Yesterday, I had the opportunity to go hear Richard Stallman speak. The Computer Science Club at Waterloo managed to snag him and gave his speech entitled “Copyright and Community in the Age of Computer Networks.”

Stallman’s arguments about copyright are essentially the same as Lessig’s from his talk, “Free Culture.” That is, copyright started out as a restriction on publishers but now has grown into something that denies the freedom of the public. The media corporations are now excercising their influence on our governments to continue to extend the breadth of copyright so that they are in control of our culture.

Because his points mirror Lessig’s so closely, I kind of wish he did give a talk about Free Software instead, since it’s so relevant to those of us hoping to become developers at Waterloo. And while he kept emphasising that this wasn’t a Free Software talk, he inevitably had to talk about it.

There were a few interesting points that he brought up during the talk. The first was about GNU/Linux. We’ve all heard the argument before that Linux really shouldn’t be called Linux because it isn’t just Linux. It’s something that I’ve never really thought about, but I knew in the back of my mind. The two reasons are that Linus Torvalds isn’t a free software person and that the GNU portion of the OS has been worked on for almost a decade.

It makes sense that Torvalds wouldn’t really be part of the free software movement, considering he mentioned that he used whatever was right for the task, and so open sourcing the Linux kernel was the most efficient way of working on it. This lead people to believe that Torvalds was all for free software, where this isn’t really the case. I’ve never really thought about how dangerous it would be until Stallman mentioned it.

I’d also knew that GNU had existed long before Linux and that we were all diminishing the work that GNU has done by thinking of the OS only as Linux the kernel. Stallman believes that properly crediting the work that GNU has done will take some of the limelight off of Torvalds so that GNU will be able to talk about free software with more authority.

There’s also the idea that copyright was put in place since it affected only industry. Since in the 1700s, the only people who were capable of mass production of copies was industry, it didn’t hurt to restrict them, and so the law wasn’t enforced against the general public. Today, however, we all own copying machines: computers. And as a democratic state, the right thing to do should be to diminish the powers that copyright grants.

Stallman also addressed in the Q&A how programmers are expected to live off of free software. Essentially, proprietary software restricts and oppresses the user. To create proprietary software is essentially taking away the freedom of others, and that’s unacceptable. However, most paid programming is for custom software for companies anyway, so that will remain largely unchanged.

Wow, this Free Software and Open Source Symposium held by Seneca looks really interesting. Looking at the workshop list and symposium agenda, it looks really interesting, and it’s only $10 (unless I want to go to a workshop). Unfortunately, it’s on a Thursday and Friday and is right there during midterm season. Darn.