Blau: Starting trasmission, let's check the transmission on our websites, webpages. Let me reload it.
Blau: OK, let me see if the stream has started. If you are already listening, let me know via chat in the debxp room both on Freenode and Matrix network.
Blau: I'm awaiting for your OK on chats. Let me see. We're live, Bandali! Thank you Bandali! Bandali is on our IRC.
Blau: So, there we go! What's up folks? Everything “numa nice”? Blau here, and as you can see this is a Monday's Live, a little bit different from the others to start with.
Blau: We're speaking in English, or trying to speak in something similar to English, which is not something easy for me but no problems because we are among friends and everything is possible “with a little help from our friends”.
Blau: Second, what makes our live really special is our guest today, Richard Stallman, who generously accepted the invitation to chat with us and all debxp community today.
Blau: But before talking about our guest, I'd like to thank: Kretcheu for the initiative, he's really the guilty one for this Live; Oliva for making the bridge for us;
Blau: Amin Bandali for the technical support, so that this live streaming could happen and of course to all our team that worked very hard organising this event.
Blau: Finally unlike our usual lives, the questions were sent in advance and we drafted the topics for our conversation based on them. Based on your questions, from our community.
Blau: But you guys and girls still can ask questions via IRC or the Matrix network. We will write them down and if there's time, Richard will be able to decide which one he wants to answer.
Blau: Well, without further ado, Richard, good evening, thank you very much for accepting our invitation. We are very excited about your presence here.
Blau: It's a tradition here in our Mondays' Lives that all participants and guests give a brief greeting or make a short introduction on the topic of the night or about themselves, before the conversation actually begins.
Blau: So to make that short today, this time, I'll ask Kretcheu and Oliva to say a few words to introduce you to our community. Kretcheu thank you again and please go ahead.
Kretcheu: Good evening Blau! Thank you again for the opportunity. Good evening Igor, Alex, Juca, Richard and everybody.
Kretcheu: Richard Stallman: the creator of the Free Software Movement, GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation, and still our cornerstone. Today I'd like to start telling you a story.
Kretcheu: Some day at a BBQ, I invited Richard to play fussball (“totó”, “pebolim” in Portuguese) and he answered me: “I don't like competitions”.
Kretcheu: Despite his authority, I disagreed. I said “The free software model competes against the non-free software model”.
Kretcheu: He told me “no, it's not a competition. They want to f* us! So this is a war! I don't like competitions but I like war”. Welcome our Free Software warrior!
Stallman: What I probably said was “I don't understand competition, but I understand war”. If you don't have to fight someone, why fight? It makes no sense to me.
Stallman: I'd rather not engage in something like feels like a fight with somebody who's not an enemy. So this is why I don't understand competition in any deep sense.
Stallman: Well I know something about it of course, I live in a world, I see competition going on — it doesn't make emotional sense to me. Kretcheu: I understand.
Stallman: What we are doing to prorietary software is, first step: escape from it; second step: get rid of it. Blau: OK! Oliva…
Oliva: Good evening everyone, it's a great honour to be here to have Richard tonight. Richard has been an inspiration to me for over 25 years, since I met him face-to-face.
Oliva: I think introducing him is really not necessary. Ladies and getlemen, I give you Richard Stallman!
Blau: Great, great, Oliva. Well, Richard, for a start, make yourself at home. “A casa é sua”, how we say here.
Blau: In fact we do't usually do interviews here on our live streams. We prefer to see them as “bate-papos”, chats with friends guests, our community, on chat…
Blau: So if you have something to say before the questions we received that are no more than a guideline for us, please go ahead, be at ease, be at home.
Stallman: Please tell me, is there a time limit? Is there an ending time or are we going to go off as long as we feel like?
Blau: Juca, please… to me the sound faded a little bit, I couldn't undertand the final part of what you were saying.
Stallman: I'm asking whether we're going until a particular time or whether we will continue as long as we wish.
Blau: This lives usually goes for one and a half to two hours. Stallman: OK, now I know.
Kretcheu: If you want more, no problem for us. Stallman: I will probably want… I will be yearning to go back to answering my email, which I have too much of.
Oliva: We can send you questions via email! [laughs]
Blau: OK, the first question received here was… by the way it was Igor here who made this question: have you ever tried feijoada or caipirinha?
