Kris Khaira

I just got back from Richard Stallman’s talk on Software Freedom and the Danger of Software Patents here in Kuala Lumpur.

Richard Stallman founded the FSF, and also contributed to emacs and the GNU operating system and was the author of the GNU GPL license. No doubt, Stallman is almost legendary—the Gandhi of the free software world (thought with much more hair ).

The Dangers of Software Patents

Stallman is staunchly against software patents. At the talk, he said that “each patent is a monopoly of some ideas and also serves to stop us from using those ideas.”

Stallman also dispelled the myth that copyright law is bad—according to Stallman, copyright law is good and promotes creativity and the implementation of different ideas, but patent law is bad and retards growth. He explains the 3 different ways of handling patents:

1. Avoid the patent
2. License it
3. Invalidate the patent

Obviously, Stallman is one of the most provocative and bravest speakers in the software industry.

“You can avoid patents by finding all possible infringements in a product, but you can’t see all the ideas that relate to existing patents.”

You can also license your product, but by doing that, are you not doing harm by tolerating an evil system?

Stallman also advises on finding loopholes in patents. He told about how a license for using the LZW compression algorithm in Postscript was avoided because the patent only required licenses for a two-way use of LZW—compression and decompression. This may sound dodgy to some, but it is purely technical and fair.

According to Stallman, the only way to invalidating a patent is to prove that someone else had already used the idea before the patent application.

What is the use of standards if people are not allowed to implement them?

What if a person produces a masterpiece of software, through isolation for a year in his bedroom. Therefore, he should be able to claim this product as his own, correct? This is The Myth of the Starving Genius. Someone else might already have a patent for 0.5% of his software’s features and it doesn’t matter if he did it in isolation. A large company, together, may have 50 of those patents that relate to up to 30% of his software. This is how software patents retard creativity.

Software Freedom

And now I come to the more controversial part of my speech

Stallman has a strong view that free software is software that lets you use it freely. It should not be mistaken with open source software. Nor is the word “free” referring to its price.

Think of free, not as in free beer but free speech.

All free software is open source—free software lets you modify, adapt, share and change it to your needs, as long as you do not exploit the fact that it is free and resell it. But not all open source software is free. Not all open source software allows.

Free software allows true freedom of use and according to Stallman, allows these four freedoms:

• Freedom 0 – the freedom to run the software.
• Freedom 1 – the freedom to change the software.
• Freedom 2 – the freedom to help your neighbour by distributing the software.
• Freedom 3 – the freedom to help the community by releasing your adaptations of the software to the public.

The only thing worse than using an unauthorised copy of a non-free program is using an authorised copy of a non-free program.

His talk got me thinking about developers of non-free software like Adobe. How can someone make a living making free software?

Well, you don’t make money at all out of making free software. You make free software, and then you make money out of providing support services, being funded by organizations with interest in your software, teaching, selling merchandise and donations. There are always alternatives. Mozilla Firefox is a perfect example free software marketed professionally. Its programmers are not starving while its users enjoy the freedom of improving and redistributing it. Stallman himself has made a living out of free software.

The biggest concern I have with non-free software is not the price, but security and stability. I have no qualms about spending money on efficient and well-designed software that can help make me money back later, but I loathe buggy software. I loathe software with backdoors, security leaks, memory leaks, spyware and bugs that hamper productivity.

If a program is not free, you can’t tell it has a backdoor.

Stallman means to say that if a program is not free as in free to use, thus open source, you can’t find the programming mistakes. You can’t fix it for everyone else.

Stallman quotes Bill Gates, who foolishly admitted that Microsoft donates Windows licenses to schools to get kids addicted. This made me think about the junk food companies pushing schools to sell their products to get kids addicted.

Microsoft isn’t providing free software to schools. Microsoft is drugging the schools. Schools should know the difference between helping kids and maiming kids. So what can the people do to help increase the adoption of Free Software? Stallman urges us tell our government that the schools of Malaysia must switch to free software. At the same time, we need to help ourselves by not depending on free software. I agree—we shouldn’t base our livelihoods on non-free software and that includes depending on Macs and Windows to get work done. Start getting used to the alternatives.

Stallman may come off as a deranged post-modern hippie to some, but he speaks with facts. Organisations do not realise that software freedom can help them make money. Could it be discrimination against bearded men with long hair? Or is it the fear of software policies not involving the word “Microsoft”?

Whatever it is, Stallman is right—software patents harm innovation and creativity and software freedom is a necessity.

It is never a bad thing to live freely and to resist an evil system.

Audio excerpts

Richard Stallman on copyright law and patent law (2:31s) – 1.2MB

Please excuse the poor audio quality. This was recorded on a Sony Ericsson T630.