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Welcome to Software Freedom Day.
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I am Richard Stallman
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I started the Free Software Movement in September 1983,
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A movement for freedom for people who use software.
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A program is free software if it respects the user's freedom.
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It's free as in freedom, we don't mean zero price.
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We're actually not talking about price at all, we're talking about your freedom.
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If a program is not free, we call it non-free software, proprietary software, user-subjugating software.
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Because this software puts the users under somebodies' unjust power.
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So what does it mean for software to respect your freedom?
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There are four essential freedoms which make the definition of Free Software.
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Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish.
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Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code and change it,
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so the program does your computing as you wish.
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Freedom 2 is the freedom to help others :
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that's the freedom to redistribute exact copies of the program when you wish.
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Freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community,
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that's the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others when you wish.
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All four freedoms are essential in order for the users to have control over the software they use.
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And that's what this is about. With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users.
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When the users control the program, that's free software.
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When the program controls the users, that's proprietary software.
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When I started the Free Software Movement I announced the goal of developing the GNU operating system.
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A system meant to be entirely free software. And that's the crucial point.
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Because if the system is entirely free software, if all the software you use is free,
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then you have control over your computing.
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But if you use some proprietary software, then you don't fully control your computing, and someone else has
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unjust power over you.
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So, as the first stage, we were going to develop a complete free operating system,
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because you can't do anything with your computer without an operating system.
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The idea of GNU was to be a UNIX-like system, and the name GNU means GNU's Not Unix.
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So by 1992 we had almost all the GNU system, but one major piece was missing: that was the kernel.
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We were working on a kernel, but that project hasn't been a great success.
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But in 1992 Mr. Torvalds made his kernel, Linux, free software.
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So the combination of GNU + Linux made the first free operating system for a long time.
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The first one that would run, for instance, on a PC or Clone
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and it's the GNU + Linux system that many of us are now using.
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Of course it's not enough just to have the operating system, which is the collection of hundreds of thousands
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of programs to do the usual things be free. In order to have freedom, we have to insist on free applications,
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free utilities, free whatever it might be.
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And that's where our community has, to a large extent, forgotten the issue.
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Because many people who use GNU + Linux puts non-free applications on top of it,
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or non-free drivers underneath it, and that means they don't reach freedom.
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Most of our community looks at the convenience of the GNU/Linux system,
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and doesn't make freedom the goal. Which is why we need events to focus on this issue of freedom.
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But we need to teach people what this means in practice.
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There're hundreds, perhaps thousands of different distros of GNU/Linux,
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and most of them actually come with, or suggest installing, non-free software.
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They're not, even though they're versions of a basically free operating system GNU/Linux
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most of the distros are not, in fact, composed of free software.
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There're parts that are free, and parts that are proprietary, so they don't get you to freedom.
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Overlooking this means our community is not going straight towards freedom, it's going off at an angle
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and if you follow that other road, you don't get to the destination of freedom.
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So we need to focus our communities attention on installing entirely free distros,
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and you can find a list of them in gnu.org/distros.
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Among proprietary applications that people often make the sad mistake of using on top of their
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freedom respecting GNU/Linux system are noteworthy two examples: there's the Adobe Flash Player
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which is not only proprietary, it's malicious. It has two known malicious features:
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there are Digital Restrictions Management features, to restrict what the user does with their data on
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their own computer, and there is a surveillance feature that we call Super Cookies,
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which allows one site to write some information into the flash player, and another site can then read it,
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and there's nothing to stop multiple sites from cross-identifying the user, so this is malicious software.
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The other noteworthy example is Skype. Skype is proprietary software, and you have no idea of what it's doing.
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What's really bad about these two, what makes them so... what makes them such big problems,
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is that people are invited to use formats that pressure other people to use the same proprietary software.
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For instance, if you put a Skype User ID in your mail signature, you're saying in every message:
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"Use Skype! Skype is good! Even though it's proprietary software, it's good!"
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Well, if you say that, you're saying the exact opposite of the Free Software Movement, which says:
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"Watch for your freedom. Don't use these non-free programs because they take away your freedom."
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Another thing which leads people to overlook these issues is the fact that both of those programs are
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available gratis. They're gratis, but they're not free software, and price is not as important as freedom.
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Don't accept gratis as a substitute for respecting your freedom.
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For more information about the GNU system, look at gnu.org, and for more information about the
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Free Software Movement look at fsf.org. That's the site of the Free Software Foundation.
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You'll find resources there, and you could also join the Free Software Foundation or get on to
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information on mailing lists.
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Thanks for supporting freedom!
