I went to see Richard Stallman and all I got were these lousy stickers...
Richard Stallman is in Sweden. Tonight he held a very large audience enchained at KTH -the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Richard is an interesting, humourous, and excellent public speaker. The audience was taking notes, filming, laughing and clapping away. And there I was, straight from work with my Microsoft badge hanging from my jeans and turning the sound off my windows mobile....also laughing at some points I must admit. (never clapped though)!
So Stallman is talking about freedom... Different types of freedom. We've all heard the slogan freedom as in free and free as in free beer. Stallman means that all proprietary software is evil. Richard's profound mantra is that if the user is not allowed to see and alter the code she always have to fear what is lurkin within since all makers of propriatery software will try to trick the user in some way, gather her habits, her interests and just useless information in general. They will also make the computer not the servant of the owner but will keep the user captive since there will always be restrictions on what the user can and cannot do. For what purpose will the proprietary software companies behave in this way? One answer that Stallman mentioned himself was to make an update fit better to that particular user. Ooo! That is the most awful thing I've ever heard! Collecting information about people to provide them with better services?! Mmm, that's sort of the business model of the 21th century...
Another thing mentioned by Stallman was the fact that in India, there were Microsoft developers working for Al Qaida that were discovered and got fired. What kind of awful code they were trying to hide inside the operating system was not mentioned...but the fact that there could be more Al Qaida members working for Microsoft that were not discoverd yet, my god, the hellish code they would produce! Hm. I tend to believe that the code of Microsoft software is reviewed in great detail and a cover up or some malware creeping around in there would surely be discovered...but what do I know.
On the way home I was discussing with my collegue and he thought about the anology with a car...Neither of us know much about fixing cars and we're frankly not interested in knowing. We just want it to work. And if someone would try and automatically improve the car by updates, we'd be very happy about it. And if this was done based on facts as how we drive or what kind of car we have, even better. (Note the if, I'm not saying this is what Microsoft does). This is the regular computer user. It is even the advanced computer user. How many of us would know how to alter an operating system? Okay, so a lot of us think we know some stuff about programming... sure we do. Not to the extent that we would tamper with, say the windows kernel if it was possible.
Richard Stallman has some good points. Freedom is nice. It would be interesting to see what the code looks like, I agree. He is funny. One-liners like; You have two choices, throw windows out of the computer or throw the computer out of the window makes you smile, but hey, proprietary software companies are not evil. It is a business model. Just like open source is a business model. And just like free software is. We all have to make money, it is just a matter of different ways of getting paid for what you do. I like techie stuff. Show me something cool and I will like it. No matter if it's proprietary, open source or free. To me its not a war or a matter of choosing sides. It is just differet ways of surviving in a competitive world, producing a good product, and making money out of it. And by the way, I got some stickers. Check them out. They do make you smile :)
Articles about Stallman (in swedish): 1 2 3 4
And in english: networkworld
Other bloggers opinions about: Richard Stallman, GPL, Microsoft, KTH, GNU/Linux
Interesting blog post about the seminar at KTH (in swe).
