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GCN Home > 04/20/07 web stories

Stallman: Free software is matter of good vs. evil

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County got a lecture today about morals, ethics and politics from radical software developer Richard M. Stallman, a founder of the free-software movement.

Free software is not about the price of software or even about the quality or practicality of it, according to Stallman. It is much more important than that. “This is about ethics,” he said. “That is, good and evil.”

Just so you understand which side Stallman comes down on, proprietary software and restrictive licensing agreements are evil. “Free software respects the user’s freedom,” he said. His goal: Use exclusively free software.

Free software is free not necessarily in the sense of price, but in the sense that it comes with no restrictions or strings attached for the user. “Think free speech rather than free beer,” he says.

Stallman’s roots go back to the 1970s to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when coding was called hacking and software development was a calling rather than a business. He remains true to those roots, and most of his efforts today are devoted to the Free Software Foundation he founded in the 1980s as a vehicle for developing a free software operating system.

Free software supports four essential freedoms:
  • The freedom to run the software any way the user wants, or the baseline freedom
  • The freedom to study and change the software
  • The freedom to distribute the software and
  • The freedom to distribute any contributions or modifications the user has made to the software.
Don’t confuse free software with the open software movement, Stallman pleads. The open source movement is a development of the 1990s to supplant the ethical concerns embodied in the free software movement. The primary concern of open source is practical development of software, rather than ethical development and use.

To date, the free software movement has met with mixed success. Stallman began the GNU Project to create a Unix-like operating system in 1984. The name GNU was a hackers inside joke, Stallman said. It is a recursive acronym that stands for GNU is Not Unix. To make the acronym work he needed a first letter to go in front of NU. He settled on G because, “Gnu is the most humor-laden word in the English language,” he said.

Although the dictionary instructs you to not sound the “g” in gnu, Stallman pronounces GNU in two syllables, with a hard G: Gu-NU.

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