-free software does it subjugates users so of course you should be free to understand the software so that you can fix the device the software should be free and then you would be free to fix your device do you accept the idea of information as a commodity that can be sold and bought i don't think that information should exist it shouldn't be collected a database of personal information once built will be misused therefore instead of the misguided idea of data protection laws we need privacy laws that insist that systems will treat people as anonymous and not try to identify them and not keep data about people not not even accumulate the data in the first place if there's no database with personal data it's there's no danger whereas once the database is is accumulated it can be misused in so many ways of course the organization that collected the data can misuse the data and data protection laws tried to limit that somewhat but in addition uh there could be a security error and the organization leaks the data to others that will surely misuse it and won't care about those laws or a cracker could break into the system and get the data and provide it to those who will misuse it rogue employees in the company the organization that collected the data could misuse it they have done so and finally the government can collect that personal data and use it for repression and that has happened too so the way to be safe is design systems that don't identify people that don't collect data about people for instance paying in cash paying in cash doesn't determine who's paying there are a lot of questions for you and i can't pick most could you just uh well i i i'll think about autographs later right now i'm thinking about questions uh so it's about something i have no idea i don't secret experiments lamb i have no idea what that refers to sorry something i've never heard of what is your opinion on practice of dual licensing well dual life there's a confusion about that term dual licensing means you take a program and you say you can use this under this license or that license and as long as one of the two licenses is free the program is free because that one license gives you the four freedoms for using the code and what the other one says doesn't matter to this but the classical case of dual licensing was pearl in the old days it was released under the artistic license disjunctive disjunction with the gpl so you could use either one now maybe the artistic license was intended to be free but some parts of it were not clearly written so we couldn't be sure however we knew that the gpl was free and therefore pearl was free but sometimes people use the term dual license in a misleading way what they're really talking about is selling exceptions here's how that works a developer releases a program under the gnu gpl and then and by the way the new gpl says that others are not allowed to put that code into a non-free program but the developer says if you want to put this code into a non-free program pay me and i will give you a special exception that permits you to do it and that's perfectly legitimate because this code is available to the public as free software now some people object to the idea of uh of offering these exceptions but i compare that with release under uh a weak pushover license like one of the two bsd licenses or the apache license all those licenses that say you can do almost whatever you like with the code and if the developer released that same code under a weak license then everybody would get that exception and we don't condemn that that's free software it's not copy lifted but it is free so uh if offering if letting everybody put that code into non-free programs is acceptable then letting just some who paid put the code into non-free programs well that's less of a bad thing so it's acceptable too you stick it into here well i'll do it it's starting to just get to be cumbersome with so many questions what should we do if we need to use proprietary javascript to register to a meeting with you i was that the case i hope not that's bad complain vociferously and say i want to register but i can't use your website because it tried to send non-free javascript code to my machine how can i register without going through this even better say please let me pay cash at the door you don't need to know who i am after all what am i going to do i'm going to go to a an event where the public is invited you don't need to know my name and the event shouldn't know people's names there's too much uh habitual demanding people identify themselves and that is dangerous in itself it gets people accustomed to being asked all the time who they are so that they then start answering instead of saying who the hell are you to want to know how did you find energy to fight the proprietary world for so long you see to me there's nothing more invigorating than this it's exciting showing people something that's important that they hadn't seen is exciting and when people get it when they understand that's exciting and when people start to help that's exciting you'll find it exciting too well this is trying to compare owning software and owning hardware i should point out that with free software owning free software is normal if you get a copy of a free program you own that copy and that's the way it should be whereas the proprietary developers they say you're not allowed to own a copy all of your software are belong to us is what a proprietary software developer says so if you want to own a copy of software it needs to be free software and likewise if you buy a piece of hardware like a computer or a microphone or a stand or a chair you should own that too and proprietary software stops that with by putting proprietary software into the physical product they say you can't own it and this is what the right to repair supporters have noticed it's an injustice the things that you have you should really own them what if the fsf will be hacked and gpl4 will be released and it will be anti-copyleft well very unlikely uh and it probably wouldn't even be legally valid anyway you know somebody fraudulently pretended that the free software foundation had done something i don't think courts would consider that legitimate they would say no the free software foundation didn't really do this i guess i don't oh we are working on how to make that even harder because we want to show everyone that you can have confidence in gnu licenses recently some people wanted you to leave a free foundation i know they i know but the first of all i'm back on the board now and second [Applause] the rest of the people on the board are supporters of copyleft also and third i ask you to join the free software foundation as associ as an associate member and also tell the organization that you want to express your support for me this is help that the free software foundation needs together with something that will help me too what social network should i use i don't use any of them i communicate with email and i post things on various websites like the gnu website and my own personal website my own what server i can't hear you no the free software foundation system administrators run it oh i usually use ice cat ice cat is of our modified firefox with some freedom flaws corrected and some surveillance features removed and uh which messenger i don't use any uh it's inconvenient for me to do thing to have to do things in a way that requires a net connection email is convenient for me because i can do lots of work on my mail when i have no net connection and send it out later because it's not designed to be instant uh i ca do i see any need to update the gpl the version for now no i found one thing that i would definitely change if and when there's a version four but it's not important enough to require a version for now so we'll go on with version three what is what i don't remember i saved it in a file so that if i need to know it uh i'll find it well gee i'm touched just a compliment ah thanks someone is thanking me if you want to thank me or the gnu project please help that's the way to show your thanks join in and help we need a lot of work to do more in the gnu project we need programming work and we also need various kinds of administrative work you know the gnu project like any other activity involving multiple people needs organizing it needs administration it's all volunteers but still it's needed you can join in helping in either way take a look at gnu.org help and you'll see many different kinds of work we need and if you volunteer for any of them that will be important for instance we need people who are we need more webmasters right now if you are good at writing html and you understand the issues of html in a website with no javascript well also it has css but it has no javascript if you're fairly comfortable with that please volunteer to be a gnu webmaster we need your help ah who who is going to lead when someday i'm dead well it's going to happen someday i suppose right and actually we we're working on redesigning how the fsf will select its board to give us a chance to judge people better based on more knowledge about them so uh but can't say any more about that until it's decided what recent developments uh are there for me in the fsf well one thing is that we've done is we've recognized the full injustice of non-free software and we now publicize that the idea that non-free software is probably malware too the idea that uh when people talk about security they're missing half the point you'll see in almost any discussion about computer security they're limiting it they're limiting it to security against outsiders third parties they don't talk about security against the software developer and that's because the only way to have any security against the software developer is with free software that gives others the chance to check it and fix it with non-free software there's never any security against the developer of the software you know microsoft can show the bugs to the us nsa so the nsa can break the security of computers with windows all around the world and you know it's only microsoft that we've seen a report is doing that but other companies could be doing the same thing and if it's a chinese company well maybe it's doing that for the government of china if it's a russian company maybe it's doing that for putin how do you know you basically can't trust the developer of a non-free program at all for anything ah what do you do about people who carry devices that could be listening to them and to you well uh we can start the custom of saying here is a sound insulating metal box please put your personal tracking and listening device into this box and i'll close it and you can take it out when you leave when i stay i usually when i travel stay at somebody's home but i've started paying attention to whether they have things like alexa devices i don't want that i don't want it to listen to me i don't trust it duplicate how do we make a profit with software under gpl v3 well selling exceptions is one way and selling support service things like that training as another way uh and but the main way the way that's easy uh totally easy is develop ser develop solutions for specific clients and deliver those solutions to the client under a free license but the client's going to have to pay to get it written that's something that people won't do as volunteers so it's basically no different with free software that business is no different with free software from what it is normally except that you respect the client by handing over the results that the client has paid for in a way that respects the client's freedom my understanding is that that's most of the software business i don't have any reference to site i know that there was a reference about this at some time in the past that most paid software development was custom software not general purpose software so that's probably still true which means there's lots of opportunities to do this business and treat clients with respect how does the gpl license deal with libraries does using a gpl covered library in another program require the program to be gpl licensed as well yes and no basically it doesn't require the the other program to be licensed specifically under the gpl but it has to be under a compatible license so that the combination can be under the gpl so for instance suppose the other program is released under the apache license apache version 2. well that's compatible with gpl version three so you can put the two together in a combination and the the license that covers both will be gpl version three but if you took that other program away separately that would still say i am covered by the apache license version too what do i think about the lesser gpl well that's a compromise i decided to make that compromise because i wanted it to be possible to link non-free programs with the gnu c library well i'm against non-free programs i think they're evil so why did i make that compromise simple i decide if if you can't link non-free programs with the c library you can't run them on the system at all so the question was once we had the whole gnu