tag archive: richard stallman

In a post about the relicensing option from the GNU Free Documentation License to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Richard Stallman writes:

If a wiki site exercises the relicensing option, that entails trusting Creative Commons rather than the Free Software Foundation regarding its future license changes. In theory one might consider this a matter of concern, but I think we can be confident that Creative Commons will follow its stated mission in the maintenance of its licenses. Millions of users trust Creative Commons for this, and I think we can do likewise.

Sounds like a strong endorsement from someone with demanding standards.

<SALES_PITCH>

And seems like an opportunity to shill for donations to Creative Commons. They are running their annual fundraiser right now, and for $50 ($25 for students) you can become a member of the CC Network, which allows you to sport a button on your web page to proudly show your support (and link to your CC Network profile page):

And, I think …

Happened to run across this last night:

mndaily.com: Comp. sci. activist to talk computing freedom at U

Which led me to dig up this press release with details. Willey Hall on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota at 6:30pm.

I’m not sure if I’ll make it. I’d love to hear Richard speak in person, even if it’s “just” his standard speech. It’s a lot more convenient for me to drive down to the U than fly to Boston.

I never got around to writing more about my trip to the FSF Associate Members meeting earlier in the year. Speaking of seeing the Great Man in person, the member meeting started with no RMS in sight. He wasn’t scheduled to appear until a panel later in the day, but I expected to see him sitting in the audience along with the other free software luminaries present.

At one point, an audience member asked a question and used the term “Linux,” at which time a familiar …

Martin Sexton

Power of example
My mama said it and I heard
She says one ounce of action
Beats a ton of words.

– Martin Sexton, “Hallelujah”

Richard Stallman

[...] I didn’t write a whole free operating system, either. I wrote some pieces and invited other people to join me by writing other pieces. So I set an example. I said, “I’m going in this direction. Join me and we’ll get there.” And enough people joined in that we got there. So if you think in terms of, how am I going to get this whole gigantic job done, it can be daunting. So the point is, don’t look at it that way. Think in terms of taking a step and realizing that after you’ve taken a step, other people will take more steps and, together, it will get the job done eventually.

Assuming that humanity doesn’t wipe itself out, the work we do today to produce the free educational infrastructure, the …

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 30 October 2006.

Which do you like best: the satisfying, rich taste of principle in free software? Or do you prefer the less morally filling and pragmatic goodness of open source? Do you wish people would stop endlessly rehashing the whole question of “free” versus “open source?” Or do you enjoy the chance to talk about goals and philosophy? As you might suspect, since I’m bringing it up…

…I like to talk about it. Is it too soon, though, following the lengthy debate stirred up by the recent “What should we call it?” FSM poll? Too dividing? Pointless? Do I ask a lot of questions?

Let’s turn to our lodestar, Richard Stallman, for some answers. What’s that, you say? “That RMS guy is the cause of all the trouble! …

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”– Walt Whitman
A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then that I realized that an abridged edition of the essays could introduce Emerson, and make his down-to-earth wisdom accessible, to a readership that might otherwise be put off by his …