LibertyBits 2018 Conference: Richard Stallman on Computing, Freedom, and Privacy
Channel: The GNU Guru
Date: 2024-04-04

Richard Stallman's speech at the 2018 LibertyBits Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, recorded on April 24, 2018.

Mr. Stallman gives his usual passionate plea that we should all use free software. He enumerates the reasons why by talking about the "four freedoms" of free software and how they protect us from the depredations of corporations, governments, and other bad actors.

He gives lots of examples of past and ongoing offenses such as: controlling--up to, through, and including sabotaging--the machines we own; preventing us from installing the software that we want to use; preventing us from using the software that we purchase in the way that we choose; spying and snooping on us; reporting what it finds to other corporations and state agencies; etc.

The bottom line: end user agreements are fundamentally anti-social, because they are designed to prevent us from sharing with our friends and co-workers, and proprietary software is essentially a form of malware that should be avoided at all costs.

He also talks about things like why most "Linux" distributions are actually not free; why the term "open source" was coined in 1998; the JavaScript trap; how software as a service harms your freedom; and wraps-up with the many ways you can help to contribute to a healthy free software ecosystem.