Stallman: I've tried feijoada, it's not one of my favourite dishes. Caiprinha no, because in general I mostly do not take alcohol,
Stallman: with exceptions of wines if I like the taste and I don't have much of that. I do not want to be under the influence of alcohol ever.
Blau: Great. Stallman: And I don't like the taste of any form of alcohol except some wines.
Stallman: It's that these drinks taste lke alcohol! Except for beer which tastes sort of bitter and unpleaseant. So, really no thanks!
Blau: And what about this drink? Stallman: I can't tell what it is.
Blau: GNU Linux! This is just an olive oil bottle and I made this label similar to some alcohol but that's my favourite drink, GNU!
Stallman: Well… I often have olive oil, but don`t generaly drink it. 10:23.000 ---> 10:34.000 Blau: Great [laughs] Can you tell us about the very beginning of the free software movement and GNU project,
Blau: specially a little before, when you were with your community of hackers in universities? What can you tell us about that time? To me that time seems to be very cool…
Stallman: It was, but let me start please… Blau: OK.
Stallman: because I'm going to have a lot of questions to answer.
Stallman: So let me make this whole thing efficient: you would like to know about that time before I started the GNU project? Blau: Yes.
Stallman: In the 1970s I was part of a community of hackers that shared software. Now, the software was developed mainly by us hackers
Stallman: with ocasionally other contributors, and it included various universities, sometimes companies as well.
Stallman: The lab where I worked was, in some sense, the deepest part of that, because we used the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), which was written entirely by hackers.
Stallman: Now, the Stanford AI Lab started with a version of Digital's PDP-10 Timesharing System, back when that was, as far as I know, legally not copyrighted.
Stallman: Even then, they had the source code and they started making lots of changes to that. But we developed one from zero, using some of the software that had been used on the PDP-6 before timesharing.
Stallman: So we were in a world of free software and we all shared the software. Whenever somebody wanted a copy of a program we were working on, we would say: “here it is!”
Stallman: That was our way of life, it was shocking to do anything else, and at the beginning of my time in it, which was 1971, this was not totally unusual.
Stallman: There were a lot of computers which came with an operating system in source code, with nothing intending to stop people from reistributing it.
Stallman: In all the parts of the world there wasn't much non-free software. Although during the 1970s that changed and non-free software started encrouching and spread all around.
Stallman: By the end of the 70s, in most places, there was no free software anymore. Non-free software had become the norm and ocasionally circunstances made the difference visible to me.
Stallman: For instance, around 1981 or so, I suggested to somebody who was in charge of computer facilities at Harvard,
Stallman: because they were running strict security on these computers, I said
Stallman: “how about if you let each floor of a living unit of one of the houses have its own computer and have a few students from that floor be the system administrators?
Stallman: That way they could learn to be good system administrators and at the same time, instead of iron discipline, rule and subjection, they could teach people on their floor, who knew each other anyway,
Stallman: to get along in the computer the way they got along in physical space, that is, as neighbors rather than people suspicious of invading everyone else.”
Stallman: The answer I got surprised me: “we have proprietary software in these computers and we promised not to let any student get a copy of it.”
Stallman: Before that I didn't realize that non-free software was one of the drivers of policitated timesharing. It turns out that if you had a timesharing computer, with various users,
Stallman: the only way to maintain security for any user against the other users is to treat them all like subjects of a policitate. I had seen the document that they made all students agree to, which basically said:
Stallman: “if we think that you're trying to break any of these rules, that is breaking the rule and you'll be kicked off the computer.”
Stallman: What a repression! That was a cause that we at the MIT Artificial Inteligence Lab were very up and arms against.
Stallman: In our timesharing system, the Incompatible Timesharing System, we didn't implement security. We didn't want any sort of security features because the older hackers have realized that,
Stallman: if they implemented some security, the administrators would use it to control everybody. But the administrators were not able to implement the security, so the hackers decided:
Stallman: “we won't given them theses systems to control us with. We won't let them tell who's doing what. We won't write anything to keep track of who's doing what.” That was quite effective during the 70s.
Stallman: In any case, this connected in my mind: non-free software, which I was comming to recognize as oppressive, with passwords and file permissions, which I already thought as repressive along with basically every body there.
Stallman: That world continued to some extent until the PDP-10 died. It died and wasn't repaired because the community had already died.
