Cell phones are ‘Stalin’s dream,’ says free software movement founder

Free software movement founder Richard Stallman sounds off on smartphones, Microsoft and software freedom.

Nearly three decades into his quest to rid the world of proprietary software, Richard Stallman sees a new threat to user freedom: smartphones.

“I don’t have a cell phone. I won’t carry a cell phone,” says Stallman, founder of the free software movement and creator of the GNU operating system. “It’s Stalin’s dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I’m not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I’m not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop.”

Stallman firmly believes that only free software can save us from our technology, whether it be in cell phones, PCs, tablets or any other device. And when he talks about “free,” he’s not talking about the price of the software — he’s talking about the ability to use, modify and distribute software however you wish.

Stallman founded the free software movement in the early- to mid-1980s with the creation of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, of which he is still president.

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When I asked Stallman to list some of the successes of the free software movement, the first thing that came up was Android — not Google’s version of Android, but rather a third-party version of the mobile OS in which all proprietary software has been stripped out (see also: Stallman supports LibreOffice).

“It just recently became possible to run some very widely used phones with free software,” Stallman said. “There’s a version of Android called Replicant that can run on the HTC Dream phone without proprietary software, except in the U.S. In the U.S., as of a few weeks ago there was still a problem in some dialing library, although it worked in Europe. By now, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.”

Although Android is distributed with free software licenses, Stallman notes that manufacturers can ship the devices with non-free executables, which users cannot replace “because there is a device in the phone that checks if the software is changed and won’t let the modified executables run.” Stallman calls it “tivoization,” because TiVo uses free software but lays down hardware restrictions to prevent it from being altered. “If the manufacturer can replace the executable but you can’t, then the product is a jail,” he says.

Theoretically, Stallman says, phones that use only free software can protect themselves from the danger of electronic eavesdropping. “If it’s all free software, you can probably protect yourself from that, because that’s caused by the software in the phone,” he says.

Ironically enough, Stallman was speaking to me on a cell phone. Not his own, of course, but one he borrowed from a friend in Spain while on a European speaking tour. Over the course of 38 minutes, our connection was lost five times, including just after Stallman’s comments about electronic eavesdropping and free software for phones. We tried to connect again several hours later but were unable to complete the interview via phone. Stallman answered the rest of my questions over e-mail.

Sacrificing convenience is something Stallman is used to. He won’t use Windows or Mac, obviously, and even software such as Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular operating system based on GNU and the Linux kernel, does not meet his free software requirements.

Few people are willing to make the sacrifices he will for the goal of software freedom, Stallman acknowledges.

“The decisions anyone makes depend on values,” he says. “And most people are taught to think about software purely as a matter of price and performance, not whether it respects your freedom. People who make decisions on those values will not make any sacrifice of convenience to get free software, whereas I am willing to work for years and years and years to have no proprietary software in my computer.”

Stallman does his computing on a Lemote Yeeloong laptop running gNewSense, a GNU/Linux distribution composed only of free software.

“There are some things I can’t do. I’m using a rather slow computer because it’s the only laptop with a free BIOS,” Stallman says. gNewSense is the only totally free distribution that will run on the Lemote, which has a MIPS-like processor, he says. The Lemote had come with another GNU/Linux distribution that included non-free software, and Stallman replaced it with gNewSense.

Stallman, 57, experienced software sharing for the first time when he began working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. The sharing community broke down in the early 1980s around the same time that Digital Equipment Corp. discontinued a mainframe hardware platform the community relied upon. Stallman could have joined the proprietary software world if he had been willing to “sign nondisclosure agreements and promise not to help my fellow hacker,” he says. Instead, he pioneered the free software movement.

Stallman is a fascinating figure in the world of computing, admired by many individuals and reviled by companies such as Microsoft which see a threat from software they can’t make a profit from.

Stallman has failed to break the Microsoft/Apple dominance of the desktop computer market, not to mention Apple’s dominance of tablets. But the free software movement he created did lead to the proliferation of Linux-based servers which are prevalent in data centers and power much of the Internet. This is perhaps ironic because Stallman expresses resentment about the credit given to the Linux kernel at the expense of his own GNU operating system.

Stallman says he is “somewhat” proud of the proliferation of free server software, “but I’m more concerned with the size of the problem that needs to be corrected than with how far we have already come.”

Free software in data centers is nice, but “with the goal of giving users freedom, their own desktops, laptops and phones are the computers that affect their freedom most.” The focus is mainly on software rather than hardware, but the movement insists on “hardware that comes with specs so that we can write free software to support it fully,” he says. “It is unconscionable to offer hardware for sale and refuse to tell the purchaser how to use it. This ought to be illegal.”

Before agreeing to an interview with Network World, Stallman demanded that this article use his preferred terminology — e.g. “free software” instead of “open source” and “GNU/Linux” instead of just “Linux.” He also requested that the interview be recorded and that, if the recording were distributed online, that it be done so in a format that works with free software.

There are four essential software freedoms, Stallman explained. “Freedom Zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish. Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code, and change it so the program does your computing as you wish. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help others; that’s the freedom to make and distribute exact copies when you wish. And Freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community, which is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions when you wish.”

Stallman came up with the term “copyleft” to indicate licenses that ensure free software code cannot be redistributed in proprietary products.