system out there would people be allowed to compile non-free programs for it and which require requires linking them with the c library and i concluded that if we didn't allow that it would be self-defeating that people would say this system's no good we don't want it so i concluded that we had to accept that compromise and i can conclude it was morally legitimate to do so because we would not be distributing any non-free software originally i called it the library gpl the gnu library gpl but that gave people a mis a wrong impression they thought if i'm writing a library i should put it under the lgpl well not necessarily sometimes it's better to release a library under the gpo so that it can only be used in free programs it's a tactical question i use an old thinkpad laptop which can be reflashed with with libre boot oh great any recommendations on modern computers where i can do the same unfortunately no the modern cpus are all evil now uh purism uh is planning to sell machines where they they allow the management engine to run until startup and then they found a way to people found a way to turn it off from then on uh is that good enough i don't know i don't have an opinion about that question i'm not an expert on the management engine or how it's connected to things or anything about it it's basically what are free web browsers well ice cat is the one we recommend what do i think about companies that are investing in what they call quote open source unquote but sometimes is free software well at one level it's good developing useful free software is a good thing i'm not going to say that that's be bad on the other hand sometimes what they spend their money on is developing non-copy lifted alternatives to successful copy lifted free programs and that feels like weakening our community's defenses my opinion about red hat well for the most part red hat does work on extending some gnu programs and i think that's useful uh what do i think about centos i recall that centos was not a free distribution but i don't remember any more details than that i don't know what the non-free software is what's the best reasons to become free software developer the best reason is because you want freedom and you're disgusted with running non-free software and you want to replace that non-free software write free replacements to free everyone including yourself that's the best reason so there are gnu plus linux distros whose developers call them linux something or other uh for instance there's a gnu slash linux distribution that whose developers call it linux mint but that's a that's a misnomer it's a variant of the new slash linux system so the right name for it is gnu slash linux mint you know just because they got it wrong doesn't mean we have to honor their mistake comparing reverse engineering with free hardware designs well i'm in favor of both but i think that reverse engineering has is much easier for instance to reverse engineer the specs to control a peripheral is a lot easier than designing and manufacturing another peripheral that's tremendously hard and it takes a lot of money to mass produce hardware whereas once it doesn't cost you a lot of money to reverse engineer the specifications the you know how you run the hardware and once that's done you can write free software and and you don't have to make and manufacture alternate hardware so in the long term free hardware designs our best but that is a tremendously slow and expensive way so let's do the reverse engineering please very important uh uh now he says a lot of hardware nowadays is not free i'm not sure what it means to say that a piece of hardware is free or not the definition i've got for free software is precise and specific what does it mean to say that a computer is free is is this is this clock free i don't know what it would mean whereas yeah just so after thinking about this for a while i decided it's a mistake to formulate a question like that it's not hardware that can be free or non-free it's a hardware design a hardware design is a lot more like a program it's not a physical object it's it's a work of authorship and so it could be copyrighted and it could be under a free license you see now now these two things are similar enough that you can carry the concept of free from one to the other take a look at gnu.org philosophy slash free hardware designs which says basically everything i have to say about free in the area of hardware he's asking me which programming language is more free the question actually is not meaningful a language isn't free or non-free life for instance what about the c language is the c language free what does that mean the meaningful question is can you compile and run c programs with free software now in 1985 the answer was no there was no way to compile and run a c program except with a proprietary compiler and that's why i wrote us a free c compiler because i wanted to change that i wanted to make it possible to run c programs with only free software and i wrote the programs needed to make that possible and so it was possible in 1990 it was possible it was the same language though in 1985 you could only run it run c programs with a proprietary compiler in 1990 you could run them with with a free compiler so the point is it doesn't make sense to ask is the c language free what the question that makes sense is what about this compiler is this free what about that compiler is that free that's the question that that is meaningful to answer and also the question that is important because it shows you what work needs to be done i can't hear you at all i'm sorry i have hearing problems i don't know what you said if you write it down i'll be able to read it oh i called for laws against data collection the gdpr is not enough because it's mainly focused on data protection it doesn't try very hard to stop collection of data let me give you an example in some cities in europe there are parking lots where the way you pay is by entering the license number of the car in the system and then it charges you money somehow but this is a surveillance system it means they know exactly which cards have been parked everywhere at any time that should be illegal it should be illegal to set up a system like that for the simple reason that there are ways to collect money for parking without identifying every car therefore it should be illegal to do it by identifying every car that's what it means to prohibit all avoidable collection of identifying information allow people to do things anonymously someone's asking about his his fundamental right to sell programs