Nearthwort Obtain interviews Richard M Stallman - a transcript of the interview

Nearthwort Obtain is a website with a difference. While most websites concentrate on providing content in the form of text and graphics, this site's principal content is in the form of podcasts. That is right, it features interviews with famous personalities which you can listen to. And the quality of the content is also quite high. Nearthwort obtain is the brain child of Marc Fiszman who calls his podcast website the "Multidimensional Adventurer's Handbook".

Marc recently interviewed none other than Richard . M . Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement. This is the transcript of an excerpt from this interview - made available with prior permission from Marc.

Interview with Richard . M . Stallman

Nearthwort Obtain interviews Richard M Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Movement and the man who put the GNU into GNU/Linux. There are two main parts to this interview. In part I, Richard introduces Free Software and explains what that is all about. And that leads into some quite heavy criticisms of the popular tech heroes, well they are probably heroes of quite a few you out there certainly not of Richard's. The first is lord of Linux, Linus Torvalds and next stop is Steve Jobs of Apple who, Richard claims, is as evil as Microsoft. In the second part of the interview, we move into some multidimensional discussions which focuses on the impact of freedom on the evolution of consciousness.

Marc : Could you briefly explain what you mean by the definition of Free Software ? There may be a lot of tech savvy people who will be listening to the show and they won't be aware of what that means and your involvement with that.

RMS: First of all, Free refers to Freedom here and not price. So you should think of Free speech and not free beer. When you understand the proper meaning of the word Free, you understand Free software. Free software means software that respects the user's freedom. It is not a matter of what the program does in the technical sense, but it is a matter of the social system that the program's developers use. In fact the social system respects your freedom, then it is free software. It is decided by the program's life and not it's code. Any program could be free software but most of them are not. So specifically, Free software means you the user has four essential freedoms.

Freedom 0 : Run the program as you wish
Freedom 1 : the freedom to study the source code and change it to do what you wish
Freedom 2 : the freedom to distribute the copies of the program to others.
Freedom 3 : the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions as you wish

If the program gives you these four freedoms, it is Free software. If one of them is substantially missing, then it is proprietary software or user subjugated software and that shouldn't exist.

Marc: And what is the difference between Free software and open source software ?

RMS: The term open source was coined many many years later by people who were in the Free Software community and liked Free software but they didn't like the ethical and political approach of the Free software movement. They liked Free software in a practical sense. They appreciated it , they enjoyed the benefits of these freedoms. They didn't want to use the term freedom, they didn't want to look at these as an ethical question. they didn't want to ask whether it is wrong for a program not to respect your freedom.

So they coined another term more or less saying category software. That which enabled them to take a purely practical approach to the question. So they have an official definition of open source which is pretty similar to the definition of Free software in its practical resolve of those differences and they encourage the saying 'practice' but they don't say it is an ethical area instead they present practical benefits only. they present the question as purely practical.

They don't say that ethically speaking, software should be open source but we say that ethically speaking software should be Free.

Marc: Are you saying that Free software is a political movement where as open source is not ?
RMS: Absolutely.

Marc: But I have listened to another interview that you gave to about a year ago. I think you were talking about the development of the famous project Linux developed by Linus Torvalds.

RMS: He is in the open source camp.

Marc: Do you have beef with him or do you get along with him ?

RMS: Well we still have some disagreement because in the past few months he has been actively ridiculing the idea of freedom as something that shouldn't exist.

Marc: And that is your main problem with him...
RMS: Absolutely.

Marc: He claims that he doesn't take a political stand. Right?

RMS: He calls himself apolitical. I call him amoral.

But when you say that you are apolitical, that is itself a kind of political stand that is, ignore all those political questions.

Marc: Why should we care about Free software.

