Happy Hacking
Stallman is one of the rare alive persons I see who can assume the role of a morale conscience for our contemporary world and much troubled society (!?) He is the genuine intellectual, achieved scientist and cold tempered social activist entitled to carry this much needed virtuous, wise and timeless truth that the rest of us can rely upon. Not that my worldview agrees with his. He has one and I only have instinctive feelings of what seems right and what seems wrong. But in virtually everything that he has reflected upon or has a say, I always find myself, at various levels, in agreement with him, from "obvious" to "convincing". I can't think or remember any of his statements and thinking, "oh, that is disappointing".
Today (11 July 2012), I could hear for the first time a talk he delivered in person (I've heard scores of them in videos). It was over two hours and a half of speech but time just vanished, as he was denouncing despising abuses from corporations on the one hand and offering a paradigm of a better, decent, sharing, open, free, brotherly world instead.
I'll give an example from today of how truthful and deep he is even when sounding light-hearted on an apparently unimportant issue. He made this bold statement: "everything that Hollywood produces is trash". My initial feeling was—surely like yours now, reading this tirade seemingly more appropriate in a pub than from a profound thinker—"that's exaggerated, that's a figure of style, a provocation, maybe something he says on the fly". But as a gifted speaker who understands and controls what he's saying at the most accurate level, he knows this could be taken as such, and he continues: "by that I don't mean most of what Hollywood produces is usually trash, I really mean, Hollywood is a machine to produce trash". And then the punchline, he brings some factual argumentation, evoking such things as Save The Cat! which is a recipe to make blockbusters, not art, but merchandising, the sort of rule-of-thumbs gathering of all that pleases the mass, the tricks that relegate gastronomy to junk food, making Hollywood movies into, precisely, trash. Now I may differ on grounds of personal tastes, but I certainly accept the point as valid. And possibly, with further investigation, right. He seems to have thought carefully and deeply over all these problems. It would be worth dissecting the problem... I know that at least some of my favourite Hollywood movies have in fact met with terrible difficulties from the Hollywood producers and should be more appropriately regarded as having survived the Hollywood industry than being produced by it.
His talk was inspiring. It is such a nice feeling to hear things that appear so deeply, utterly true and so obvious, but which are so adverse to society that it made them illegal. Sharing is the most obvious theme. I am personally against forbidding or restricting access to something which has, intrinsically, no limitation. Duplicating a chair has a price. Duplicating a file has none. Some phony "intellectual property" and "copyright" have been invented to make profit on the latter. Stallman made an interesting historical overview of how such notions emerged, and became corrupt. Profit is not the problem. The inherent limitations that follow from wanting to maximise profit is. It brakes, slows down, stalls, block and eventually kills itself from killing the very source it is trying to feed upon.
I am not against the possibility for someone to sell the file, making commerce and profit from it. What I am against is being compelled to. I understand how it can look faulty, dishonest, naive or a combination of these. But hear Stallman. He tells you how you could have a button to pay 1€ to an artist you wish to personally reward or support. With this simplistic parable, or gedankenexperiment, if you wish, he develops to solve all the important issues at stake, particularly for the most concerned parties, the artist and their public. True, this removes the middle-men from the equation, the editor, the real copyright owner (he took the record-company as an example). But hear him again exposing the scam of their practices. They shouldn't exist anymore. Even though they would prove to be necessary, another blow Stallman typically delivers—and did in the questions session—is the famous punching line: "but is this worth your freedom?" Whenever you pause to think about it, however strong was the original argument, you came to an irresistible No.
Stallman makes you feel the world could really be a better place. Orders of magnitude so. What should we do about it?
I don't think I have strength, will, courage, time and dedication to be an activist who takes serious things seriously, stand for something, even something so important as intellectual freedom which is increasingly abused and restricted, as Stallman demonstrated through, again, a compelling historical perspective of what copyright was and what it became.
There are things that are more important than this, so if I had to stand for something anyway, I'd feel I would have to choose otherwise. Spain, for instance, is currently falling into a social chaos, it is being ripped off by markets and companies, citizens are oppressed and disarmed of their economic freedom by cuts in salaries and increase in taxes, education, research and developments are sacrificed, universities close posts massively or cancel them, reduction of salaries and increase of workloads are reported by people both in the private and public sectors, the country is being nationalised away, young people are desperate with over one in four unemployed and with neither short nor long-terms prospects, at the same time as laws are being enacted to reduce the little rights they would have previously had. I learned that the European card of social security coverage I was entitled to when I left Spain is now no longer valid for people who do not have a permanent contract. For me, that's a slight annoyance, and another proof that Europe is somewhere between being a business and a scam, not something for Europeans (I am about as much European you can be, I'm French, married to a Spanish, living in Germany, previously in the UK; I never found any advantage from the existence of Europe, neither my wedding, my car, my flat, my bank, nothing, maybe this social security card was the only exception of something raising my rights above the frontiers of the states, well, it is not anymore and everything would have been the same for me without a European union and a European parliament). For others in precarious situations, the lack of social security could become a life threatening situation. It turned out the attempt to remove social security to young unemployed Spaniards was anti-constitutional. Still, I heard of cases where people had to declare themselves indigent to hold these basic rights. Everywhere I look, things are going for the worst. Not yet in Spain but in Portugal, the government is inviting its citizens to leave, to emigrate and look for jobs elsewhere. It is not public policy but many people actually do this. Those who stay are beaten up by the police, the newspapers show at this very minute bleeding protesters [1]. That's a snapshot of Spain. The dynamics is clearly of a country collapsing into an impeding catastrophe.
