On Free Software and Other Topics

Honestly, I was a bit surprised when Richard M. Stallman promptly responded to my email inquiries about free software. Not many well-known personalities take the time and effort to do so. My respect and admiration naturally doubled when he agreed to do this email interview for the e-Legal.

In 1984, Stallman (RMS), who was a researcher at the MIT AI Laboratory, started the GNU - Gnu's Not Unix- project. The project's goal was develop "free" software. He would later create the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a tax-exempt charity organization dedicated to the development of free software. The following is my email interview with him.

GEL: How would you describe the beginning of the Free Software Movement?

RMS: In the 1970s, I was part of a community of programmers who normally shared software. I grew to appreciate the way of life in which you could always study the source code for a program, change it, and share it with others.

In the 80s, this community ceased to exist and I found those freedoms disappearing. I refused to accept the way of life that proprietary software imposes on its users; I decided that I would do any amount of work to regain the lost freedoms.

GEL: When you say free software, what exactly does it mean?

RMS: Free software is a matter of freedom. Roughly, it means you have the freedom to study, change, copy and redistribute the source code of the program you use. If you have these freedoms, the program is free software for you.

If you don't write software, you can think of a program as something like a recipe. People who cook often copy recipes for their friends. And it is common to change a recipe too. If you have changed a recipe, and you cook the dish for your friends and they like it, a friend might say "Can I have the recipe?" Then you might write down your version and give a copy to your friend. This happens all the time; this is what people who like to cook do.

It's just as useful to do these things with software but proprietary software denies us the freedom to do them. That is why we won't accept it.

The "free" in "free software" has nothing to do with price. It does not mean that copies do not cost anything. Selling copies of free software is legitimate and normal; anyone has the right to do that.

However, if a program is free, and you really really want to get a copy gratis, you can probably find someone who will make a copy for you without charge.

GEL: What are examples of free software that ordinary Filipinos might have already come across with?

RMS: Most computer users have never used any free software. That is because they use Microsoft Windows. The programs that are popular on Windows are all hyped commercially, and as far as I know, none of them are free.

However, if you use the World Wide Web, you have probably accessed web sites that use free software. More than half the web sites in the world are run entirely or mostly by free software: the Apache web server on top of the GNU/Linux operating system.

GEL: What are examples of free software that are being developed now and what are their significance?

RMS: The GNU/Linux operating system and the other free operating systems are the most significant because they give you the possibility of using a computer with all free software. That makes it possible to use a computer and not give up your freedom.

That is the reason we developed GNU so we could clean from our computers the non-free software that doesn't respect the users' freedom and community.

GEL: I understand that there is a difference between Free Software and Open Source. How would you describe the difference? How do the two movements contribute to making the world a better place to live in?

RMS: In the Free Software Movement, we see free software as an ethical and political issue, an issue of freedom. We develop free software so that we can have the freedom to share and change the software we use.

By the 90s, our free software had become attractive for technical reasons as well as reliability, power, and efficiency. So there were people who liked our free software but did not agree with our views. In 1998, they formed the Open Source Movement.
The open source people encourage programmers to develop free software (more or less their criteria are a little more lax than ours, so an open source program is not necessarily free software). But they cite only practical benefits such as powerful, reliable software as reasons for this. They studiously avoid the idea that these freedoms are freedoms you are entitled to.

GEL: The Philippines is one of those countries who export programmers to more developed countries? Would you know of any Filipino or Filipinos who have contributed in some way to the Free Software Movement?

RMS: I don't happen to know of any. But there are some 100,000 free software developers today. I don't know most of them.

GEL: If you don't, what can Filipinos contribute to the movement at this stage?

RMS: Filipinos who know how to program can write free software just like any other programmers. But there are many ways to help, see www.gnu.org/help/help.html for a number of suggestions.

One other thing you can do is encourage Filipinos, and the government of the Philippines, to adopt free software and thus choose freedom.

GEL: The Electronic Commerce Act of the Philippines (Republic Act No. 8792) requires all government agencies to be able to conduct business with the public electronically within two years from its effectivity. Is it possible for the Philippine government to use free software in complying with the law and in order to save on costs?

RMS: Free software gives everyone the freedom to make copies and distribute them, and that includes the Philippine government. So, it can potentially save a large amount of money, year after year, once it makes the investment to switch.

But it should do more than this. It should encourage all computer users in the Philippines to adopt free software. This would mean even greater savings in the balance of payments, increasing each year.

GEL: Few schools in the Philippines use, much more, teach free software. If you were to address Filipino school owners and administrators, what would you say to them? Would you have a message to the President of the University of the Philippines, the university to which our Institute belongs?

