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Proprietary Software Is An Ugly Way Of Life: Stallman
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"Mac OS is malware. It has digital handcuffs. The Apple products, the 'i' things are even worse."
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Monday, March 05, 2012:
Richard M Stallman likes to cherish his freedom, be it in his software or his life. He does not use a cellphone because he thinks it can track him. Facebook is his biggest enemy like Apple and Microsoft. Proprietary software or anything else that hampers freedom is non-acceptable to him. EFYTimes had candid conversation with RMS during his visit to India where he touched upon his idea of freedom and why he hates proprietary software. Read on...
Please talk about your journey with the free and open source software?
Well, actually its not open source. Please don't connect me with open source. I disagree with that. Infact, open source was started specifically to reject the ideas that I stand for. So my journey is about free, swatantra and mukt software. Before I started the Free Software Movement, I lived in a free software community. So I knew from experience that free software was a good way of life. I was not just imagining it. Since I had actually experienced life in a free software community, I knew it was a good way of life. That was when I was working at the MIT Artificial intelligence lab in the 1970s. The lab was a part of larger free software community. We shared software around. All the software we used, with very rare exceptions, was free software. And a lot of it had been written by us. So, this was the pure free software way of life and I thought it meant good. As well as, it also meant that you could fix anything that bothered you. At the beginning in 1971, when I was hired by the lab, free software was not unusual. Lots of operating systems were free. But, by the end of the 1970s, free software had become rare. Proprietary software was the norm everywhere and then in the early 80s, our community died and I was dropped into the proprietary world. By contrast with the free software way of life, I thought it was ugly... morally ugly. It was constant mistreatment of other people. Because I could understand the comparison, I said, I refuse to live that way. I dedicated all my efforts to making it possible not to live that way, for me and for you.
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So in 1983, I launched the Free Software Movement, whose goal was to make it possible to use computers and have freedom. However, for that to be a practical option, you need an operating system that's free software. In 1970s we had one but it was PDP 10. In the early 80, PDP 10 was obsolete anyway, so all our software were obsolete too. And all the computer systems with modern software were proprietary. To make free software a real option, we needed to be free and therefore it was my job to develop one. I announced a plan to develop a UNIX like operating system that would be an entirely free software. And then I gave it the name 'GNU', which stands or GNU's Not UNIX. The name was kind of a joke. Although the name was joke, the project was a very serious one for fighting for freedom... the freedom that we had lost completely.
What was the journey to develop GNU/Linux like?
We had to start from a little more than zero and call our way up to freedom. There were a few free programs in 1983 when I started GNU, but those were in no way nearing the whole operating system. So there was a lot of work to do and that we did during the 1980s. There are hundreds of components that you need to have a UNIX like operating system, even at the most basic level. A few components we found with somebody else who wrote them for different reasons but were free software. But the other components we had to bring into existence. So, I wrote some of them and I recruited people to write others and in some cases I convinced somebody for free programs, for instance the CSRG at Berkeley. They had written a lot of code to change UNIX but their code was mixed in AT&T's code and so it was proprietary. I met them in 1984 and requested them to separate their software and release it as free, which they did subsequently. But, there was one essential component that was missing... the Kernel. We started developing a Kernel in 1990. I chose an advanced design, which gave it somewhat the character of a research project and it took six years to get a test version. Unfortunately, nobody succeeds everytime. But we didnt have to wait because in 1992, Linus Torvalds, who had a proprietary kernel called Linux decided to make it free. So in February 1992, he decided to liberate Linux. The combination of Linux Kernel and all the other pieces of GNU system made a complete system, which was basically GNU, but also contained Linux. So calling it only Linux operating system in wrong. It is GNU/Linux operating system.
Is the concept of free software anyway related to the price?
To me free software is the freedom issue and not the price. Price is a side issue. You may get a free copy of a software or you may pay for it. Either one is ok. The important thing is that free software respects your freedom and community. When a program is non-free, we call it proprietary, non-free, user subjugating software. A non-free program generates a system of digital colonisation. There is a colonial power which is the proprietary software and then there are colonised people, who are the users. Like any colonised system, the proprietary software keeps the people divided. They are helpless because they do not have the source code. They can't change it and they cant even tell what it really does. A proprietary software is often designed to do something nasty. It's a very general statement when I say free software is important for freedom in community. Specifically, a program which you have a copy of is free for you if you have four essential freedoms. Freedom '0' is to run the program as you wish. Freedom '1' is the freedom to study the source code and change it. So it does your computing as you wish. Freedom '2' is the freedom to help others to make copies of the software and distribute them. Freedom '3' is the freedom to contribute to your community, to make copies of your modified versions and distribute them to others you wish. So, if a program comes with these four freedoms, it's a free software because the social system of its distribution and use is an ethical system that respects freedom of the community.
If one of these freedoms is missing or insufficient, it is a proprietary software because it imposes an unethical social system on its users. So, the distinction between free and proprietary software is not just a technical distinction. It's not about what Jobs' program does, it's not about how the code works, it's not about how the code was written. Those are all technical details and they are of practical importance to some people for various practical reasons. But this is a social, ethical and political distinction, which is why it is so important... more important in general than any technical distinction.