If I should involve myself in a fight, wouldn't this one be more important?
But if I look farther, the injustice against African countries, the raping of Lybia, the suspicious story that looks like a repeat in Syria, colonialism in the middle-east, the murdering of civilians by the several of thousands, the escalating, and probably orchestrated, tension between nations, the impeding war between Iran and Israel, aren't those even more urgent and important still?
But if you stop having an onlooker's interest, and start to fight genuinely, won't you become fully this? (I don't want to write, "only this"). I don't know what remains of the computer scientist productivity of Stallman, the genius author of Emacs and gcc. He is, beyond a free-software activist, also a political activist. I don't even have time to read all that he posts on the topic. On this day where he had to give this talk at TUM, he posted 17 entries. One of them reads "Spain to further hurt poor. Spain has been ordered to lay out a clear plan to impose further suffering on the poor, in order to get money to bail out the banksters." He pays closer attention to Spain than I do when I am directly concerned.
I am sure his fight is efficient and useful. It is, at any rate, admirable. I am deeply admiring of him, for what he was before (and might still be), a gifted computer programmer with style and depth (here I should say that Emacs is probably the piece of software I use the most in my work and that I regard it, maybe with $\mathrm{\TeX}$), as one of the most beautiful and inspiring piece of code ever conceived), and what he became, a morale conscience for humanity.
Torvalds, on the other hand, remained what he was: a computer coder. He is still very much active, as I understand, and a motor in the development of linux, git and other, admittedly, important things. He is a genius as well, an important, influential person. It is ironic that today, Torvalds described, in a Google+ post, Emacs as the creation of the devil [2], and that at the same time, Stallman was emphasizing the difference between the free software movement, which is a philosophy, and linux, which is a side effect, or a particular case, that took all the credit, when it is just a component, albeit the most fundamental and the most complicated.
What if Stallman decided to ignore the whole business, though? And focus exclusively on his art. What other jewel of computer code would he have blessed the world with? Maybe his work for free software is actually more important. Torvalds deserve all the honors of his category, maybe Times man of the year, he might even have been this already. I think Stallman deserves a peace Nobel prize, although I don't think the prize is attributed fairly, the peace prize least of all. Stallman will have a much wider recognition, that of the future generations. He will become a Mahatma Gandhi, while Torvalds will become a Thomas Edison.
When I ponder this question, I naturally think of my particular case. Should I give up obscure questions of quantum physics and fight for a better world? Maybe I won't do well. Stallman said today that "better not to do something than to do something that ultimately harms" (like writing code, which is something good, but if the code is proprietary, it is bad as it alienates people's freedom, regardless what the code is and better for this code not to be written). This is, again, something which rings true to me.
I find the case of Charlie Veitch interesting. He was a trader, I think, or something related, a hedge-fund analyst or a consultant, something immoral of the like. Out of disgust from the practice he was dragged into by his hierarchy, he became an anarchist. He started as a peaceful, mischievous activist speaking in a megaphone in the street, teasing authority and mocking absurd laws such as forbidding you to take a picture in the street. Possibly he became pretty much crazy under the stress and the escalation of getting serious with his revolt. Here's a video where's he very much moved and aggressive, in stark contrast with his débuts where his main goal was to poke childish fun with his friend Danny Shine, hug policemen and say that everything is okay [3]. His prose can also be extremely corrosive and violent... I don't know if he is crazy. Whether he's right or deluded would imply joining his journey, if not to walk alongside him, at least to take the same route, to see where it is going, to truth or abyss. But it is such a long detour. I can only from my vantage point, immobile, see how far this is going, and at least, right or wrong, admire him too. Even if he is completely wrong, I believe the world needs more people like him, with this thirst for justice, for standing up for something, even if anything. While I trust Stallman will leave a print in history, Veitch is only one of these Gavroche who will go with their time. It doesn't mean they are not also needed. But he is carrying me away already. I will come back to him at one or another occasion, and carry on with other dear recordings of today's talk.
Stallman concluded his performance auctioning a stuffed gnu. Starting price, 20€. He incremented by 10 but some guy in the audience made aggressive biding, quickly jumping to 50, then 100 then 150, where it stayed. The generous benefactor gave the cash to Stallman who pocketed it as he was opening the questions session.
There too, he had things his way, asking people to queue rather than circulating the microphone around which, he said, would give authority to the chairman to select who could speak, a potential thread of favouritism or censorship.
Most questions were interesting, mainly from computers people so technical on that aspect. It's interesting that the most primitive fear was "how can people earn a living then?" and that it is so common, even in, I assume, a select audience. What strength of Stallman to tirelessly, slowly, carefully explaining. Another question was "I think Microsoft did good things disseminating computers". The reply was "So what?". One chemist mentioned problems he had having an accepted paper for a conference published because he wanted to have a public licensing of it (it turned out some arrangement could be found through contacts on the researcher and conference organiser sides). Stallman told him "you should mention this problem during your talk at the conference". It's delightful to imagine the talk with a mention on copyright policy.
It was great. I can't really blog on this topic because this calls into questions so many things, that even to write superficially about it results in such long and chaotic mass of disorganized thoughts. I believe time will increasingly be calling us to make choices, choices for or against war, choices of society, of personal involvements. I will, then, probably, like most of us, be called to make a step forward. In any case, then, I think it'll go in a direction where Stallman has trodden before.
To finish on a light note, here's the exhortation he kindly signed for me on a volume of his collected essays:
See also