Dr. Richard M. Stallman (RMS) on How to Make People Care About Free Software and Why Prohibiting Proprietary Software Would Not Work
Tackling false equivalences and lame analogies, such as saying Free software is "free" like a free (gratis) puppy
Last month in Berlin RMS answered some questions from the audience (which he read and then replied to). Among them:
How to make people care? I think that's care. You can't, as far as I know. You can't make people feel this or that. People's own minds contribute to what they care about to their choice about what they care about. What I find is that. It's good to present the issue in ways that relate to things that people care about in other areas of life. And in the 14-minute video you can see where I got to following that approach.Should I have the freedom for creating, distributing, and supporting proprietary software? Well, first of all, I think you shouldn't do those things but that doesn't mean you should be prohibited to do them. I tend to think that if there is something people want, prohibiting it is often not a very good solution. Look what happens from prohibiting dangerous drugs. On the other hand, maybe you can figure out why you see a lot of people trying to use dangerous drugs maybe you can see what leads them to go in that dangerous direction and maybe make something else available that would be better than a drug maybe people wouldn't be drawn to those drugs. I don't know. The method of supplying drugs to addicts so as to wipe out the black market for drugs and then it would be harder for anyone who is not an addict to get her hands on some drug. That seems to work pretty well in countries that try it. So maybe a similar general approach could work with non-Free software as a way of discouraging it from being a successful business.
The video of that speech (and Q&A) is in WebM. No proprietary code needed. No YouTube. █