Episode: 473
Title: HPR0473: Tit Radio Ep 011.1a - RMS and Aftershow
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0473/hpr0473.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:18:38

---

Truth is stranger than fiction.
This is the truth. This is Briblias.
Believe it or not.
Fox Shinga, ruler of Marwar India, was killed by his vanity.
He couldn't resist trying on a robe,
sent to him by an enemy.
The robe had been dipped in poison and fucked, died.
Believe it or not.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the father of 100 crippled daughters.
King Kusinava, who ruled over a great Hindu kingdom,
was the father of 100 daughters, all of them hunchbacks,
to commemorate his great family tragedy.
The king founded a city and named it Kanyu Kajba,
the city of the deformed maidens.
And there he resided for many years.
The capital founded by the tragic king has survived to the present day.
It's now the principal city of the district of Farukabad, India.
It's name having been reduced to the modern Kanyuaj.
It's name having been reduced to the modern Kanyuaj.
Believe it or not.
Hello and welcome to the tragic radio 11.1.
This is a special last show episode.
Today, I have an audio interview with Richard Storlman
before his talk at the Edinburgh University Informatics Kallok,
with a particular focus on ethics in the field of software.
Also some funny ha ha clips from last night's show.
Sit back and enjoy.
And I will talk to you at the end of this kick-ass show.
If I'm put it on the media, I wanted to ask you
if it's okay for the community radio stations to take it
and they might be broadcasted in a variety of formats.
It's okay for them to re-broadcast it in formats
that can be played by free software.
I do not want it to be transmitted in real-player format
or in some Microsoft-only format.
It would be contradictory.
Okay for you to make it available as a transcript and translate?
Yes, yes.
But when you do that, please put on a note
permitting verbatim copying by everybody.
A person that doesn't devote his whole life
to developing a new form of freedom
without some pre-existing beliefs that drive him to do so,
what drives you to spend so much time on software freedoms?
First of all, growing up in the US in the 1960s,
I certainly was exposed to ideas of freedom
and then in the 1970s at MIT,
I worked as part of a community of programmers who cooperated
and thought about the ethical and social meaning of this cooperation.
Then that community died in the early 80s
and by contrast with that,
the world of proprietary software,
which most computer users at the time were participating in,
was morally sickening.
And I decided that I was going to try to create once again
a community of cooperation.
I realized that what I could get out of a life of participation
in the competition to subjugate each other,
which is what non-free software is,
or I could get out of that was money
and I would have a life that I would hate.
Do you think that the free software movement or parts of it
could or thus benefit from collaboration
with other social movements?
I don't see very much direct benefit to free software itself.
On the other hand, we're starting to see some political parties
take up the cause of free software
because it fits in with ideas of freedom and cooperation
that they generally support.
So in that sense, we're starting to see
a contribution to the ideas of free software
from other movements.
Have you considered that the free software movement
is vital to oppositional movements in the world,
against corporate rule, militarism, capitalism, et cetera?
Well, we're not against capitalism at all.
We are against subjugating people who use computers,
one particular business practice.
There are businesses, both large and small,
that distribute free software and contribute to free software.
And they're welcome to use it, welcome to sell copies,
and we thank them for contributing.
However, free software is a movement against domination,
not necessarily against corporate domination
but against any domination.
The users of software should not be dominated
by the developers of a software,
whether those developers be corporations,
or individuals, or universities, or what.
The users shouldn't be kept divided and helpless,
and that's what non-free software does.
It keeps the users divided and helpless.
Divide it because you're forbidden to share copies
with anyone else, and helpless because you don't get the source code.
So you can't even tell what the program does,
let alone change it.
So there's definitely a relationship.
We are working against domination
by software developers.
Many of those software developers are corporations,
and some large corporations exert a form of domination
through non-free software.
Also, that resoft that developers could provide
a technical infrastructure for these movements
that would be impossible to develop using propriety software,
which are too expensive and locked into a logical model
that reflects the interest of a dominant world system,
like commodization, exploitation, control, and surveillance,
instead of sharing justice, freedom, and democracy.
At the moment, I wouldn't go quite so far as to say
that non-free software couldn't be usable by opposition movements
because many of them are using it.
It's not ethical to use non-free software,
because at least it's not ethical to use it,
to use authorized copies,
but it's not a good thing to use any copies.
You see, to use authorized copies,
you have to agree not to share with other people,
and to agree to that is an unethical act in itself,
which we should reject,
and that is the basic reason why I started the free software movement.
