Richard Stallman speech at the 2007 US Green Party Convention

Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software movement. He's one of my personal heroes because he has the courage of his convictions to not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.

His speech tonight is titled: "Who Owns Your Computer"

His speech will be from 08:00 PM (EST) to ???. I will live-blog.

As usual, if you have a question for him during this workshop - ask in the comments section of this post, and I'll ask him and post the reply.

Refresh this page to see the updates. (About once every five minutes.)

In case you don't know who he is, here is Stallman's Wikipedia entry:

20:05 EST: RMS is being introduced by Babe Hogan... who is making a documentary about Wikipedia. Babe said the word "Open Source" to be funny - and he just ran out of the room. (He's just kidding, he just walked back in.)

20:10 EST: Says that it's more important to have soft-wear that respects the users freedom, than for it to be high-quality. He says that's like deciding to live in a country strictly based on how much money you can make.

20:12 EST: RMS says proprietary software is designed to make the user helpless. Proprietary software is about power over the user... and he thinks that is wrong... which he

20:15 EST: Four rules for free software

0) Freedom to run the program as you wish.

1) Freedom to study the source.

2) Freedom to help your neighbor. Such as give a copy to someone.

3) Freedom to contribute to the program.

:17 EST: He says people hate Microsoft for the wrong reason. The problem with them isn't that they are a monopoly, it's that they want to have power over the user. And if you have a choice of 5 different different proprietary programs is simply choosing your master.

08:19 EST: "Since sharing is an act of friendship, to attack sharing is to attack society."

08:23 EST: "No matter how nice a program looks, if someone offers me a program I can't share, I tell them I can't accept it because it's against my ethics."

08:30 EST: Stallman says the term "OpenSource" is around because corporations want the public to ignore the ethical problems behind proprietary software.

08:40 EST: Free software is also a political issue. In France the one person who was against Free Software got elected. Proprietary software developers are not just satified with their business models - they want to make Free Software illegal.

08:45 EST: Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal to use Freesoftware to read copyrighted material.

08:47 EST: Here's a pic I just took:

08:50 EST: RMS is introducing the concept of "Copyleft". He wants to make sure no one can take away one of the four freedoms.

08:53 EST: RMS GPLv3 makes it impossible to separate users from their freedom.

08:55 EST: Q & A started.

• Talking about voting software - he says he doesn't trust computers with vote counting.
• Addressing the criticism that Free Software discourages innovation, RMS says "Freedom is more important than innovation."
• RMS says Green Party values and Free Software movement overlap.
• Re-iterates the importance of freedom over everything.

09:15: Seminar ended. Room 

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