RMS: If you are using computers and using software and if you are using software which is not free, then you don't control what it does. Not you personally and not your whole community. A non-free program is controlled by its developer. The developer decides what it will do and also decides what it won't do. And so it is a tool for the developer to maintain control over society, to gain a power of the kind nobody should have. It is dangerous for the society to allow people, to allow anyone that kind of power. Someone I am not sure who it was, said code is law. What it means is that if you are doing software then the software decides what you are allowed to do. So that has the effect of being laws. These laws are being written by software companies which they can arbitrarily decide by fiat, the laws that are bound to you if you use that non-free software. I don't.

You can listen to the rest of this interesting interview where RMS apart from talking about Free software explains why Apple is as evil as Microsoft.

derStandard.at interviews Mark Shuttleworth

DerStandard.at runs a very open interview with Mark Shuttleworth - the founder of the Ubuntu project, where he is asked his opinion on a variety of topics, the chief among them not surprisingly that about Ubuntu Linux and the path it is going to take in the future. Ubuntu is by far the most popular GNU/Linux distribution and has held the top post for well over two years now on Distrowatch's most popular Linux distribution list.

The interview touches upon a number of things such as the advantages of using Ubuntu in the enterprise over RedHat or SuSE Linux which have better tools for centralized management which Ubuntu lacks at this juncture, His thoughts on OLPC and the potential role that Ubuntu can play in it, on why Launchpad - a software developed by Ubuntu has not yet been released as open source, why he feels that compiz and beryl are not yet ready for being integrated with Ubuntu by default, his thoughts on Debian, its relevance for Ubuntu and so on.

At the least, his answers are quite interesting which makes reading the whole interview a worthwhile exercise.

Interview : Linus Torvalds says he has never used Debian yet

Alright, many of you would find this title a bit controversial. But that is exactly what Linus Torvalds the father of Linux said when asked the simple question of which Linux distribution is his favourite one.

Linus Torvalds was interviewed by oneopensource.it where he went on to express his thoughts on a variety of topics including GPLv3, whether Linux infringes Microsoft patents, about Microsoft - Novell agreement, the future of Linux kernel and so on.

The questions posed are quite thoughtful and Linus Torvalds answers are equally interesting.

On questioned as to "which is your favourite distribution, and which one do you consider more secure?", this is what he had to say ... (and I quote)

I don’t really tend to care much, I’ve changed distributions over the years, and to me the most important thing tends to be that they are easy to install and upgrade, and allow me to do the only part I really care about - the kernel.

So the only major distribution I’ve never used has actually been Debian, exactly because that has traditionally been harder to install. Which sounds kind of strange, since Debian is also considered to be the “hard-core technical” distribution, but that’s literally exactly what I personally do not want in a distro. I’ll take the nice ones with simple installers etc, because to me, that’s the whole and only point of using a distribution in the first place.

So I’ve used SuSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, YDL (I ran my main setup on PowerPC-based machines for a while, and YDL - Yellow Dog Linux - ended up the easiest choice). Right now, most of my machines seem to have Fedora 7 on them, but that’s only a statement of fact, not meant to be that I think it’s necessarily “better” than the other distros.

Interview : Linus Torvalds says he has never used Debian yet

Alright, many of you would find this title a bit controversial. But that is exactly what Linus Torvalds the father of Linux said when asked the simple question of which Linux distribution is his favourite one.

Linus Torvalds was interviewed by oneopensource.it where he went on to express his thoughts on a variety of topics including GPLv3, whether Linux infringes Microsoft patents, about Microsoft - Novell agreement, the future of Linux kernel and so on.

The questions posed are quite thoughtful and Linus Torvalds answers are equally interesting.

On questioned as to "which is your favourite distribution, and which one do you consider more secure?", this is what he had to say ... (and I quote)

I don’t really tend to care much, I’ve changed distributions over the years, and to me the most important thing tends to be that they are easy to install and upgrade, and allow me to do the only part I really care about - the kernel.

So the only major distribution I’ve never used has actually been Debian, exactly because that has traditionally been harder to install. Which sounds kind of strange, since Debian is also considered to be the “hard-core technical” distribution, but that’s literally exactly what I personally do not want in a distro. I’ll take the nice ones with simple installers etc, because to me, that’s the whole and only point of using a distribution in the first place.