I wanted to make it easy to reject
the unethical act of agreeing to the license of a non-free program.
If you're using an unauthorized copy,
then you haven't agreed to that.
You haven't committed that unethical act,
but you're still, you're condemned to living underground,
and you're still unable to get the source code,
so you can't tell for certain what those programs do,
and they might, in fact, be carrying out surveillance.
And I was told that in Brazil,
the use of unauthorized copies was, in fact,
used as an excuse to imprison the activists
of the landless rural workers movement,
which has since switched to free software
to escape from this danger,
and they indeed couldn't afford the authorized copies of software.
So, these things are not lined up directly on a straight line,
but there's an increasing parallel between them,
and increasing relationship.
The business cooperation, as a social form, is very closed.
It's answers to no one except the shareholders,
for example, a small group of people with money,
and it's a turn-up bureaucratic organization
is about as democratic as a Soviet ministry.
Thus, the increasing involvement of corporations
with free software strike you as something to be concerned about.
Not directly, because as long as a program is free software,
that means the users are not being dominated by its developers,
whatever, when those developers be equal.
A large business, a small business, a few individuals,
or whatever, as long as the software is free,
they are not dominating people.
However, most of the users of free software
do not view it in ethical and social terms.
There is a very effective and large movement
called the open source movement,
which is designed specifically to distract the users' attention
from these ethical and social issues,
while talking about our work.
And they've been quite successful.
There are many people who use our free software,
which we develop for the sake of freedom and cooperation,
who have never heard the reasons for which we did so.
And this makes our community weak.
It's like a nation that has freedom,
but most of the people have never been to what to value freedom.
They're in a vulnerable position,
because if you say to them, give up your freedom,
and I'll give you this valuable thing,
they might say yes, because they never learned why they should say no.
You put that together with corporations
that might want to take away people's freedom
gradually and approach on freedom,
and you have a vulnerability.
And what we see is that many of the corporate developers
and distributors of free software
put it in a package together with some non-free user-subjugating software.
And so they say that the user-subjugating software is a bonus,
that it enhances the system.
And if you haven't learned to value freedom,
you won't see any reason to disbelieve them.
But this is not a new problem,
and it's not limited to large corporations.
All of the commercial distributors of the GNU Slash Linux system
going back something like seven or eight years
have made a practice of including non-free software in their distributions.
And this is something that I have been trying to push against
in various ways without much success.
But in fact, even the non-commercial distributors
of the GNU Plus Linux operating system
have been including and distributing non-free software.
And the sad thing was that of all the many distributions
until recently there was none that I could recommend.
Now I know of one that I can recommend.
It's called Ututo A. It comes from Argentina.
I hope that very soon I will be able to recommend another.
I have a more technically orientated beliefs
of the open source movement, not enough for you.
The open source movement was founded specifically
to discard the ethical foundation of the free software movement.
The free software movement starts from an ethical judgment
that non-free software is anti-social.
It's wrong treatment of other people.
And I reached this conclusion before I started developing the GNU system.
I developed the GNU system specifically to create an alternative
to an unethical way of using software.
When someone says to you,
you can have this nice package of software
but only if you first sign a promise you will not share it with anyone else.
You are being asked to betray the rest of humanity.
And I reached the conclusion in the early eighties that this was evil.
But there was no other way to use a modern computer.
All the operating systems required exactly such a betrayal
before you could get a copy.
And that was in order to get an executable binary copy.
You couldn't have the source code at all.
The executable binary copy is just a series of numbers
which even a programmer has trouble making any sense out of.
The source code looks sort of like mathematics.
And if you've learned how to program, you can read that.
But that intelligible form
you couldn't get even after you signed this betrayal.
All you would get is the nonsensical numbers
which only the computer can understand.
So I decided to create an alternative
which meant another operating system
one that would not have these unethical requirements,
one that you could get in the form of source code
so that if you decided to learn to program,
you could understand it.
And you would get it without betraying other people.
You'd be free to pass it on to others,
free either to give away copies or sell copies.
So I began developing the GNU system
which in the early nineties was the bulk of what people
erroneously started calling Linux.
And so it all exists because of an ethical refusal
to go along with an anti-social practice.
But this is controversial.
In the nineties as the GNU plus Linux system became popular
and got to have some millions of users,
many of them were techies with technical blinders on
who didn't want to look at things in terms of right and wrong
but only in terms of effective or ineffective.
So they began telling many other people
here is an operating system that's very reliable
and is powerful and it's cool and exciting
and you can get it cheap.