Stallman: That's because they had gone to work for one of the two competing Lisp machine companies, there was LMI and Symbolics, and only two of us remained at the MIT AI Lab, which meant that the hacker community was basically dead.
Stallman: Then one of them was working part-time for MIT and for LMI, and somebody from Symbolics pointed out that there was an MIT rule saying that he couldn't do that, so he had to leave, and I was the last hacker at the AI Lab.
Stallman: Well, I don't take up a lot of time with this because you can read about this in the last chapter of the book Hackers by Steve Levy,
Stallman: the point is, the hacker community had died, the free software that we had used was all dead because it was written for a particular computer and that was dead.
Stallman: Everything was gone! So, what could I do? I had to start another community and that's what I did with the GNU project!
Stallman: I said: “let's make another world of free software and invite a lot more people into it and try to make a community in which we can do everything using free software and we never have to run a non-free program.”
Juca: I had a quick follow-up question which was actually about the Steve Levy's book. I would ask you if you agree with the depiction of the history that is in the book, is it accurate?
Stallman: Well what is in the last chapter was accurate. However the first section of the book was about things at the MIT AI Lab before I was there
Stallman: so, you know, as far as I know it's accurate but I couldn't tell, for the most part I learned things from there too. And the other two major sections were about other communities which I didn't know a lot about.
Blau: Okey, any more… Stallman: And most of them were doing non-free software. Like the games, which were just covered in the third of the three main sections of that book were non-free.
Stallman: And not only that, they ran on microcomputers and I never worked with microcomputers. My home computer was a PDP-10.
Stallman: It didn't belong to me but as one of the system hackers it might as well have been my computer although whatever I implemented on it was genelly for the use of people at the lab.
Blau: Okey, anyone else? Let's go ahead. Other question is: why and how to encourage people to fight for their freedoms in general?
Stallman: I don't know how to explain to you why freedom is important. Freedom is so fundamental that either you get it or you don't. I've seen people argue for freedom based on other values but, for me those other values are less important.
Stallman: Some people argue that freedom leads to more progress. Freedom is more important than progress. And all the other things that you can try to argue for something based on are less crucial than freedom.
Stallman: But we can look around today and see the reason why software must be free, and that is non-free software is generally malware. “Malware” means software designed to mistreat the user.
Stallman: Mostly when people talk about that they presume that the malware is something that wasn't supposed to be in the computer at all, and was put in by somebody who wasn't supposed to have anything to do with that computer.
Stallman: But that's closing your eyes to the most common malware, which is proprietary software developed by companies that make operating systems or apps,
Stallman: and it's software that was intended to be in the computer but was also designed to mistreat the user. Microsoft Windows, MacOS are malware.
Stallman: Android is malware, because there are parts that are free software, but others are non-free and some of them are malware. And iOS, Apple's mobile operating system for the iMonsters, that's malware.
Stallman: And ChromeOS is malware, because Chrome is malware. You've got to expect this. Experimental surveys have found that most apps available for mobile devices are malware.
Stallman: Why is this? If a company controls what's in the program, that company has ways to benefit by mistreating users and since it controls the code of the program, no one can stop it.
Stallman: There are no checks on what the company can get away with except if it does something so horrible that users will stop using it.
Stallman: One of the malicious functionalities they tend to put in is various things that make it hard for users to move away or stop using it.
Stallman: So they do that and when the users see that they have become addicted and screwed at that point is hard for them to do anything about it.
Stallman: So, if you don't want the software mistreat you, you've gotta make sure that the users control it, and the way to do that is free software.
Kretcheu: Absolutely. Blau: You mean freedom of choice is less important than freedom itself.
Stallman: Absolutely. Choosing between a limited set of options is a very small example of freedom. Yes, it is an example of freedom, but it's not much.
Stallman: If you have a choice between Windows and MacOS, how much freedom is that? That means that you can choose your master. But freedom means not having a master.
Stallman: People who are not programmers some times ask “why does this matter to a non-programmer?” Well, it's true that if you are not a programmer you're not going to change the code of the programs you're running yourself,
Stallman: but if the program is free and users are free to change it there will be various groups of users working on versions that are changed in this way or that and,
Stallman: you and other users can get together with those groups and say to them: “you know… could you add a feature to do this? could you change that feature a little because I find it annoying the way it works”, you can do that.
