Richard Stallman Speaks at NUS

Richard Stallman, the man behind GNU and the Free Software Foundation, came down to NUS this afternoon to speak at the School of Computing about “Free Software and Your Freedom”. He was last here about 13 years ago. He’s still pretty much the same person now as he was then. That is, still excessively obstinate about his ideology of software freedom. I don’t quite subscribe to the same extremist ideas, but everyone is certainly entitled to their own beliefs.

Times have changed, the world has marched on since 1999, just about everyone now has mobile Internet, and just about every netizen also has a Facebook account. Not only does he not want to carry a mobile phone, so that he cannot be tracked, he now also opposes Facebook because it collects too much information about individuals. Here, I’m thinking you just about don’t exist if you aren’t on Facebook. Alright, that’s maybe a little extreme in thinking. But it’s also rather extreme to be avoiding all these “technology”.

Don’t want to be tracked? Well, we all know where you’re going to be today from 2pm to 4:30pm. We also know where you’ll be tomorrow from 6pm to 8pm.

As he dispensed with his preliminaries at the start of his talk (i.e. stating his “rules”), he requested that, while we could take photos of him, those photos not be uploaded to Facebook. With all the auto-magic face recognition stuffs going on, he did not want to be tracked on Facebook.

Umm. Erm. Could those face recognition magic not apply elsewhere too? Google+? Maybe, Facebook might be the most invasive today, but if it’s going to be on the Internet, does it really matter whether which part of the public Internet it is going to be on?

Talking about “freedom”… now, what about my freedom to post any photos I want, anywhere I want to?

Well, alright. Out of respect to the man who brought about tremendous benefits through GNU and the Free Software Foundation, I won’t post his photo on Facebook. It will be on my blog though.

So, anyway, the talk got underway. Richard Stallman talked about software freedom, and the four basic tenets, according to him, that define software freedom. Things that many of us are probably already familiar.

Thirteen years on, Richard Stallman is still very sore about Linux. In fact, it seems much more so this time, because at some point, it almost sounded like today’s talk was about how bad Linus Torvalds has been. He wants credit given to GNU, and play down the significance of the Linux kernel. Linux, says Richard Stallman, is just one of the kernels in the big picture of GNU system. That may be true. But perhaps, without Linux, GNU wouldn’t be where it is today. Say all you want about GNU/Linux, I think the majority of users just don’t care.

A person in the crowd raised a question toward the end of the Q&A. The ideology of freedom is nice. But perhaps, people don’t really care about freedom, and what they really want is convenience? Bingo! It is not that people don’t care about freedom. People are now “buying” into a “package deal”. They know, for example, what the Apple ecosystem is like. (And if they don’t, well, they are a lost cause…) Hate all you want about Mac OS X, iTunes, the App Store, and how, right now, you can only install into your iPad and iPhone what Apple permits, and perhaps in future that might even extend to Mac OS X computers. Apple puts you in a jail, and that’s why there’s the term jailbreak. But hey, if you buy into the Apple ecosystem, understand that this is how it works. This is the package.

Com’on, isn’t it not very different with Android? Android is open-source yah, but aren’t the ROMs distributed by Samsung and HTC (the two that I am familiar with, since I have their phones) “signed”? You also have to “root” and/or “unlock” the phones. They aren’t very free too, right? Sure, I don’t like it, since I am the kind of techie who also wants to hack my phone and have the freedom to modify the software that my phone runs. But, I understand the deal that I’m getting into. I still bought the phones that I bought.

If you drive a car today, do you care that the software in your ECU (engine control unit) is not free? No. You bought your car so that your car can serve a specific purpose. You expect it to serve that purpose, otherwise you’ll hound the car manufacturer. But you don’t go to your car manufacturer to demand access to the source code that manages the car, so that you can enhance the car, or fix problems with the car in the event the car manufacturer doesn’t want to.

Then, how does it work with the cloud? Now that most things are moving to the cloud, actually, the matter of software freedom doesn’t quite apply anymore, doesn’t it? After all, you don’t run the software. Oh, not quite, the man is also very much against the cloud, because you lose control of that “software”. While previously the software were still in your hands, it is now somewhere else, controlled by someone else, who now may in turn be subject to the freedom, or not, of free vs non-free software.

Wow. I thought the cloud was nice. No, actually not always so. I hate it right now when someone in the cloud decides to “upgrade” their software to add a feature, remove a feature, or change a feature. I can’t “downgrade”. I know Richard Stallman has a good point here. But can we shun the cloud? I remember a slogan from the days of Sun Microsystems: The Network is the Computer. Now, the cloud is practically your online existence. Can you completely avoid the cloud?

Richard Stallman says non-free is evil. Free is good. Well, problem is, good isn’t always all that good. So evil prevails. If there’s anything good about it… well, you get to pick your poison.