So I’ve used SuSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, YDL (I ran my main setup on PowerPC-based machines for a while, and YDL - Yellow Dog Linux - ended up the easiest choice). Right now, most of my machines seem to have Fedora 7 on them, but that’s only a statement of fact, not meant to be that I think it’s necessarily “better” than the other distros.

The future of C++ as seen by Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup

Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup is credited with creating the ever popular C++ programming language. While there are pure object oriented programming languages such as 'smalltalk' for instance, it was C++ which shot the object oriented programming paradigm to popularity.

In this video interview, Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup answers a number of questions such as the following ....

• Do you think you'll ever design a new language from scratch?
• How long after the standard is out do you expect to see a production compiler?
• Is it possible to do garbage collection cleanly and efficiently in C++?
• How soon after you created C++ did you see it start to take over the industry?
• Is there any particular naming convention you subscribe to?
• What's your opinion about the Microsoft implementation of C++?
  

Very interesting questions indeed... which ask for equally interesting answers from Dr Bjarne Stroustrup. Watch the video.

A talk with Opera CEO Jon Von Tetzchner

Ask me which web browser I use the most and I won't even pause before telling you that Opera is one of the web browsers of my choice. I have always had a soft corner for Opera web browser going even way back when it was an ad supported one. There was this thin non-intrusive bar on the top of the browser which showed a couple of ads when you were browsing the net. But now it is a totally ad-free free web browser which is famed for its innovative features and relatively small memory footprint.

And Jon Von Tetzchner is the CEO of Opera which is a Norwegean web pioneer. The main income for Opera comes from operator deals with search engines such as Google, Yahoo and telephony providers T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telfonica and so on. This means that the end users get to use the world class products of Opera such as the desktop web browser and Opera mini - the web browser for mobile phones, for free while still making money for the company.

Read this exciting interview with Opera CEO Jon Von Tetzchner by Andrew Orlowski.

Linus Torvalds speaks on the future of Linux

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, has, along with others like Richard Stallman, literally changed the world of software forever.

Linux-based distributions seem to pop up every day, while more and more devices now run Linux at their core, from mobile phones to inflight entertainment systems, to the world's mission critical server infrastructures.

The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?

APC Interviewer James Buchanan who is an Australian programmer, writer and cartoonist chats with Linus Torvalds and quizes him about what the future holds for the Linux kernel and in what direction it is being steered. Read the full interview.

A talk with Pavel Kanzelsberger, Creator of Pixel

You say you do not know what Pixel software does ? Well it is the end result of a one man company's remarkable achievement in developing a graphics software at par with Photoshop. The person in question is Pavel Kanzelsberger from Slovakia who has single handedly developed this software. I may add that it is not a GPLed product rather it is as closed source as Photoshop. Its USP is that it has a native Linux build and runs on numerous other OSes as well. And then again it doesn't cost you a hand and a foot to acquire it as it costs far less than Photoshop and is pegged at just $38 .

At present Pixel is still in the beta stage but is quite usable. A glance at the user interface of Pixel will give you a clue as to where it takes its inspiration from . It has the exact interface of Photoshop - an aspect that Adobe should be worried about especially since this product works flawlessly as well and is getting better as days go by. Check out the screenshots of Pixel.

James Gray at Linux Journal quizzes Pavel Kanzelsberger about what motivated him to start working on this project, the development process, a little about the person himself and the future of Pixel. Do read the interview.

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.

Interview with Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds the self confessed benevolent dictator and father of Linux recently gave a frank interview to the Linux Foundation. In it he holds a conversation with Jim Zemlin and talks about the future of Linux, patents, internal and external competition,Microsoft and so on.

The interview is in the form of a podcast and is split into two parts [ Part I and Part II ]. Linux Foundation has also made available transcripts of the interview which you can read if you have a low bandwidth link. Transcripts of part I and part II .