Richard Stallman, unrepentant: ‘Apple is your enemy’

Richard Stallman stands by his criticism of Steve Jobs in the wake of the Apple founder’s death, the free-software advocate said in a recent interview with Slashdot readers. He also called for the elimination of harmful computing-related patents and advocated for preserving copyrights for works of opinion and art.

The FSF (Free Software Foundation) founder stirred up angry buzz in October 2011 with a post following Jobs’ death:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. … As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’s malign influence on people’s computing.

In the recent interview, Stallman said he stood by his words, pointing fingers at critics who were “evidently were more concerned with forms of politeness than with substantive good and evil.”

Stallman said people should stop praising Jobs for “the elegant styling of the jails he designed” but rather respond by saying “it’s wrong to put users in jail.”

As for Apple in general, he said simply, “Apple is your enemy, and if you don’t recognize this and fight, you’re being a chump.”

Stallman’s beef with Apple is expansive. For example, he’s opined that “Apple iThings pioneered a new level of restricting the users,” and he’s claimed the company uses its patents to attack free software, engages in censorship, and spies on its customers.

Apple bashing aside, Stallman also used the forum to elaborate on his positions on copyright law and patent law, stressing that the two are very different beasts and should not be lumped together under the umbrella term “intellectual property.”

Regarding copyrights, he said that works designed for performing practical tasks must be free — but that “simply eliminating copyright on those works would not have this result. … Without copyright, programs could still be made nonfree using EULAs [end-user license agreements], TiVoization, and nonrelease of source code, but we would no longer be able to prevent this using copyleft.”

“As for works of opinion and art,” he continued, “I don’t think they must be free. I advocate some reforms of copyright for these works, but I see no reason to abolish it.”

As for patents, which he deemed artificial monopolies on using a specified idea, he said they should be eliminated entirely, and capitalism would not come crashing down as a result. “There have been successful capitalist countries that didn’t have a patent system,” he said.

Stallman touched on plenty of other topics in the interview.

On the FSF’s role in campaigning vs. coding:

I didn’t write GCC with the idea of making a “better” C compiler. I wrote it so there would be a freedom-respecting C compiler. … We didn’t develop Gnu to have a “better” operating system than Unix; we developed it so we could have a freedom-respecting operating system. … If we could raise money to hire a few software developers, we would spend it on projects that are more than technical improvements. For instance, it would make no sense to try to develop a Web browser that is “better” in a merely practical sense…. Instead we are trying to do something that Firefox does not aim to do: Protect the user’s privacy from surveillance by websites, and protect the user’s freedom from nonfree JavaScript code.

On the seeming inactivity of the GNU Project:

The GNU Project is not as cohesive as I wish it were. To some extent, this is a consequence of an approach that was necessary. The only way to develop something as large as the GNU system through the work mostly of volunteers was to divide it into projects that could be implemented mostly independently by different people. The design of Unix lent itself to this. The fact that the GNU system incorporated programs such as X and TeX, that were developed by other people or groups that regarded the Gnu Project as just a user, pushed in the same direction.

On copyrights:

Those works that are made for doing practical jobs must be free. This includes software, educational works, reference works, text fonts, recipes, and 3D-printer models for objects for practical use, as well as some other things.

Works of testimony and opinion, and artistic works, don’t have to be free as in the four freedoms, but their users should have more freedom than now. I think people should be free to share them (noncommercial redistribution of exact copies), and to remix them. Putting DRM or EULAs on them should be banned too. I think all the CC [Creative Commons] licenses do these things, more or less, and I use CC-ND for my statements of my views, including this one.

On open source licensing pipe dreams:

If I could magically change one program to GPLv3, it would be Linux. One of the improvements of GPLv3 is that it blocks Tivoization, and Linux is very frequently Tivoized. (Many Android devices contain a Tivoized copy of Linux.)

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