Stallman Talk

The interviewer was good and so was Stallman. It must be one of the better interviews as of late.

Bomb-interviews don't work well with Stallman. You have to let him speak. If necessary, do some editing afterwards -- but do let him speak. A live interview with Stallman doesn't work either if it's more than a few lines. I would go as far as eliminate the role of the interviewer totally. Shoot the interview, cut the questions and bring to the fore what RMS has to say. The questions should be presented in inter-titles for the best effect. RMS must be given time by a factor of x4, just leave the most interesting parts. You don't can a movie on-the-fly. Most of the footage is left on the editing room's floor.

Interviews like this are interesting. No marketing talk. No appeal to popularity. I'd like to see more of the same.

Stallman proves time and again that there's no match for him when it comes to original thinking and thorough formulation of ideas in crystal clear tenets that are so fundamental that they apply in each and every new scenario no matter what the technology discussed. That's the hallmark of a genius. He's the Einstein of free software.

"Absolutely. The idea that software should be free and we deserve control over our computing IS the political idea. It is a political idea in the same way that freedom of expression is a political idea. You can campaign for one just as you can campaign for the other. This does NOT have to be linked to any overarching broad political ideology. And in our case it's not. There are a lot of libertarians, that is sort of right-wing anarchists, who support the free software movement. We accept their support. I don't agree with them in general. The free software movement doesn't take a position on the other issues. [...] We condemn certain business practices that deny freedom to others and subjugate them. [...] We certainly don't want to eliminate private business."

"On a logarithmic scale I'd say we've got around half way."

"Digital technology leads to surveillance and accumulation of dossiers about people. It doesn't have to, but it tends to. [...] Unless there is a political will to prevent that it tends to happen."

"You can push something uphill but it tends to go downhill. A hill tends to promote rolling down. In the same way digital technology tends to promote the collection of data about people."

Also, the threat to privacy that voice recognition servers pose, like Siri (or Cortana, but RMS didn't mention it).

Stallman concludes by wrapping it up:

"Freedom is frequently threatened. To keep it, you have to be ready to struggle to defend it. Freedom is threatened globally now. Plutocratic regimes are trying to impose treaties like the TPP = Treacherous Plutocratic Poison. TTIP = This Treaty Is Plutocratic."

They mention a supposedly free or open-source piece of hardware, the Novena laptop. This was news to me.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/novena/

http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/07/founder-of-gnu-bestows-blessing-upon-open-source-crowdfunding-site/

http://hackaday.com/2016/01/30/building-the-novena-laptop/

For reference, the following is a transcript of Stallman's statements, from the above video, regarding why the goal of innovation should be less important than the goal of freedom.

"Freedom is more important than technical progress, more important than innovation. Our society puts too much emphasis on innovation as a goal. This is to take for granted that innovation is good for us. Well there are situations in which innovation is likely to be good for people, and that's where the people can freely choose which innovations to incorporate into their lives. Then they'll reject the ones that are bad and they'll keep the ones that are good for them. And yes, once in a while there will be a long-term bad side-effect that they won't notice, but you can't avoid that. You make decisions, you occasionally make mistakes. But if people have control over which innovations they use, at least they can avoid the innovations that are a pain in the neck.

But nowadays that is not the case, people don't have control over this. Innovations give companies that make nasty products a chance to change them and it's the companies that make sure the innovations serve the companies' interests They don't have to serve the users' interests. For instance, Apple made a big innovation with the iPhone by designing it as a jail--that is putting in censorship of applications so that the users weren't free to install whatever application software that they wanted as [they could] in all previous operating systems....But the point is, that was a big innovation. An innovation that was subsequently adopted by Microsoft. Democracy was once an innovation. Tyranny was once an innovation. Innovations can be good or bad, and we make a mistake by prizing innovation so much. so as far as i'm concerned innovation is secondary."