Stallman: If you and a few friends and a few programmers decide to, this group can make a modified version to do whatever it is those people want and then you get what you want.
Stallman: You can't do that with a non-free program because you and those other people you can't get the source code. You're not allowed to make and let alone release a modified version. With free software you can.
Blau: Related to this… we have another question about browser-based software, software as a substitute of service.
Stallman: Actually it's the opposite. It's Service As A Software Substitute, that's what you are talking about. But that's actually different, that's a different thing.
Stallman: Service as a Software Substitute means you have some computing you wanna do but instead of doing it on your own computer you send it to some server,
Stallman: where software that you'll never get runs and does that computing job and shows you the result. And the moral problem with that is that you don't get to control the software that does your computing, you don't even have it on your computer!
Stallman: So that's equivalent of using a non-free program. In other words it might look like a solution especially if you realize “well, this way I avoid having a non-free program on my computer”, ENDWEBVTT 29:25.000 Stallman: but the way I use to describe the problem twenty years ago sounded like that's a solution, you avoid having a non-free program on your computer, but it doesn't give you control over the computing that's done because the program doing this computing is running in a server and you can't touch it there. But browser-based software is a different problem. Stallman: It means that you run a program that was sent straight to your browser from someone else's server. So you still depend on that server. It controls what's going to run on your machine. Now, if the software is free there are some ways, although a bit inconvenient, to come up with changes, patches to put in to that program when it gets into your machine. There's a thing to do this, I've never used. It's just not an easy thing to do. It's not easy for the community to mantain and release modified versions that way. Stallman: Now, if the server does nothing, absolutely nothing except send that program to your browser when you want that program, well you could make a different, suppose it is free software and you download the source and you make a modified version, you can put that on a different server and say “if you wanna run my version, come to my server” and others could do likewise, this could be ok, you could make your own computer, even your own laptop be a server for itself and install the version that you like and run that. Then it becomes architecturally complicated and twisted but mainly that doesn't matter, especially if you don't know this once it's set up. But when that program is inherently tied to using a particular service than it's just no good, that software has gotta be something that's released and so that you can install the version you like. Basically JavaScript as Alex put it turns the web into an app store, except in some ways it's the worse of all the app stores. So that's not a solution either. People who like that like it for convenience. You don't have to install anything, you don't need to think about that. Well, yeah I see the point, but convenience must *not* be the primary value. Because, if it is, you will be at the mercy of companies that know how to make things very convenient. And we know that uh… the company that is highly reputed for making things convenient is also highly tyrannical both for itself for its commercial own commercial benefit and for various tyrannical governments. (long pause) And that company by the way is Apple. Blau: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google… What more? GAFAM. Stallman: Well, they are different. They do different things. I condemn all of them but for different reasons. Blau: That lead us to another question here about a problem we are facing here in Brazil that is the adoption of non-free software in public education. The question is: what's the best way for the free software movement to react to big tech's vendor lock-in strategies over schools and government institutions? Stallman: As far as I can tell… Well, first of all you've gotta distinguish between government institutions and schools, even though the public schools are government institutions they are not, they do something very different. See, most government institutions, most government agencies run a lot of software internally and if the government is using non-free software that's a very bad thing for the country, it means that the proprietary software developer has power over the country. Stallman: The crucial reason for the State to move to free software is digital sovereignty of the country. The state must have control over all the software that does the state's computing, rather than letting some private interest have control over the state's computing. However, when the public institution, the governance agency deals with the public, that raises a different issue! It must not make the public run any non-free software! If it does to to make people run non-free software is directly to oppress them! Now, the schools are a big example of this, because all they make the students run the non-free software. If the school administration were running the non-free software, that would be comparable to most government agencies! It would be a violation of the country's digital sovereignty, but it would not directly oppress masses of people. When the schools make their students run non-free software, that oppresses every student! How do you fight back against this? I can't see any way, except the methods that people use against other kinds of oppression! Which are often difficult. Basically, individual activists can start the struggle by refusing! By saying: “I won't run that! So, give me another way i can do this! Come up with a way that i can do my classes without using any of that stuff!”