And they didn't mention that this allowed you to avoid
an unethical betrayal of the rest of society
that it allowed users to avoid being kept divided and helpless.
So there were many people who used free software
but had never even heard of these ideas.
And that included people in business who were committed
to an amoral approach to their lives.
So when somebody proposed the term open source,
they seized on that as a way that they could bury
these ethical ideas.
Now they have a right to promote their views
but I don't share their views so I decline
ever to do anything under the rubric of
quote open source unquote and I hope that you will do.
Given what it helps users to understand the freedoms
in free software, then the ambiguous use of the word free
in English is clarified.
What do you think of the use of the name flaws
as in free, libre open source software?
There are many people who, for instance,
want to study our community or write about our community
and want to avoid taking sides between the free software
movement and the open source movement.
Often they have heard primarily of the open source movement
and they think that we all supported.
So I point out to them that in fact,
our community was created by the free software movement
but then they often say that they are not
addressing that particular disagreement
and they'd like to mention both movements without taking a side.
So I recommend the term free slash libre
and open source software as a way they can mention
both movements and give equal weight to both
and they abbreviated for us once they have said
what it stands for.
So I think that's if you don't want to take a side
between the two movements, then yes, by all means
use that term.
Of course, what I hope you'll do is take the side
of the free software movement.
Me always.
But not everybody has to.
So that term is a legitimate.
Are you happy with the development of a community
which has grown out of the vision of a free operating system
and in what ways did it develop differently
from the vision you had at the beginning?
Well, by and large, I'm pretty happy with it
but of course there's some things that I am not happy with
mainly the weakness that so many of the people in the community
do not think of it as an issue of freedom.
Have not learned to value their freedom or even to recognize it.
That makes our future survival questionable.
It makes us weak.
And so when we face various threats,
this weakness hampers our response.
Our community could be destroyed by software idea patterns.
It could be destroyed by treacherous computing.
It can be destroyed simply by hardware manufacturers
which is refusal to tell us enough about how to use the hardware
so that we can't write free software to run the hardware.
There are many vulnerabilities that we have over the long term.
And while the things we have to do to survive these threats
are different.
In all cases, the more aware we are, the more motivated we are.
The easier it will be for us to do whatever it takes.
So the most fundamental long term thing we have to recognize
and then value the freedom that free software gives them
so that they will fight for these freedoms the same way people fight
for freedom of speech, freedom of oppressed freedom of assembly.
Of course, those freedoms are also greatly threatened in the world today.
So what, in your opinion, threatens the growth of a free software at the moment?
I have to point out that our goal is not precisely growth.
Our goal is to liberate cyberspace.
Now, that does mean liberating all the users of computers.
We hope that eventually they'll all switch to free software.
But we shouldn't take mere success as our goal.
That's missing the ultimate point.
But if I take this to mean what is holding back the spread of free software,
well, partly at this point it's inertia, social inertia.
Lots of people have learned to use windows.
And they haven't yet learned to use kind of slash linux.
It's no longer very hard to learn to use kind of slash linux.
Five years ago it was hard, now it's not.
But still it's more than zero.
And people who, if you've never learned any computer system
then learning to do slash in a linux is as easy as anything.
But if you've already learned windows, it's easier.
It's easier to keep doing what you know.
So that's inertia.
And there are more people trained in running windows systems
than in writing in a slash linux systems.
So any time you're trying to convince people to change over,
you're working against inertia.
In addition, we have the problem that hardware manufacturers
don't cooperate with us the way they cooperate with Matt,
with Microsoft.
So we have that inertia as well.
And then we have the danger in some countries of software idea patents.
I would like everybody reading this to talk to all of,
or anyone listening to this, to talk to all of their candidates
for the European Parliament.
And ask, where do you stand on software idea patents?
Will you vote to reinstate the Parliament's amendments
that were adopted last September,
and that apparently are being removed by the Council of Ministers?
Will you vote to bring back those amendments in the second reading?
This is a very concrete question with a yes or no answer.
You will often get other kinds of, you may get evasive answers
if you ask, do you support or oppose software idea patents?
The people who wrote the directive claim that it does not
authorize software idea patents.
They say that this is because the directive says that
anything to be patented must have a technical character.
But somebody in the European Commission involved with this
admitted that that term means exactly what they wanted to mean,
Humpty Dumpty style.
So in fact, it's no limitation on anything.
So if a candidate says I support the Commission's draft
because it won't allow software idea patents,
you can point this out.
