I’m just back from a great night out, and found this waiting for me when I returned home:

It’s from my friend and craftbrarian, Jo Beazley, in Queensland. Thank you!

I enjoyed a night of chilli tofu and chat with fellow librarian bloggers, Con and snail … as well as our friend Gaby and Con’s husband, Mike.

Gaby and Con had been to an ALIA event where six workers in academic libraries talked about what their jobs involved. I was all ready to go to the event too…but all week my head was buried in trying to find images of MIT hackers and reading about free software in preparation for a presentation in a couple of weeks… so I almost missed the fact that Richard Stallman was talking at the same time. Almost, but thankfully not quite.

Mike, snail and I could not quite agree whether Richard Stallman was an icon or a guru of the Free Software movement. He wrote the GNU operating system which is an integral part of Linux distributions. He would prefer it to be termed GNU/Linux. He decided in 1983 that he would write a free software version of an operating system or die trying (of old age). Without a free operating system computer users would never be free of proprietary software for their computing.

Stallman’s basic argument is that software created by users that can be shared in a community is democratic and that proprietary software is not. This is Free software as in freedom, not as in without cost. He differentiates between Open Source software, which is a term that focuses on technical convenience and Free Software which he sees as a human rights issue.  He argues that software should fit the four freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Stallman has very clearly articulated his beliefs at the gnu.org site. He is good-humoured, incredibly logical, unkempt and has a passionate conviction that what he is doing is important and that the message should not be diluted or compromised.

I set up a CoverItLive window to catch my tweets from the event. It is embedded below. I understand that he does the same talk each time he does it, but as someone who had not seen him talk before I thoroughly enjoyed the delivery and the message – even if I often was annoyed at the stretches of logic he was making to justify a belief about liberty.

My favourite Stallmanisms for the evening were:

“Attacking ships is bad. Sharing software is not. Don’t call them by the same term, piracy”

“Amazon Kindle is a way of burning books. It means we need to end our friendships with others who read”

“Gnu is the most humorous word in the English language. Each time you write it you put a G at the start that you don’t say. It’s a joke. Not necessarily a good one. You pronounce the operating system  G-nooooo because we have been using it for 18 years, so it is no longer Gnu/new”

“Hacking is “playful cleverness”

“If I am the father of Open Source Software, then it was conceived via artificial insemination using stolen sperm.”

“vi vi vi is the editor of the Beast. To use it is not a sin. It is a penance.”

“it is every citizen’s duty to poke Big Brother in the eye”

I am very very glad that someone like Richard Stallman exists.

Here is the CoverItLive record of the event.