. Now, in gnu.org/education, unfortunately I don't remember the whole URL but you will find the article written by a polish graduate student about how he finished his academic year rejecting every non-free program that his teachers tried to make him run. And he didn't have one simple method to do it either! He was flexible and clever! He didn't give up! He kept looking for another way! And in all these different cases, with different teachers, he found a way that the teacher would eventually accept, so that he could do his work. So, you know, if you're just persistent and firm, you can often succeed! And it's very important to do so. But to change the schools themselves, we need larger groups of people in one place. We need enough people to go to the school and say: “This is unacceptable! Don't you dare make a google account for our children! Don't you dare make a Microsoft account! Don't you dare make an Apple account! Don't you dare make a Canvas account…” you know, what ever kind of account it might be… don't do it! That's letting a company spy on our children and it doesn't matter what your contract with them says, because we don't trust them! We don't believe them! Juca: I had an occasion on my own university course where i was supposedly had to use a non-free software for an assignment and the way that i solved the problem, at least for me, was that… Well after talking to the professor and he kind of refused my propositions of using something else, in the end i simply did not do the assignment, get a zero grade in that specific assignment but then i was good enough in the other assignments in order to pass. Stallman: Yeah a friend of mine, took an online course about copy right and when he saw that the course required him to use non-free programs, he wouldn't use them and so he failed the course. He had the courage to say: “Well i'll fail this course rather than go along with these requirements” i wish he had published an article abou tthis in a very visible place because he would have taught people something. Blau: Kretcheu? Kretcheu: Yes, here we have another problem, because we need to show the people, not only the students, but the teachers too, because many, very many teachers don't understand and think that google accounts for free it's a good! Stallman: Well yeah a lot of people have been confused… uh they think that if you get something gratis that that means everything is fine. But on the other hand, a lot of people are aware that what google does is spy on people. So, i don't know, maybe in brazil a lot of people haven't got that message yet. In the US, people who have some idea of things, are getting that message and people… uh you know, the examples of what's going on in China… uh you know, these and condemnation of amazon for spying on people… these are starting to spread that message. The part that is not spreading very much yet is how do you make software not spy on you? The answer is: choose free software only. That will give the community the chance to make sure it doesn't spy on you. But we have to realize that: that only works for the software that runs in your computer. But there are other systems that spy on people. Uh… which don't do it by running in your computer so there are systems you need to talk with, and they can collect data about you and that's spying on you. They have to be designed to let you be anonymous. And that has to be a law! The law i should say that you need to… uh, that systems must be designed not to collect any data about persons, unless it is impossible to do anything like that job without that data. In in various cities, i've come across systems where to pay to park the car you have to enter the car's license plate in a digital system, a computer. Now, whether you pay properly or not, either way, that system knows where you parked. It's a mass surveillance system! That should be illegal, because we do know of ways to charge for parking without recording the identity of each car at parks. They may be a little less efficient, well to hell with efficiency! That'sa little bit more efficiency should, in terms of how much work it is to collect the money, is not an excuse to track everyone! Unless we take that very strict interpretation of necessary, we will find constant efforts to justify surveillance of everyone. Juca: There's one case that concerns me here in brazil, i heard that there's a proposition of a new law to enable or even to require that the public the roads that connect cities have a system for charging the fees to use the roads automatically, and then people would have to sign up to those systems, in order to travel in those roads. And i'm concerned that it won't be possible to travel on the roads without using such a system… It's not clear how it would be implemented or whether it would becompletely mandatory for everybody or not, but it concerns me that it probably something like that might happen. Stallman: It concerns me too… In fact, they did something like that here in massachusetts. You can't pay toll without doing so through methods that Stallman: identify you. And that's a [00:33:22] N/A problem! Anonymous toll collection is a problem that was solved decades ago by David Chaum, who invented the blind signature. It wasn't adopted but it's established technology and now we have a convenient implementation called gnu taler. So you could make a radio toll paying device which would look just like the ones that people actually use that work by identifying them selves, except that it could be anonymous and it would have