Richard.M.Stallman calls for vigilance to safeguard ones Freedom

Richard M Stallman the father of GNU in a whole hearted interview with Peter Moon of ComputerWorld publication exhorts all Freedom loving community members to be aware of and vigilant about the pitfalls of turning a blind eye towards the less obvious details such as the version of GPL license used in various open source software.

Here are some of the quotes from the very interesting interview...

On difference between Free software and Open source...

In terms of ideas, Free software and Open source are as different as could be. Free software is a political movement; open source is a development model.

On where and why he opposes Linus Torvalds ....

The fact that Torvalds says "open source" instead of "free software" shows where he is coming from. I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats.

Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him.

Will free software community win the war against Microsoft ?

Nobody knows who will win this fight, because the outcome depends on you and the readers. Will you fight for freedom? Will you reject Windows and MacOS and other non-free software, and switch to GNU/Linux? Or will you be too lazy to resist?

On the deal between Microsoft and Novell ...

Microsoft's aim, in the deal with Novell, was to make people scared to run GNU/Linux without paying Microsoft for permission. That is why we designed GPLv3 to make it backfire.

Read the full interview here.