09.18.20
Richard Stallman Has Not Changed His Tune at All
Full video: Hackers – Wizards of the Electronic Age
Summary: Richard Stallman’s (RMS) principled views regarding software go back to the days of zeroes and ones; his position 35 years ago was almost indistinguishable from today’s position
FISHED or extracted from very old archives (thanks, figosdev) are a couple of little segments — among several more — of an early RMS back when GNU was just getting started. The GNU Project is nowadays ubiquitous (even if so many people refer to GNU programs as "Linux") and copyleft is widely adopted in spite of corporate FUD from the likes of Google and Microsoft.
To give just a little outline, here’s RMS about 8 minutes in. He starts his day at 5 with dinner, then works until the morning, in effect working all night long while living at the lab (MIT).
On why Free software is important to him:
He shows up a number of times throughout this programme, typically insisting that his purpose as a hacker is to make all programs free. He has barely changed his vision and his goal since; he’s very, very consistent. Being stubborn when you’re right about something isn’t a weakness but a virtue. Even his sceptics came around to embrace his philosophy.
“He has barely changed his vision and his goal since; he’s very, very consistent.”figosdev, who found this old video, was responding to “Somebody Needs to Talk About Free Software Politics“ (which he called a “nice article”) ans said that “one thing you notice from the hackers video is that we are talking about the same things now that they were talking about in 1985. Woz was saying that source should be free. Of course he was in the same room as RMS. Another way saying that source often was free — sitting on a tape in the same desk as the computer, because sometimes you needed the programs on that tape in order to run your own programs.” █
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