Bonus Interview- Richard Stallman - Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation’s mission is to promote users’ freedom to copy and redistribute and change software. Free software refers to freedom, not price, so the alternate to free software is proprietary software. Proprietary software that subjugates and divides the users, that’s what’s wrong about it is because it divides and subjugates people. It doesn’t respect users’ freedom, it doesn’t allow users to be part of a community, and that’s why it’s wrong. It’s not wrong for programmers to make money. And as long as they can make money in a way that respects the freedom of other people, I think that’s good. After all, I’m a programmer and I’m not unhappy when I make some money, but I only do it in ways that respect the freedom of other people. Back in the 1980s, it was possible for people to speculate, speculatively assume that we couldn’t possibly do such a big job because nobody would write the software if they weren’t getting paid. Well, now we know from experience that lots of people will work on free software even if they don’t get paid. And at the same time, a number of people have found ways to get paid to write free software. So, we’ve now shown that we can do very large jobs. We can produce a broad spectrum of software that is very high quality and that users like to use. Well, I think that the World Wide Web should eventually become the free encyclopedia of all knowledge. That it should have articles covering every topic that you’d want to have in an encyclopedia. And every one of these articles should be available for access at no charge, and people should be permitted to redistribute them also, and also to quote any part of the article in a new article. I think that they’ll be written mostly by teachers, college teachers, high school teachers. If each one writes an article a year, not every teacher because obviously they won’t all do this, but if a couple of thousand teachers get involved and each one writes an article per year, that’s not a very large part of your time, and that’ll get the job done in a decade or two.