power tokens, and when you go past the radio system that collects toll. Your computer… your little portable total paying computer, would send a taler token to the highway server and the highway server would know that toll was paid but it wouldn't be able to tell who paid. Now, to prevent tracking everyone on the roads, it needs to be illegal to set up a device to record the license plate of every car that passes by. Or to systematically record license plates of cars passing by. There should be an exception namely a court should be allowed to order specific surveillance in a particular place for a certain period of time… you know treat it the same way as listening to phone calls… the state can get permission to listen to phone calls, but is not allowed to just do so on a blanket massive basis! That's necessary for the sake of people's freedom. Anyway, the new taler already works! It's not specifically designed for paying toll… You'd have to put it into a suitable device. No, it's designed mainly for use over the internet, for purchases… For purchases of access to something digital, it's obvious how that could work anonymously. The only thing that would need to know who you are is payment, and if payment doesn't need to identify you anymore, well the rest can be anonymous, that'seasy! For buying physical goods, there's a question of how to arrange to deliver it to you! But if there are stores with lots of boxes, where things get delivered, you can choose one you could buy a physical object, specify where it should bedelivered, pay for it, get a receipt — a digital receipt which is signed to validate it without knowing anything about who you are and all the store knows is which box is going to be delivered. Juca: I'd like to make a suggestion… Since you were telling me something that i didn't know about, you're telling that there exists technology that is implemented as free software and that solves this kind of problemand… I suppose that brazil is not the only country that has this kind of problem, it might be interesting from a campaign's perspective to try to map which are the countries that have laws or proposals of new laws… Stallman: It might be interesting! I can't do it! I'm busy, but if someone wants to do that that would be good! By the way, for more information about gnu taler, look at taler.net. That word was the name of a german coin in the 17th and that's where the word dollar came from. Juca: I was not specifically talking about you doing it, but actually the FSA as an organization… Stallman: Well, sorry, the FSF hasn't got that much in the way of resources. It can't just go out and do another thing! It needs money to pay somebody to do another thing. And where does the money come from? It comes mainly from individuals! So you could join the free software foundation as an associate member Juca: I'm a member Stallman: Oh, thank you! Well that's where the money comes from! More associate members, means the FSF can do more! Stallman: And so i'd like to ask those of you and so i i'd like to ask those of you who are watching this conversation please join the free software foundation and you can also say that watching this conversation with me is what moved you to join! Blau: Okay! Can we move on to another question? Okay, another subject… I know this is the most important subject that we talk until now, but we have other questions, for example, about open source. Juka here with us made this question to send this question to us. Do you mind to explain the question to Stallman? Juca: Sure! Sure! The question is simple and you will recognize that sentence Richard. Why does open source misses the point of free software? Stallman: Well, you have to recognize that the term open source was invented in 1998 as a another way of talking about basically the same practice but without bringing up ethics. In other words, presenting it in purely practical terms! What were those people doing? And why was the result useful? So they formulated a way of talking about the same community, working on the same software, more or less the same software, but they did it without saying freedom! Without raising the issue of right versus wrong! Only what works better or what what doesn't work. Then they started an organization which wrote a definition of open source and it was pretty close to equivalent to the definition of free software but not exactly! And it was interpreted by different people! So the line ended up being drawn at a somewhat different place so there are some programs that they judge to be open source which we say are not free software! This is somewhat confusing, it's unfortunate! But the big difference is at the deepest level! The values! Because we say that a non-free program is an injustice! It's wrong to lead people touse a non-free program! It means that you're getting power over them! Or you're helping someone else get power over them! The open source people don't talk about this issue at all! And therefore i've refused, ever since 1998 i've refused to promote open source, that's not how i describe what i do! But you have to realize that all of the free programs we work on would fit the definition of open source. So at that level, free programs almost always are open source and almost all open source programs are free, though i know of a few exceptions. Juca: Did you refuse open source since the very first moment? Stallman: The first moment, it took me about a day, when Eric Raymond told me about their plan touse that term… I think he phoned me and he asked me if i would use the term. And i said i'll have to think about it. And by the next day I realized that it would be very unwise for me to promote the term open source. It would be self-defeating, because it would bury even more the idea of freedom. Now in english the word