Discours de Richard Stallman à l'occasion des 35 ans de la FSF
Titre : Intervention de Richard Stallman à l'occasion des 35 ans de la Free Software Foundation
Intervenant·e·s : Richard Stallman
Lieu : Free Software Foundation, Boston USA
Date : 9 octobre 2020
Durée :
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Licence de la transcription : Verbatim
Illustration :
NB : transcription réalisée par nos soins, fidèle aux propos des intervenant·e·s mais rendant le discours fluide.
Les positions exprimées sont celles des personnes qui interviennent et ne rejoignent pas nécessairement celles de l'April, qui ne sera en aucun cas tenue responsable de leurs propos.
Transcrit : neox
Transcription
Hello, I'm Richard Stallman.
37 years ago, I launched the development of the GNU operating system. The aim was to develop a complete operating system including applications and utilities as well as the basic core, so that users would be able to do all their computing without ever running a non-free program. They would be able to do all their computing in freedom.
35 years ago, I launched the Free Software Foundation to raise funds to support GNU development. Of course nowadays, the Free Software Foundation does other things to support free software and the free software movement, in addition to supporting the development of GNU.
37 years ago the way you did computing was by loading programs into your computer: applications, utilities, games, and so on and each of these programs was at least somewhat general purpose. So a text editor would let you add text for any use whatsoever or a file transfer program would let you transfer files to any machine for whatever purpose it might be and so all we had to develop was these general-purpose programs and people could do whatever they wanted to do.
Then about 30 years ago the World Wide Web began. It was some years before we had a free graphical browser. But once we did people could use all sorts of websites and what you did with the website it was you accessed information. You just looked at it or you downloaded it and you navigated around in it and once browsers could do these things, they would work with any website, but companies started pressuring to get more control over users browsers and what they did for or to the user. They converted browsers into platforms for sending a computer program to run directly for the user and these programs came straight out of someone else's website and they ran which is not a wise way to do things.
Well now we have to pressure websites to please, allow everything to work if the user doesn't run JavaScript code or at least make the JavaScript code free software, so users are not running non-free software and we have to build up community practices of making modified versions or patches for you to use on the JavaScript that comes from websites. We have to pressure the websites to keep their interfaces stable so that these things don't have to be changed over and over so that users can get control over what's happening when they point their browsers websites.
The next big problem in Computing came with smartphones because the companies that made them encouraged every organization to make its own app. These apps were all proprietary and the result was we can't possibly replace those millions of apps. We have to try to persuade organizations to let people connect through websites. At least that's something we can try to handle and we already know how you need to do it if we can.
This year things have got worse again, covid-19 led social institutions to react by pushing people to do everything through non free apps and servers that mistreat people. I'm resisting this pressure. Absolutely 100%. I simply won't let any organization pressure me into running nonfree software: one way or another I refuse.
Often I refuse by saying “I can't use that. Can we talk by phone? Is there some way I can mail you a check?” whatever it might be and I'm rather stubborn and persistent and creative in looking for ways to deal with organizations and not run non-free software. But unfortunately, there are many things. I just can't do: I can't participate in a class, I can't go to a lecture, I can't listen to a concert, I can't do quite a number of things but the most important things they'll generally offer some sort of alternative. You just have to look for one and try to invent one. However, this sort of resistance is not enough.
What we want is to be able to participate in societies activities without running non-free software. This will require convincing many organizations to change, something that we have tried a little bit to do in the past but we've never succeeded on a wide scale. But now we must.
The first stage is already happening. There are free programs that schools can use for their classes which replace things like Zoom or Google and Microsoft things. We need to start convincing classes to change and then convincing schools and school departments to change. Professor Sussman at MIT is teaching his classes using Jitsi. I know music teachers who were teaching their students using Jitsi some are starting to use BigBlueButton.
The very beginnings have already been achieved their examples for others to follow. However, they're not entirely convenient yet. We need to make them a little more convenient but in parallel with that we need to organize: a major city public school tried using BigBlueButton for a class and was surprised that the results were very good. It was not merely as good as using Zoom. They got much better results that the children liked it better. So it would be really great if they publish the results. How we're going to convince them to publish the results that they got? I'm not completely sure, but we're just at the beginning of trying, but you see the kind of thing that we need to organize to do.
In the meantime there ways you could personally resist: if a school wants you to use zoom see if the school will give you a phone number to call in with an ordinary phone to listen to the activity on zoom. In other words you can connect to a zoom presentation for audio only without running the zoom program or any other particular program. If you can get a copy of the video material or a recording of the video of the class, you could put that together with listening in the class. Ideally if you get the material in advance you could look at that while you're listening. And if you can't get it in advance, maybe you can find a friend in the class who's willing to point a camera per screen and send the video to you. And this way you can get the same results. At least it enables you not to run Zoom. And if you tell your classmates how you're avoiding running zoom and why it's important enough to you to go to this trouble, it will show them that there's something important here something that's important enough to you that you're willing to go to some trouble to avoid running these programs. You'll have a chance to tell them about ideas they haven't thought about before. Sometimes, other activities you do give you a chance to pressure others to use ethical Computing, so they can talk with you. I'm going to be giving a presentation this week, a remote presentation, using GNU Jami to communicate with the people attending. So, the people running the activity are going to communicate with me through Jami and then use other software to stream what's on the screen and that method makes it possible to use almost any communication system any free program that works for you. You can ask them to install and it will work for the presentation. When you give presentations you can say “Okay, I'll give this presentation but I don't want to do this through Zoom. Zoom is an unjust program. I don't want to be involved in treating the attendees unjustly and I don't want to be treated unjustly myself. So please use a different program when that's free.”
The job we still have to do is enormous but we've already achieved an enormous amount. We have ramped up through many orders of magnitude. And now we have a couple more to do. We'll have to teach people the importance of freedom and fortunately the constantly increasing amount of computerized repression that's going on is going to help us get the point across. So let's get going.
Happy hacking.