and how that relates to open source principles there are no open source principles the whole point of open source was not to have principles not to make it a matter of principle because the free software movement is based on specific principles and the whole point of open source was not to talk about those principles to forget about that to present it as a matter of practical advantages only now i know i like the practical advantages too i'm not saying forget about all practical advantages but i am saying most important is the principle of users freedom in their use of programs now the other thing it mentions is sell programs but that's ambiguous you know with free software you can sell copies that's selling software but not in the way proprietary companies do it so you've got to be careful about terminology the free software movement accepts and doesn't object to selling copies of programs as long as they come with freedom but if they don't come with freedom then they're non-free software and that's an injustice and uh if you're wise you won't buy and there's a fundamental fallacy the in the argument that some people try to make about uh well we need to be able to get money in order to pay for development of software why is it is development of software a good thing do we want software to be developed that argument assumes yes of course developing software is a good thing i don't agree i think that developing software is a good thing if the software is free and it's a bad thing if the software is not free so to assume some simple statement like developing software is good that's too simplistic i don't agree with that there has to be a condition on it developing free software is good developing proprietary software is bad now the argument won't go through starting from that from that starting point so that's the place where the fallacy is usually introduced what is your personal attitude to the modern service based at model well i wouldn't use any of those disservices because they deny the user control over the computing in order for free software to give you control over your computing you need to be running your own copy and so if the copy that's doing your computing belongs to some service company and is running in that company's computers and you don't you can't even see the source of that and if they showed you source you wouldn't be sure that that source matches what's actually running in their computer you can't trust that now i don't mind using the web to communicate with an organization just as i can commun communicate with an organization by talking with a clerk on the phone okay well if i do the same thing with a web browser that's okay too but it's only okay if it's limited to communication if they start trying to do my computing for me that's not right and if they send non-free software to run in my browser of course that's unacceptable so it has to be kept to a matter of communication just as if you were talking over the phone with a representative of the company you say what you want uh the representative says what it costs you say yes or no a deal is made but they don't get any other power over you what do i think about video games well i think they can be fun but i wouldn't use a non-free one uh uh what do you think about the quote mit license unquote that term is misleading there are actually two different licenses that people are referring to one is the x11 license and the other is the expat license they're pretty similar both of them are free licenses they are non-copy left weak pushover licenses look at license list.html for all questions like that the camera in the middle of the room running by non-free driver like at your coffee machine or other home device those shouldn't have cameras you should put tape over their cameras so that they can't see you but basically i wouldn't want to have a coffee maker even if i liked coffee i wouldn't allow a coffee maker that was talking over the internet to somebody else that's unacceptable any product i buy for my home is not going to talk on the internet to anyone it can only talk to my computer through a secure interface so that it's so it's basically an appliance not a computer so that nothing can change any software in it which means the software might as well be a chip as far as freedom and security are concerned what is an ideal future well there are many political issues in life but i assume we're talking about in regard to software it would be uh well all software should be free meaning every user of the software gets the for free could you pick all those up [Music] uh but other than that as far as technical things are concerned basically that's a matter of taste i don't have strong opinions about what you should like in the software you run have you heard about serenity os i don't recall if i ever heard of it how do you see the future of free software well i used to say that i couldn't see the future my crystal ball was full of clouds but then people started talking about the cloud well that's nonsense the only cloud is in the mind of users that think that there's a cloud there is no cloud only various companies computers and they do things with them that you don't know and you can't tell and you shouldn't trust and trust your computing to them could i take a photo with you not under these circumstances i'm sorry uh ordinarily i would but i don't want to have a lot of people coming around me it's not safe sorry i wish i could what do you think about facebook and other companies providing user personal data to government agencies they shouldn't be collecting that data the root of these problems is not how that not when the data is used it's when the data is collected and if we focus on that we will see what would be a real solution focusing on trying to limit the way the data gets used tends to be ineffective it's very hard to stop the data from being misused especially when governments are involved they keep finding hidden ways to pressure those that collect the data to hand it over secretly but if it's illegal to have a system that can get the data from you at all it's easier to verify that that that law is not being violated is the fsf planning to run a system of of certifications no it's a giant job and we don't have resources for that in principle it would be fine but uh uh but we're not in a position to do it should your user scripts plugins also be free well yes but i've never said that you have an obligation to distribute copies of a program if you just want to run it yourself a program that you write and you use is free because every user has the