free has the problem that people may think it means gratis, but what can you do? We don't have a better word. Stallman: Sometimes we say libre borrowing from french or spanish on to make the distinction clearer. But in portuguese when you say livre people won't think that means gratis. So, you have it completely clear! Just don't use the english word free! That's just that's borrowing an ambiguity that you don't need! Kretcheu: And Richard, how do you feel, or even better, how do you react when people nominate you as a open source father? Stallman: You know i used to have a clever response to that but it's been so many years that that i don't remember what it was… I just have a vague memory that i had a clever reply… Do you remember? Kretcheu: Yeah! Stallman: Tell me, tell us! Kretcheu: Yes is about some sperm… even only if some body get your sperm… Stallman: All right, conceived with stolen sperm without my knowledge or consent. Kretcheu: Yes hehe nice! Blau: Ok, ayuh well… Stallman: But it's been a long time since anybody called me that! Nowadays the fashion is not to admit i did anything good for anyone! Blau: Perfect, still about open source… I have to confess i'm really uncomfortable with the kernel I use. I'm not happy with a linux kernel. I use linux libre, thank you Oliva! And we have a question here that reflects sort of the my feelings about kernel linux… Do you think it's time for us to go and find another kernel or develop another kernel? Stallman: I think that's a silly sort of question, no please, no offense meant! So why should it be time to replace a free program? Especially a very big free program which is a tremendous amount of work? Blau: Okay… Stallman: Which includes lots of device drivers… And how are you going to replace all of those? It's it's just… You know… We tried developing a different kernel. Now it wasn't meant as are placement for linux. We started before linux, but the problem we ran into was we had chosen an advanced design using a microkernel and processes that would communicate and it turned out to have a lot of problems — fundamental problems — in that design that no one has a way to fix! And people don't use it. Kretcheu: Do you have some regrets? Stallman: Well, yes, in a way maybe we should have started developing a kernel using the old-fashioned obvious monolithic architecture. Who knows? Ultimately though, it turned out that not to be a big problem in practice because we do have linux! And linux is free software, except that in the usual release there are some firmware blobs which are basically their binary code dressed up as a list of numbers. So, the purpose of linux libre is delete those, then you get a free program. Now, if the developers of linux were free software activists, they would never have agreed to include those blobs in it. That's too bad! Torvalds never was a supporter of the free software movement! What can you do? In fact … Stallman: … he was one of the people who had open source type ideas before the term open source was coined. You know, those ideas didn't began in 1998. Lots of people sort of liked free software but found the idea of the Free Software movement to be too radical and simply never agreed with it. Blau: Well, thank you. Kretcheu: I think we have other questions. Blau: Yeah. Igor… Kretcheu: ? including. Blau: Igor could read those questions for us? Kretcheu: Can you? Stallman: I see there's there are some questions in my chat that I haven't seen. Blau: Yeah. Stallman: You want me to start answering these? Ok. About “What do you think about the ethical hacking movement?” Well, I have to explain that hacking meant playing around in clever ? funny ways. They didn't all have to be funny, some of them were just impressive. So, in the 1970s when I said I was a hacker I meant the same thing that the other hackers meant. Enjoying a certain kind of playful cleverness. Now, one of the domains in which people practiced this playful cleverness was getting through computer security. But remember: these were big computers that belonged to the university. In the 1960s there were no personal computers, there were no microcomputers. If you were a student, [and] you wanted to use a computer, it was a computer at a university, and the question is: did they turn it off that night? You know, if you could learn to get into the computer room and turn it on, and managed to run it, you could use it at night when normally they weren't letting anyone use it. What a stupid waste. If this machine gave basically 24 hours of computer time per day, what a shame if people could only use it for 14 hours at the day, and 10 hours of the day was wasted. And [if] you had a project to do, why not go in and turn it on at night, and get some more work done? This was a computer that you were supposed to be using, but not at night. But on the other hand, breaking security could also be fun because it was clever. But back then, the hackers were not stealing money, they weren't breaking the security of bank computers or anything like that. It was academic computers that they were trying to use. But that was only one side of what people did with hacking, you know? At MIT there were a bunch of programs known as “display hacks” which was basically: write a program to make some pretty thing appear on the display console. And some of them were beautiful and interesting. We appreciated them. You may ?have come across “munching squares”, which was one of the old display hacks from the 1960s. It could be fascinating trying different parameters to control what it would do. Playful cleverness can be in any area. There are composers who composed pieces that were hacks in some ways. And that they demonstrated playful cleverness. There was a piece by ?