During the third evening of fisl14, one of the most awaited speeches of the event took place: Livre Software and other essentials for computing freedom, with Richard Stallman. Founder of Free Software Foundation, Stallman is a programmer, hacker and an influential politic activist of freedom of technology and information. He is the author of the GNU GPL license, the world's most used free license, that consolidated the concept of copyleft.
To Stallman, activism for Free Software is a mateer of ethics, society and politics. "Or users control their programs, or programs control users, but both ways can't happen". The activist stressed the importance of sharing: "We need much more than individual control, we need collective control", he said.
Stallman compares proprietary softwares to colonial system, in which the population is deprived of its right to freedom and is dominated by big corporations. His main goal is the "liberation of cyberspace", condition in which users can legally modify, copy and distribute any material through the net.
Zero Hora Newspaper interviewed him, who also answered some of these questions. Check out below; the whole interview is in this saturday issue of Zero Hora (Jul/06).
Why do governments want to know everything about people?
Stallman – Because they can catch any whistleblower. They don't want us to know what's happening. United States have already shown that they want to hunt down and chase any whistleblower they can at any cost. The surveillance we have at the US today is incompatible with the human rights.
How do you see the use of these tools to organize protests against govenrments?
Stallman – It's ironical, given how horrible Facebook is. Facebook is a monstruous tool for surveillance. I beg you not to use Facebook. I never used it.
Photo: Guilherme Dias/indicefoto