four freedoms look at all the users there's you you're the only user and you have the four freedoms because you wrote it so it is free software in a trivial way and you're free to release copies if you wish but you're not obligated to so writing a program and using it yourself i think is fine you don't have to release it if it's really useful it might be a really good thing i might join people in saying hey please finish this up and release it because it would be a good contribution to the community but i wouldn't say you have no right to keep this private how can you assess the current state of free software i can't systematically do that i wouldn't know how i just hear some things and that's all i can go by thank you thank you nowadays people speak about danger of system d uh i don't have a strong opinion about that mainly because it is free software which version of office software do you use i use libra office i don't use it very often i prefer to do my editing in emacs [Applause] is it ethical to ever run proprietary software as a demo of of the history of computing in museums of computer history yeah i guess so if you're not trying to really do your computing with it but just show something about it i think that's okay another situation is suppose you're trying to see what features non-free software has now so you can implement the same feature that's perfectly fine why not i used to do that i we bought a computer and it would come with windows on it and i might play around with it for a little while to see what it was like before the sysadmin erased it this is a question about the xdg desktop specification which i just don't know sorry we have to stop okay well i'll just keep going and maybe i can answer all these in 20 minutes let's see ah someone's asking me what i think about the invidious front ends for youtube i think that's great and knitter i don't use knitter very much but i think i've used it a couple of times oh it's good and yeah those sorts of things are good now there's a special point here those are proxies for accessing an existing website that you want to look at and they save you they enable you to avoid running the non-free javascript that those websites send so that's that's good but the point is why is it okay that the proxy is a website it's because what it's doing is accessing another website so the fact that you're using the web to do this job is not the fault of the proxy it's part of what you're actually trying to do to use if what you were trying to do did not involve looking at a website then to try to do it for you with a website would be bad it would mean you'd be losing control you should have a free program you'd run on your own machine to do the job but because this is a matter of how you're going to look at something on youtube or twitter or reddit and those you are websites to look at it's okay for the solution to take the form of a proxy website how to make free software reliable it is pretty reliable should all software be free yes in the sense that if you get a copy of a program it should come with the source code and the four freedoms always so this question raised whether it's ever whether there's ever a non-free program that is good well in practical terms it is possible for a non-free program to do something that's very useful but why is that software non-free it didn't have to be non-free if our society were set up differently that same program could have been written and made free so the point is we should change society so that when people develop software they release that software as free software and then we wouldn't have to have you know that there wouldn't be the idea that you're stuck with non-free software or nothing that's what we have to change i have trouble understanding this i just can't i'm just can't make out the words really sorry is there a social network or messenger with gnu license i think there are several i don't use them see often i'm doing work and i don't have a net connection so i just don't use instant type anything i don't find any kind of social network con convenient even if it respects my freedom it's better for me to use email what do you think about people writing you emails and publishing or showing your answers somewhere well i realize that that can happen so i try to think about what i'm going to say what for your opinion should be improved in ukraine well this is my third day in ukraine so i don't know a lot about ukraine now yesterday i found out about government forms that you have to sign digitally and the person who was telling me about this said that he had to sign them with non-free software and that made him feel really mistreated by the government except that i hear that today there was a presentation about free software which can sign those things so okay problem seems to be solved or almost finished being solved maybe it's necessary to develop convenient user applications to do signatures that the government will accept if so then that's an important project to work on but it was really nice to hear that you know just as soon as i heard about the problem i found out that a solution was already underway my friend popka has a birthday today well uh happy birthday polka [Applause] and may all your software be free [Applause] uh so i wish you a long life of using svobodni software what do you think about ubuntu ubuntu is a distribution of gnu slash linux so the right term for it would be ubuntu linux unfortunately it is not a free distribution it contains substantial amounts of non-free software so i wouldn't recommend using it what do you think about qt license well qt is if i remember right is released under gpl version 2 or no gpl version 3 only and for the moment that's fine but if we ever have a gpl4 that will be a problem so i want to talk with qt's developers about working out a way to advance it to gpl4 someday if there is ever a gpl for how do you suppose to tax rich people if the government shouldn't have their named lists oh well yeah we need to require people to report their income and we when businesses send money to shareholders for instance that has to be registered but ordinary transactions like what you bought in the store they should not be registered base you know when if you buy or sell a house that should be registered but if you buy say a chicken that should not be registered will free software supplant proprietary someday that's up to you if you fight hard then yes because basically i don't try to see the future because that's too hard what i need to know is what would be good for me to do today and that's a