Portrait of Richard Stallman with GNU horns, Artist: Jin Wicked, GNU Free Documentation License

Dave Taber (DT): Could you explain your concept of free software?

Richard Stallman (RS): Free software is not an issue of free speech as such, but it's the same meaning of free that you use in free speech, or in free market, for that matter. But it's not the meaning of free that you use in free beer. For me this is an issue of individual freedom and community. With free software you get both of those and with proprietary software they are both denied by private power. So for me this is an issue of something more important than economy. We are cooperating and it has something to do with economic activity but I think it diminishes an issue of freedom to call it mere economics.

Our project is called the GNU Project. You have to pronounce the letter 'G'. Our operating system is GNU, however it's no longer new. In 1983 I decided I wanted to be able to use computers as part of a community of freedom. This was impossible because all of the operating systems that existed were proprietary software and the only way to get a copy was to sign a contract saying that you wouldn't share it with anyone. My solution to this problem was to develop another operating system and then I and the other authors would make it free software.

I decided to develop an operating system that would be free software, would run on modern computers, and be portable.

I started the GNU Project in January, 1984. Through the 1980s we developed various parts of the system. In 1992 the last missing piece was provided by someone else [Linus Torvalds]. That piece is called Linux. It's the part that's the kernel, meaning that it's the lowest level part, it allocates the machine's resources to all the other things that you do.

In 1992 there was a complete free operating system for the first time for modern computers. It consisted of GNU plus Linux, so we call it GNU/Linux. Now you will find many people who erroneously call the whole thing Linux. That is rather a problem for those of us who are trying to promote the ideals of freedom that are the reason for GNU. When Torvalds gets all of the credit for our work it's not just unfair to us, its unfair to the free software movement.

DT: What are those ideals?

RS: Computer users deserve the freedom to change and redistribute the software that they use. There are four essential freedoms. Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish. Freedom one is the freedom to study the source code and change it as you wish. Freedom two is the freedom to make copies and distribute them to others when you wish. Freedom three is the freedom to publish and distribute modified versions when you wish.

I believe that these are the human rights of all users of software. The free software movement's goal is the liberation of cyberspace.

DT: These principles form the basis for the development of free software?

RS: Well, yes and no, there can be more than one different reason to do the same thing. Many people have developed software and made it free without sharing those views.

DT: Would you comment on the social and economic impact of free software?

RS: The success has been both good and bad. The problem is that the appreciation of our software has spread a lot further than the appreciation of the ideals of freedom and community. People have found that our software is powerful and convenient and reliable, and they discovered that they could make it more so by participating. So we have achieved something very broad and at the same time shallow.

DT: Yet this method of product development is unprecedented in history.

RS: Well, yes, we are producing a tremendous amount of useful order in a totally anarchist fashion. More than a million people have participated and there is no organization that anybody has to belong to. Any person or group of people can start their own project and run it however they like. They can decide how they are going to work together and make their versions, and somebody else who makes a change can send it back to them and say, 'I would like you to put this in, if you will,' and they can do it or not. That's what usually happens, but somebody who makes a change can also say, well I'm just going to distribute my version myself.

This model is already being used in other arenas, in fact one where we can see it has been used for centuries is the arena of recipes, where the same four freedoms apply. Now we can also see it at work in the area of encyclopedias. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia in the same sense that GNU/Linux is free software.

DT: What do you think inspires people to participate?

RS: It's tremendously fun — that's the most basic thing. What makes people do Sudoku? What makes people do crossword puzzles? Fixing a program is a lot like those things, plus it's useful for a lot of people. You make something work and people like it and they admire you.

There are other motivations, too. For example, I want a world of freedom. Now, one thing that may seem paradoxical is that I'm not an anarchist. I believe in having a welfare state and you can't have a welfare state without a state. Now, I can imagine that there might be a possible world which had no government at all, and it was nice to be in, but I can imagine that without any kind of government it would turn into horrible chaos so I don't advocate getting rid of government.

DT: Would you say this model is mainly useful for creative endeavors?

RS: It can be so, but I don't think it's essential that it be so. I'd rather not use the term creative. After all, lots of things can be creative. Writing a program can be creative, but that's not the distinction. The distinction is between works of practical use and works whose function is just to look interesting. That's not a comparison of which one is more important, but there are different kinds of importance to society. What art provides to society is very different from what software or encyclopedias provide to society. Software and encyclopedias are used to do a practical job, they have a practical purpose.

It is unethical and anti-social to stop people from changing and redistributing works of practical use, but I don't think the same thing about art. I would say, regarding art, there are two minimum freedoms: one is the freedom to make and non-commercially redistribute exact copies, which, you can see, is just a part of freedom number two for software. Then there is the freedom to produce new works of art by transforming old art in such a way that you wouldn't call it a different version of the other art. It's a broad interpretation of fair use, but not radical.

So these are the freedoms I believe are essential for art, however, I think copyrights should not last for the century or century and a half that it can last now [Ed. note: following the passage of the "Mickey Mouse" Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 [5]]. It should last a fairly short period of time and after that the work would be in the public domain.

DT: I did see on a web search that some folks are using copyleft as a tool to help produce music.

RS: I haven't seen it, but I like the idea. I don't believe all art must be free, but I think making art free is a good thing to do.

DT: What motivated you to create the copyleft form of copyrights?

RS: Copyleft is a technique for using copyright. Copyright is designed to fit itself to right-wing purposes, namely to subjugate a whole bunch of people and keep them divided and helpless. Copyleft is my way of using copyright law to do just the opposite, to establish freedom to cooperate for everyone. The way it works is that I maintain the copyright on my work, but I put a statement on it saying that everybody has the four freedoms. Also, essentially, copyleft says that modified versions must have the same license, in other words, modified versions must also be free. My aim was to make these freedoms inalienable rights of all.

DT: With the growth of the free software movement, you're going a long way to accomplishing that.

RS: Well, within a certain range, but freedom is very threatened in the world today. The traditional American ideas of freedom, which are what inspire me, are not very much honored in the United States anymore.

DT: I guess the last thing I am wondering is, because we are not a technical publication, what should people be looking for in terms of operating systems and programs?

RS: They should insist that the software they use respects their freedom. If a program doesn't they should reject it. On www.gnu.org [6] you can see the list of free distributions of GNU/Linux. The sad thing is it is a short list, there are hundreds of distributions, and there are less than ten that are free.

Awareness of the issue of freedom, valuing freedom, is still a minority activity in the free software community. Look at how many people say "open source" instead of "free software." The reason that term was coined was for the sake of people who wanted to talk about the software and hush up the term 'free'. They didn't agree with the idea that freedom is an ethical issue that we should campaign from.

If we could magically produce free software for all of the computers in the world today, we could give all computer users freedom. Would we still have it in five years? If we value our freedom and appreciate it, then maybe we'll insist on maintaining our freedom and in five years we might still have it.

But if we only think, 'oh wow this software's so convenient and practical' and we don't care about these freedoms, five years from now we'll discover that many other proprietary programs have been made and we'll lose our chance at creating a free cyberspace commons. Open source ideas can help motivate people to develop the software, they can even help motivate people sometimes to use the software, but they can't go the last mile of showing people why they should reject non-free software. And people who are not prepared to defend their freedom are likely to lose it.