RMS: Even in the US, schools never have enough money. It must be even worse in the Philippines. Since the school system has the freedom to make as many copies of GNU/Linux as it wants, it could use all the money that it would have spent on for license fees. In addition, since GNU/Linux is more efficient, schools could make use of less powerful computers (such as the Simputer which was designed in India), or used computers that companies are replacing with new ones.

High schools and universities have another specific reason to use free software: the students can learn how it works. Proprietary software is secret software; you cannot find out how it works (or even what it really does). This is not conducive to learning computer skills except at the shallowest level.

I learned the craft of operating system development in the 70s by writing changes for the various programs in the free operating system that we used in the lab at MIT back then. At that time, there were few places in the world where a person could have that opportunity. Today, anyone who has access to a PC running GNU/Linux can develop his skill in this way.

Using free software in schools will lead, in the long-term, to benefits for the Philippines as a whole. It will help the country to escape from the rut of dependency on non-free software which becomes deeper and more expensive every year. And, it will encourage the development of all kinds of computer-related skills.

GEL: What is your personal view on intellectual property rights?

RMS: The term "intellectual property" is a catch-all for several disparate areas of law: copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and more. These areas have essentially nothing in common: the laws say different things, have difference effects, and raise different political issues. The only intelligent way to think about them is "separately".

If you use the term "intellectual property to think about them, it will encourage you to lump them together. Any generalization about copyrights, patents and trademarks is almost surely simplistic and foolish. To encourage people to think clearly about copyright, about patents, about trademarks, and so on, we should refuse to use the term "intellectual property", and instead we should explain why the term is a pitfall.

I have no opinion about intellectual property. I have opinions about patents, they should not be applied to the software field. It would take an hour for me to state my views about copyright, but I can state a simplified version.

I believe software, textbooks, reference books, and other works that serve functional purposes should be free: everyone should have the freedom to copy them, change them, and redistribute them.
For other kinds of works, the issues are partly different, but everyone should have the freedom at least to distribute verbatim copies noncommercially.

GEL: What do you think of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement and its effect on developing countries like the Philippines?

RMS: TRIPS, like the rest of GATT, is designed to give corporations power to control world trade.

I have read about the effects of GATT in the Philippines. Manufacturing jobs for export, in developing countries, often used to be good jobs. Today, in the "enterprise zones", they are nearly a form of slavery, where workers are deprived of their basic rights.

It is a mistake for any country to regard such jobs as desirable. The Philippines should abolish its enterprise zones, and say to the foreign companies that subcontract to them, "If some other country would like you to mistreat its citizens, go there. We won't allow it here."

GEL: For the ordinary Filipino, a computer is a personal computer running Windows and Microsoft Office.

RMS: It is an awful shame when people come to accept a state of helplessness as normal. But people can learn to change this attitude.

GEL: What is the free software alternative? Do the available hardware support such alternative?

RMS: The GNU/Linux operating system runs on most ordinary PCs, though you do need to check that the specific I/O devices are supported. A few are not.
GEL: We know that you have been to some Latin American countries and that you have spoken to legislators and policy makers in these countries. What, generally, was your message to them? What is your message to Filipino legislators and policy makers?

RMS: The most important message for legislators is, please do not pass laws that prohibit us from developing free software.

In the US, many free programs cannot be written. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act was used to suppress free software for playing a DVD. And many free programs are prohibited because algorithms, techniques or features are patented. The Philippines should avoid creating these obstacles for its own computer users.

The proposed Hague treaty (see www.gnu.org/philosophy/hague.html) threatens not only free software but also freedom of speech. Countries should not sign it unless its dangers are corrected.

If the Philippine government wants to do more than just protect liberty, it could make a good investment by actively encouraging computer users in the Philippines to switch to free software. The savings, over the next decade, would run to billions of dollars.

GEL: Is there a free software community in the ASEAN region? How about in Asia? What do you think should the role of these communities be in the region?

RMS: There are free software users and developers in Japan, China, and Thailand, and a very strong Free Software Movement in India. The Free Software Foundation of India is now being formed.

GEL: How would you describe the General Public License? What is copyleft?

RMS: The idea of copyleft is that you are free to make and publish a modified version of our software, but your modified version must itself be free in the same way.

By contrast, non-copylefted free software permits non-free modified versions.

Both of them are free software, because in both cases the developers respect the users' freedom. With copyleft, we go even further and actively defend the users" freedom.

GEL: Has there been any occasion wherein you had to enforce the provisions of the GPL by court action?

RMS: Not yet.

(Copyright 2003. Gilbert E. Lumantao. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.)