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: His professor thought he would have made a great biologist but Richard Mathew Stallman, had more important things in mind. He wanted to be a professional hacker at Harvard. He also wanted to wage a war against big corporations like Microsoft, seeking a monopoly on knowledge. Richard, however, is not a communist – he is a symbol of freedom in the software industry. To him, intellectual property rights (IPR) is a sham in the age of globalisation. “Freedom is too precious to lose,” he says. His idea of defending freedom is to subscribe to the ideals of a free software movement. But free software does not mean freely available software without commercial interference, he says. Rather, it means subscribing to four basic rights – freedom to run, copy, distribute, change and improve. On a recent visit to Kolkata, he spoke to Indranil Chakraborty on the free software movement. Excerpts:
How would you define free software?
Free software is all about freedom – freedom of the users’ to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. I believe there are four kinds of freedom for the software users. I have identified four human rights. These are also rights that would define free software.
A program belongs to the free software if the users have these rights. The freedom to run the program as you wish for whatever purpose, freedom to study the program and make changes according to one’s wish, the freedom to distribute copies to your neighbours and publications and the freedom to improve the program and give the improved version to communities.
When you talk of free software, you always stress on the role of the community. Why is the community important in the free software movement?
It’s impossible, however great you may be as a programmer, to master all the software. So you need the cooperation and participation of others in your community to develop software according to the community’s needs. Working together, people belonging to the community can master all kinds of software and can make sure our computers work as we want and don’t depend on proprietary software.
Do you see proprietary software as a negation of freedom?
The developer of proprietary software decides what would be the function of the software. The developer decides what you can do, your needs and thus the commands to create power against you. This is what Microsoft does. I did not set out to beat...
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