U.S. programmer Richard Stallman recently gave a talk in Venezuela about the practice and ethics of free software, as part of the closing activities of the 7th National Conference on Free Software, held in Caracas.

Stallman, founder of the free software movement, through the widely-known GNU Project, and graduated from Harvard University earning a Bachelor of Arts in Physics in 1974, explained about the impact of privative software, the anonymous of WikiLeaks, the distribution of Canaima GNU/Linux and free software.

Read the interview made by the Venezuelan News Agency to Stallman bellow:

-What is the difference between free software and privative software?
Free software respects your freedom and community, while privative software takes users’ freedom. There are two possibilities: whether users control their programs or the program controls users.

Liberties are needed so users can have effective control of the program and the information technology. The four liberties that define free software are freedom zero to run a program however you want; freedom one to study the source code, the program and change it so it can make your computing however you want; freedom two to make and distribute exact copies of the program however and whenever you want and freedom three to make and distribute copies of your modified versions whenever you want.

-What is the impact of using privative software?
When the owner controls the program he/she is tempted to introduce malefic functions to take advantage of his/her power to subjugate users even more. And what do these malefic functions do? They watch, restrict and abuse users; there are back doors.

-If that’s true, why do people use privative software?
Firstly, because they don’t understand, nobody has never explained people that there’s a problem of freedom when choosing a software. They think that it’s just about community and big media outlets distracting people from those issues precisely because they are media corporations and have commercial relations with the manufacturers. But there’s also inertia, social inertia, and it has a lot of forms. For instance, most of the companies use Windows and most of the schools teach Windows and if we ask companies to stop using it, they say that schools graduate Windows users. Inertia is an obstacle and it’s not easy to overcome it.

-What do you think about the distribution of Canaima GNU/Linux?
The distribution of GNU/Linux is one example, currently there are over 1,000 [programs]. One of the problems and weaknesses of our community is that almost all the GNU/Linux have privative programs, and most of our community values more commodity over freedom. Canaima used to be like that.

The Canaima developers have recently decided to eliminate privative programs within its distribution, but there’s a very important aspect on the implementation of this decision: on the one hand, how Canaima can clearly have no relation with privative programs in the future and, on the other hand, to say that those privative programs are not part of Canaima, but they’re actually there.

It has to break its relation with those programs to become an ethic and free distribution, and I am hopeful that they will do it so Canaima can join our list of totally-free distributions.

-Which are the totally-free GNU/Linux distributions?
I don’t remember all of them, but you have Ututo, Blag, gNewSense, Trisquel, Venenux, Dragora, Musix, Dinebolic and maybe a couple more. You can find the list in www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html.

-What is the educative and training step to democratize free software? Does the state have to participate? Or the community?
Schools and all the education-related activities must exclusively teach free software because teaching privative software is teaching dependence.

The instruments to give everyone access to free software is the community, schools and the state. It has to migrate all its computers to free software and the free software community has also a volunteering role to foster, teach and make easier migration.

AVN / Press Office – Venezuelan Embassy to the U.S. / August 15, 2011