(Gillion de Mashou) who lived in the 1300s and he was the first ?star composer in Europe. But this piece is a palindrome. Poeple still do sing it sometimes. So, that was hacking. It was also good music. Kretcheu: Sometimes just for fun. Stallman: Well, that's riht. That's the point. It's being clever for the pleasure of being clever, but also sometimes for a practical use. For me, a lot of the software I've written that people enjoy using, well, writing it was still hacking. I was still being playfully clever as I did it. Altought it was to address a practical job, not purely for amusement. Kretcheu: Are you nowadays hacking? Or not ?in ? Stallman: Not much in software. Problem is: I have work to do. Which takes up most of my day. And I wish ?(that were not so) but it's a responsibility and I can't just throw it away. Kretcheu: I think I… Stallman: I don't know who could take it up. Kretcheu: I think I… Stallman: In any case, this question is about “ethical hacking”. People got confused in the early 1980s and they thought that hacking meant breaking security. And the people who do “ethical hacking” means to them that they deal with the question of breaking security but not with the goal of breaking security and causing harm to people. Oh, well, what they are doing might be a good thing to do but I don't call hacking, because for most of ?(them|it) it isn't. When I wanna talk about breaking the security on a computer I call it cracking. Kretcheu: Yeah. Stallman: Which is a term that I coined in the 1980s so that we could talk about that without calling it hacking. Please don't use the term hacking to refer ?(to|of) breaking security. In the AI lab we never broke any security, we had a ?(time sharing system) that didn't have security in the 1970s, so nobody ever broke the security. Great. If you don't make the security you never need to break it. But we did plenty of hacking, it just wasn't cracking. So, if other people call that hacking, please, insist on calling it cracking when you talk about it. Kretcheu: Yes. Stallman: So I think I have answered that question and… Juca: I have just a quick comment. Stallman: Yeah. Juca: Regarding the display hacks. There is something that still hapens nowadays, but started in the 80s. Unfortunately a vast majority of those things are non-free, but some are free software, but there's a community of artists that use computers to make art. Unfortunately most of those are not sharing the source code under free terms, but- it happens throughout Europe- around the world, where people make this fun graphical, visual, multimedia, pieces of art by running code. And it is called the demoscene. And it is really unfortunate that they don't share so much. Stallman: ?There're needs to be a free demo movement. Juca: Yeah. There ars some people who adhere to these ideas and produce… Stallman: It would be good if they held free demo events where it is a rule that every program presented there, developed there, discussed there must be free. Because this- Juca: That ?(could|can) be interesting once we get back to have in-person conferences, right? Stallman: Well, even if it's a virtual conference it could still have this rule. Juca: Yeah, sure, sure. Stallman: So… Kretcheu: Stallman. You- Stallman: Yeah? Kretcheu: You talk about your work. So, Oliva puts there in the chat a question from audience. Maybe we have some billionaire there. The question is: What are the things the Free Software Foundation can do with more money? Or, if Free Software Foundation gets 1 billion tomorrow what is the most important- Stallman: I don't have any answer ready. You're asking me to make a list of things and then evaluate them all and compare. And sorry, I'm not ready to do that. I could think of some things to do. But I have to, you know, to say what is the most important ?I'll be in effect saying: I looked the whole list. And I haven't seen the whole list, I'm sorry. But I can give you some- Kretcheu: I- I think it's a good problem to deal with. So- Stallman: Well, actually I think it's very unlikely we'll get a billion dollars. Kretcheu: ? Free Software Foundation? Stallman: No, we did look at the question of what would we wanna do if we had one- if we had- could hire one more person. And we decided that the area would be legal. Things having to do with copyright and licenses. But it's not just legal ?, you know, we would want to talk more about the importance of copyleft. We need to do more to promote copyleft. And, if we got a billion dollars I'm sure we would spend some of it promoting copyleft. Juca: I think it's a good opportunity to talk about the high priority projects list. Stallman: Well, there has been a bit of confusion about the high priority projects list, because currently it includes things that are not technical projects. Which I think was a mistake. It should be technical projects only. That was the idea of it. But in any case, it has a list of big projects, and I'd say it should be called the important long-term projects list. The things that you could start working on now and over a period of years that could turn into ?in a big advance for the free world. But, you know, you gotta figure you're gonna be working on this for a long time. Juca: In the 80s the FSF used to fund the work of developers to actually write free code, but then it stopped it. It's not clear to me why did it stop funding development work. Stallman: Well, for why: we didn't have enough money to do so. But also it's ?probably that- the advance of volunteers, so numerous that we couldn't even keep track of them, and that ?(work|were) that- didn't make it easy to keep track of what they were doing was going so fast that we wouldn't be able to figure out what we should pay someone to do. You know, if we did that, by the time it was finished there might be another one that was already more advanced. 1:12:35