Free Republic

Richard Stallman: iPhones and Androids are 'Big Brother' tracking devicesNearly three decades into his quest to rid the world of proprietary software, Richard Stallman sees a new threat to user freedom: smartphones. "I don't have a cell phone. I won't carry a cell phone," says Stallman, founder of the free software movement and creator of the GNU operating system. "It's Stalin's dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to...

On August 4th, we found out that Lenovo Group, the company that has taken over IBM's Personal Computing Division, had made a deal with Novell Inc. to preload SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. For the first time, a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has committed to preloading a Linux desktop.

Stallman-headed group's increasing politicization leaves a sour taste When Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985, it was organized around a radical idea: Software should be free, not just as in free of charge, but free as in the concept of liberty. During the next 20 years that idea turned out to be not just radical, but surprisingly practical. Beginning with Stallman's Emacs text editor, to the various Gnu utilities, the Linux kernel, and beyond, free software has proved to be an enduring success. Much of the credit for that can be given to Stallman himself. Through...

The Curious Incident of Sun in the Night-Time ~ by Richard Stallman Our community has been abuzz with the rumor that Sun has made its implementation Java free software (or "open source"). Community leaders even publicly thanked Sun for its contribution. What is Sun's new contribution to the FLOSS community? Nothing. Absolutely nothing--and that's what makes the response to this non-incident so curious. Sun's Java implementation remains proprietary software, just as before. It doesn't come close to meeting the criteria for free software, or the similar but slightly looser criteria for open source. Its source code is available only under...

"The actual words I used were quoted correctly, but [author Kenneth Brown] deliberately confuses his terms, like 'Linux.' He confuses the Linux kernel, which I had nothing to do with, and the GNU OS project, which I launched," said Stallman, who characterized such mistakes as "deliberate." GNU Project founder Richard Stallman has told LinuxInsider that a recent report's use of interviews with Stallman is a "deliberate" attempt to confuse people about the origins of the Linux kernel, the GNU system and software developed as part of the free-software and open-source movements. "The purpose of this report is to confuse, to...