INTERVIEW: Richard Stallman on 20 years of GNU

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 13 Jan 2004 at 11:28

I cannot answer because that is not the way I think about the field. I focus on the obstacles we face, rather than on ranking the problems we have solved.

And the highs and lows of the last 20 years?

The adoption of the DMCA and the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act were some of the lows. The popularity of GCC in the 80s, the availability of completely free operating systems in the 90s, and increasing political support for free software in Brazil today, are some of the highs.

What are the most urgent development needs required to drive the GNU system further right now?

One vital need is for better free manuals (a free operating system should include complete free user documentation). Today users tend to use non-free manuals. A couple of publishers do publish and sell free manuals, but this practice needs to spread.

In software itself, we need a free complete Java platform, we need free software for speech recognition for dictation, and we need free 3D drivers for the common graphics chips (binary-only drivers are available gratis, but that is not free software and not adequate for living in freedom).

We need free software to play RealAudio and RealVideo and Quicktime and Windows Media Player files; these will be illegal in countries whose governments have caved in to the media companies, but they can be developed and published in countries that have not.

However, in the long term our main needs are not for specific technical developments. Those will come, sooner or later. What we need most is to block, and repeal, the laws and regulations and
measures that prohibit development of free software.

Right now the FCC in the US is considering a proposal to prohibit free software from receiving digital video transmissions. See www.publicknowledge.org. That would be the first ever specific prohibition on free software for a specific job. But there are already laws which have that effect.

The US already has the DMCA and software patents. The EU already has the EUCD, which has an effect similar to the DMCA. Additional laws, even worse, are now being proposed.

And how do you think the actions of SCO and the campaigns of Microsoft will impact on the adoption of GNU/Linux systems?

In the long term, I think SCO will have little effect. It seems unlikely they have any valid claims against Linux, the kernel of the GNU/Linux system, but even if they did have some, our community would persevere and solve the problem.

What's your vision for the GNU system 20 years from now?

My vision for 20 years from now is that all published software, aside from what is embedded in ROM in appliances that can't load new software or talk to any other devices, is free software. No one should ever be told, 'You can have this attractive software, but you cannot see what it does, change it, or redistribute copies to others.' The freedom to do these things is a human right that must never be denied.

How dangerous a threat is the abuse of notions of ownership, patents and copyrights to development for the software industry?

Copyright and patents are two very different laws; they have little in common except that both are conceived, in the US and UK, as artificial encouragements for conduct that serves the public interest. Properly and thoughfully, they ought to be judged in terms of their effectiveness at achieving the public benefits that are sought, and in terms of whether the burden they place on society is acceptable.