KEY POINTS:
If you think computers and the internet have done a power of good for individual freedom, you've clearly not been exposed to the thinking of Richard Stallman.
Stallman, an American, is part-way through a speaking tour on which he is outlining the philosophy of the Free Software Foundation, of which he is founder and president.
Uncompromising is the only word to describe Stallman's attitude to the proprietary software world of Microsoft, Apple and others. To end their tyranny over hundreds of millions of unwitting users of their products, he's advocating nothing less than the overthrow of the software world order.
The movement stands for free as in speech, not beer, Stallman told National Radio's Kim Hill last Saturday - an unnecessary distinction to make in Spanish, which has two words, "libre" and "gratis", to convey the different meanings.
Stallman is a practised - and forceful - advocate of software freedom. At a talk at the University of Auckland directly after his National Radio appearance, he said it was better to develop no software at all than to develop proprietary software, which is sold under draconian licence terms.
"Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless; divided because everyone's forbidden to share it with anyone else and helpless because the users don't have the source code so they can't change anything. They can't even tell independently what the program is doing to them."
It's easy to claim you support freedom if it's not defined. After all, Stallman said, in one of several swipes at the United States Administration, even George W. Bush - who "wouldn't recognise freedom after he stepped on it" - claims to support it. For software to be free, therefore, Stallman has set four conditions:
* Users must be able to run the program for any purpose.
* They must be free to study how the program works, and adapt it, for which they need access to the source code.
* Users must be able to redistribute copies of the program.
* They must be free to improve the program, and release improvements to the public.
Free software is a contribution to society, whereas the proprietary sort - and if any of the four freedoms is missing or weak, then proprietary is what it is - is a "power grab".
This is where proprietary software leads - total subjugation to a developer who has total power.
To the average Microsoft or Apple operating system buyer, this will sound baffling - and extreme. But it's not half as extreme, in Stallman's book, as the rights that proprietary software vendors assign themselves at the expense of users, when the buyer consents to their licensing terms.
Microsoft Windows Vista and Apple Mac OS X, for instance, have "backdoor" features that allow the vendors to load whatever software they see fit on the user's computer via the internet.
"To say that Microsoft and Apple can take control of a user's computer is an understatement because, really, they've always had it. They've arranged to give themselves total control of the user's computer starting from the first moment of connecting that computer to the internet.
"And this is where proprietary software leads - total subjugation to a developer who has total power."
Stallman has made the free software movement his life's work - but not by mere words. In 1983, after working for about a decade as a programmer in MIT's artificial intelligence lab, he set about writing a free operating system - before Windows or the Mac OS even existed.
He called his operating system GNU, standing for "GNU's not Unix", Unix being the OS on which it was based. He didn't quite finish the job, but in combination with Linux, which provides the operating system kernel, GNU/Linux is a functioning free OS. Stallman gets very tetchy when people call the OS Linux, rather than GNU/Linux.
He has also written a software licence for the distribution of free software, the general public licence, or GPL.
His advocacy is not lacking in humour.
But impatience isn't far away either. When a member of the audience said that in his specialised video-editing role, there was no free software that could do the job fast enough, Stallman barked, "F*** the speed issue", and chided him for not getting stuck in and developing his own free alternative.
Part of his message is that moving from proprietary to free software demands some sacrifice on the part of users. He had recently acquired a laptop that ran only free software, but at the cost of not being able to recharge the battery while it was in use.
Stallman accepted the inconvenience. "They're things I can overcome - and it respects my freedom."
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