And press the question, will you vote for the Parliament's
previous amendments?
Okay, thanks very much.
I'm different than the guy from this town.
You are alone.
And I'm fun.
I'm different than the guy from this town.
You are alone.
And I'm fun.
I'm different than the guy from this town.
Hello sound chaser.
Howdy.
First time caller?
Yeah.
Well, I tried to call once before back when you guys were at
OLF, but had problems with my kind of on the computer.
Actually, problems with Pulse Audio and that garbage.
Are you a long time listener?
Hmm.
Two months.
What are you thinking about so far?
Nothing.
We've been around for years.
Two months is nothing.
They say two months, but a few months.
Ah, that still doesn't sound like a lot to me.
How were we numbering when you started listening?
Yeah, exactly.
What are we on then?
Do you have your number?
Oh yeah, we've changed our numbering system twice now.
Not including the missing season.
Hey, that season is not missing.
It is not there for a reason.
It will be released on a...
It will be released on special CD, you know, in the box set.
We have the box set with the liner notes.
Yeah, you know.
And all the show notes in an 80 page booklet.
And you're going to charge 120 bucks a copy or something for it?
Hell yeah.
Oh yeah.
Now, how did you find out about us?
Oh, I actually installed Bash Potter.
And one of the links over there.
Plenty of two, a whole bunch of podcasts.
And HBR was one of them.
Ah, sweet.
Five dollars of that money will go to the maintenance of my Jew fro.
No toothpicks in it, I hope.
No, I still hate my cousin.
Hey, TJ, you may end up with toothpicks in your Jew fro,
but at least you don't have the clapper kids.
That's true.
Now I'm having withdrawal from Hashlinic's cranks.
That's not called withdrawal.
That's called recovery.
So cool.
See, you could go into a hash computer action show.
Or you could try a Hashlinic's outline.
Tell me the thing.
That looks not so bad.
Not so bad.
I tend to wait until I've run almost out of podcasts
before I listen to them.
So then I end up like six or seven of them right in a row.
And then I can't stand them for another two months.
I only listen to one podcast and that's the bad apples.
That was the right answer.
You know, the bad apples has been a boon in my life.
Because the first time he mentioned me on that show,
the transmission of my scooter exploded.
It's true.
I'm writing to work.
Listening to the bad apples.
It was right after cranks had started.
It had to have been.
Klaatu mentions me.
And I'm like, holy shit.
He just said my nick.
Boom!
An explosion happened between my legs.
I almost had to push that bastard to work.
It was like the next day I just came over.
I was like, hey, you want to go get some popcorn and all that?
He's like, yeah, we've got to walk.
I was like, why?
We'll have to do the scooter.
Then he told me the entire story.
Boom!
An explosion happened between my legs.
Are you two a couple?
Yes.
A couple?
What?
I mean, we're gay, but independently.
That's what we wanted to know.
Now, have you two ever done it?
We ever experimented.
As I say, if you mean snoodle, yes.
I'll just start with this intro for cranks for us.
I'll just have to play it over the speakers and face can hear it.
Okay, stage ready.
This is your debut album.
That's if you know I'm doesn't crash.
Here you come.
I used to, hey, see that, you just hold it.
I haven't started playing.
Can you hear that?
Yeah.
That's amazing.
This is going to be great.
Okay, hold on.
Peter, hold on.
I'm going to get on to the entire time I just went into that.
Oh, okay.
Not a good thing.
Not a good thing.
Right, here we go.
When is the finished laugh on that?
Yeah.
That's pretty catchy.
What?
That's like porn music.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That's what I was thinking.
That will tap and I took my pants off on that one.
That will tap and I took my pants off on that one.
That'll tap and I took my pants off on that one.
That'll tap and I took my pants off on that one.
That'll tap and I took my pants off on that one.
That'll tap and I took my pants off on that one.
I would tap and I took my pants off on that one.
I would tap and I took my pants off on that one.
That will tap and I took my pants off on that one.
I would tap and I took my pants off on that one.
That will tap and I took my pants because the whole...
I would tap and I took my pants off on that one.
I would tap and I took my pants off on that one.
I would tap and I took my pants off on that one.
I hope you enjoyed this kick-ass show.
Please send feedback to feedback at titradio.info and check out the Sean Oats at titradio.info.
My name is B.S. Deep Betty and another it is in the can.
Good night.
I hope you enjoyed this kick-ass show.
I hope you enjoyed this kick-ass show.