Richard Stallman Speaks to Christine Hall of FOSS Force, stallman.org is Down for Over a Day
About a day ago I noticed that stallman.org was offline or could not be reached for one reason or another. After some asking (regarding causes) "I'm told the host is down," a confidant told me, "and the service provider has been busy trying to bring it back up. stallman.org should be back when they succeed..."
In the meantime Richard Stallman has this new interview, published yesterday evening. Part of it speaks of the roots of "Open Source", with Dr. Stallman recalling: "Eric Raymond phoned me to tell me about their new term, and asked me to start using it. I had misgivings about it, which I could not immediately state clearly, so I told him I would think about it."
"Thinking about the material he had sent me, I realized that they planned to change the substance and focus of the idea, not just the name — to downplay the idea of freedom, not just the misinterpretable word “free.” Instead of making our moral focus clearer, they would sweep it away."
"With PR support from large companies, they could drive the idea that users deserve to control their own computing entirely out of our community and our work. To preserve this goal, we would have to focus on the goal — to emphasize it even more than before."
"The next day I told him we would continue to speak of free software and freedom."
Almost 30 years after this phonecall he still "continue[s] to speak of free software and freedom."
The interview does a good job addressing the hype about LLMs too. █