The key to Stallman’s philosophy is this: “Without those four freedoms, the owner controls the program and the programs control the users,” he says. “So the program is simply an instrument of unjust power. The users deserve freedom to control their computing. A non-free program is a system of unjust power and shouldn’t exist. The existence and use of non-free software is a social problem. It’s an evil. And our aim is a world without that problem.”

“That problem” wasn’t caused by one company in particular, but Microsoft is usually the most frequently criticized by people like Stallman.

“They continue regarding us as their enemy,” Stallman says. Ten years ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously called Linux a “cancer.” Microsoft has softened its public tone since then, but Stallman is not impressed: “They have in some ways learned to be a bit more subtle but their goal is that people should use Windows and not a free operating system.” After that thought, our phone connection was lost again.

Other than Microsoft, Stallman calls out “Apple and Adobe, and Oracle and lots of others that make proprietary software and pressure people to use it.”

Google “does some good things and some bad,” Stallman says. “It has released useful free software such as the WebM codec, and is moving YouTube to distribute that way. However, the new Google Art Project can only be used through proprietary software.”

Stallman is also at odds with some people in what is known as the open source community. Open source advocates clearly sprung out of the free software movement, and most open source software also counts as free software. But Stallman says that people who identify as open source advocates tend to view the access to source code as a practical convenience and ignore the ethical principles of software freedom. Various vendors have jumped on the open source bandwagon without embracing the principles that Stallman believes should be at the heart of free software.

“I don’t want to make this seem too one-sided,” Stallman says. “Certainly a lot of people who hold open source views have worked on useful programs that are free and also some of those companies have funded work on useful programs that are free. So that work is good. But at the same time, at a deeper level, the focus on open source leads people’s attention away from the idea that they deserve freedom.”

One of Stallman’s targets is Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and one of the most famous figures in the world of free software.

Stallman and his crew worked on the GNU operating system for most of the 1980s, but there was one missing piece: a kernel, which provides resources from the hardware to programs that run on the computer. This gap was filled by Torvalds in 1991 when he developed Linux, a Unix-like kernel.

Systems using the Linux kernel are usually called just “Linux,” but Stallman has fought for years to get people to use his preferred term, “GNU/Linux.”

Stallman “wanted to make sure GNU got proper credit,” says Miguel de Icaza of Novell, who created the free software program GNOME but has been criticized by Stallman for partnering with Microsoft and selling proprietary software. “When Linux came out, Richard didn’t take it very seriously for a while, and he kept working on his own kernel. It was only when Linux took the spotlight that he felt, to some extent, his project had not been given enough credit. The problem is, what happened at the time was there was a new community that was created out of the blue that wasn’t necessarily aligned with GNU.”

The GNU kernel, called Hurd, is still “under active development,” according to the project’s Web site.

Torvalds’ contribution to free software will be widely celebrated this year during the 20th anniversary of the Linux kernel. But Stallman won’t be one of his cheerleaders, and it’s not just because of the naming dispute.

“I don’t admire a person who says freedom is not important,” Stallman says. “Torvalds set a bad example for the community by publicly using a non-free program for the maintenance of Linux (his kernel, which is his main contribution to the GNU/Linux system). I criticized him for this, and so did others. When he stopped, it was not by choice. More recently, he rejected [the] GPL version 3 for Linux because it protects the users’ freedom from tivoization. His rejection of GPLv3 is why most Android phones are jails.”

Even Red Hat and Novell, known widely as open source supporters, don’t get a ringing endorsement. “Red Hat partly supports free software. Novell much less,” he says, noting that Novell has a patent agreement with Microsoft.

Despite outward pessimism, Stallman does see a few positives spurred by his quest for software freedom. When he’s not at his Cambridge, Mass., home, which is most of the time, Stallman is roaming the world giving speeches and holding discussions about free software. Before traveling to Spain, Stallman stopped off in London to give a speech in which he called Windows “malware,” and met with a couple members of Parliament to explain free software issues. He often gets a better reception in Europe than at home.

“In the U.S., awareness of free software has been almost completely pushed under the rug by open source. As a result, you’d never find people in any government position who’d want to talk to me,” he says.

Outside of North America, some governments are embracing free software. “I found out yesterday that in France, the state agencies are continuing to move to free software,” he says. “There’s no systematic policy requiring them to but they’re doing so more and more. And in some countries, for instance in Ecuador, there is an explicit policy for state agencies to move to free software and any agency that wants to continue using non-free software has to apply for a temporary exception, permission to do so.”

Although Stallman didn’t mention it, the Russian government is requiring agencies to replace proprietary software with free alternatives by 2015 in a bid to improve both economics and security, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In addition to free software, Stallman is devoted to political issues, and writes a blog for The Huffington Post. In fact, he sees little distinction between the corporations threatening software freedom and “the scoundrels in Washington” who are beholden to corporate donations.

In the recent Wisconsin union protests, Stallman sees something of his own spirit.

“Sometimes freedom requires a sacrifice and most Americans are not willing to make any sacrifices for their freedom,” he says. “But maybe the protesters in Wisconsin are starting to change that.” Corporations and mass media “have to a large extent convinced Americans … that they’re not entitled to refuse businesses whatever businesses want. Well, we need a spirit of resistance in America. We need to recover the spirit of freedom with which we created the United States.”

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