lot easier because you don't have to know if you're going to win when there's any kind of conflict it's hard to know who's going to win it's much easier to know how to fight and help your side win do your best when will we see gnu smartphone well i can imagine various meanings for that the guinea project develops an operating system not hardware but there have there are some smartphone models that can run the gnu system so maybe they exist already i don't know exactly what's good or bad about pine phone not everything i have seen one i know that to turn the microphone on and off you have to push a tiny dip switch so if you want the microphone to be on only when you're only when you're talking on it that's hard because that means when someone calls you you've got to push the dip switch with some tool and then answer the phone so you've got to be really fast at i can't hear you what okay i'm afraid i don't understand it's a pine phone and then you said something else i couldn't hear yeah i know what i was thinking is i i wanted to turn the microphone on only when i wanted to speak to someone and that's not easy to do physically because the switch is too small right well that's what i wanted to say uh does not free software allow for more piracy to take place what okay thank you speak loud to me always please uh well pirates as far as i know don't use software they use guns [Applause] plea if you're talking about sharing copies of things with other people please do not insult sharing by calling the sharing piracy that's propaganda for repressive tyrants so let's reject their terminology what do you think about biometric passports i find them menacing very good tool for tyrants but think about it many of you are probably accustomed to having a national id card i consider that dangerous if c language standard is not free and it isn't would you say the language is free as i said i don't think it's meaningful to ask whether a language is free this the c language has a free compiler and that's enough that's enough to enable us to use c programs in freedom and therefore it's enough however i am working on a user's manual which when finished will be free can you make a parallel between linux kernel for gnu software with risc-5 cpu well the risc-5 cpu is a free well it's a free cpu design which is being made into physical hardware and i think that's a very good thing to do but there is one flaw from my practical point of view which is they're making a cpu for tiny computers and a risk 5 cpu for server powerful computers but not one for a laptop which is what i actually need i sure wish they would make one for a laptop and then i'd be able to get a a risk 5 laptop that wouldn't need any non-free software there'd be no management engine what do you think about windows 11 it's it's non-free software so it's unjust and we know it is malware in various ways these days you can't even start using a computer with windows without making an account on microsoft's servers that's vicious what do you think about artificial intelligence well i see dangers in it of various kinds uh basically companies using it can have more power over people they already have too much power over people i think it is fine to use this free software if it is dependent on which oh wait where's the start i can't tell where this starts [Music] yes okay my question do you think it is fine to use this free software if it is dependent on non-free network services well actually i wouldn't put it that way it's not the case that invidious is a service of its own but it's for they gratuitously made it dependent on youtube that's not what is going on what's going on is people want to look at things at youtube and invidious gives you a way to do that now uh it doesn't make sense to ask whether a service is free or not not if you're trying to use the concept of free software that's just not applicable to a service and the reason is there's no way to copy a service and you can't distribute a service in the same sense a program is something that you can make copies of and you can change a copy and then you can make cut more you can make more copies of that changed one and you can some of these copies you can distribute to others you can give them you can sell them these are all things that are possible with software and because these things are possible the concept of free software becomes meaningful and interesting you can't do these things with a service like youtube they're just impossible they don't make sense and as a result it doesn't make sense to ask whether youtube is libra it does make sense to ask whether you can access it using exclusively libra software that makes sense but other than that the the things the aspects of youtube which are good or bad in morals in a moral sense they're different aspects it's not like software youtube we know is implemented by software running on server computers but that's irrelevant to our judgment of youtube because we can't see that we just know that that's the only way it can be done but it how it's done has no direct effect on us at all and that's true with any network service how it's implemented has no direct effect on us all that matters to us is its input output behavior and the input behavior is very important because what data does it get about us what which inputs are spying on us that's very important which inputs are collecting personal data about us that's important and that's something that we can tell by examining the communication we can never see the implementation the internals of whatever is going on in the servers but we can check how much data it's collecting about us because we can see what is what data are sent to the server so that those are the ways we can form a judgment a moral judgment about a server what does it do what data does it get from us because the data it doesn't get it can't ever show to anyone and that's the only way we can ever be sure that it won't show data to anyone is if it doesn't get the data so i say that's the stage at which we need to make our laws that we need to check them what data is the system getting from us so i'm finished please do not come up here please do not come up here i don't want to be surrounded by people it's just not safe these days i'm sorry and please join the free software foundation as an associate member and if you wish to you could say that you want the foundation to carry on based on the course i have set [Applause] you

Channel: OSDNConf

Views: 10,507

Keywords:

Id: VpCfN5NSIcQ

Length: 162min 37sec (9757 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021