The use of proprietary software in society is not development. It's dependence. Use of proprietary software is a social problem. We should aim to put an end to it. Writing a free program is a contribution to the society. Proprietary programs function as a trap. They are adorned with attractive features, the purpose of which is to lure the users towards the program and get addicted to it. It makes the users fall under the colonial power of the developer of the proprietary software. Paradoxically, the better the features of a proprietary software are, the more harmful it is for the society. These features do not make the program better but make them more damaging. So, if you have a choice between writing a proprietary software or do nothing at all, you should do nothing at all because that way you don't do harm. Thus, the goal of Free Software Movement is that all software should be free so that their users can be free. Once you have understood this issue, you should make sure that you don't get into this. We should reject the propaganda terms that the developers of the proprietary software use to demonise the co-operation. I am referring to terms like pirates. When they call people pirates, they mean helping other people (by sharing a software) is a moral equivalent of attacking ships.
Many proprietary programs have malicious features. These features spy on the users and send their data to somewhere or there are features to restrict the user. These programs restrict what a user can do with the data in his computer. These are known as DRMs, the digital restriction management or digital handcuffs. And there are backdoors which obey commands from somebody else to do this to the users. This is not a rare phenomena. Most of the people are using malicious proprietary software. Let me prove this by giving you some examples. One proprietary package that has all three kinds of malicious features that you may have heard of is called Microsoft Windows. It has specific known surveillance features, specific known digital handcuffs and known backdoors. So Windows is malware. More than that, one of the backdoors allows Microsoft to forcibly remotely install changes without asking the permission of 'the theoretical' owner of the computer. I say theoretical, because once Microsoft has allowed Windows to run on any computer, Microsoft has owned the computer. This means that any malicious feature which is not in Windows today can be remotely installed tomorrow by Microsoft. So Windows is not just malware, it is a universal malware. But it is not unique. Mac OS is malware. It has digital handcuffs. The Apple products, the 'i' things are even worse. They have known spy features, discovered less than a year ago. They have the tightest digital handcuffs ever in a general purpose computer. Apple is a pioneer in attacking the freedom of its customers because Apple extended its control even over the application installations. Users cannot install any program they choose. They can only install programs they choose from Apple's appstore. So this is censorship. And when Apple decides which applications to approve, it does so, based on other kinds of censorship. When Apple pioneered this kind of digital handcuff, Microsoft followed it. So Apple is to be blamed for starting to make this kind of practice acceptable. That was the legacy of Steve Jobs to the world. And it has a backdoor which can be used to remotely delete applications. So Apple's product is a malware.
Why does a free program has a license? The license is put on proprietary programs or contracts. Their purpose is to restrict people more than copyright law.
For us it is the opposite. A free software license is actually a statement of permission that gives the users the four freedoms. That's the only way a program or any other kind of work can be free, that is if the copyright holders have put on statement of permission. Because under today's copyright, whatever work is done under copyright is copyright. By default, the copyright law forbids users to copy the software, change it, distribute it and many countries even forbid running it because it is copying into the main memory. So only way a program can be free is through a formal declaration by the copyright holders giving every user the four freedoms. And we term that declaration as a free software license. So if the work does not have that license, it is not free. And there are people who are publishing things and saying these are free but they don't put on the licenses, so what they are saying is false. And when you see that, you should complain and say I am glad you would like it to be free but you actually legally need to make it free. So please do that. There are many ways to give people the four freedoms and that is why there are many free software licenses. The big difference between the free software license is between the copyleft licenses and non-copyleft licenses. The GNU general public license is a copyleft license. It means that it requires the free distribution (with or without changes) be under the same license. In effect, it says, you can distribute this code to others but you must respect their freedom the same way we respect your freedom. Looking at the same thing from a different point of view, it means that the man who provided a software copy to you must respect your freedom the same way he took advantage of the freedom given to him. Without copyleft, one person or one company can get a copy of the program as free software and put on restrictions and distribute it to you as proprietary software. And then the freedom, which is the purpose of this law will not reach you. This would be a failure for the GNU system according to the free software movement because the reason we developed the GNU system is to make you have freedom. If this freedom is taken away by a middleman, we fail. So I invented the idea of copyleft as a way to prevent that failure. And that's why I wrote the GNU General Public License as the way to release software but I wrote it so that everyone else could also release their software that way. So, when Torvalds decided to make Linux free software in 1992, he used the GNU General Public License to do that. The GNU GPL is not the only free software license. There are non-GNU free software licenses as well. But because the GNU GPL is a copyleft license, it's usually better because why let somebody else have the chance to deny freedom to some of the users of your copy.
Don't you think you could run the free software movement if you write more programs?
No. That's not true. That was true at the beginning, because in 1980s (during the beginning days) the free software I wrote was a substantial part of the free software movement. But now a days the free software community is so big and there are so many software that my addition would be very tiny. And besides, I am older now. I cannot do that as well as I used to do it. My memory is not as good. Meanwhile, what I see is that there is a terrible lack of valuing freedom and that's what other people are not doing much. So this is where I feel the need to contribute.
Diksha P Gupta, EFYTIMES News Network
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(13 Votes)
