Richard Stallman visits UIC!
Just had an upclose meeting with Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU foundation! He is visitng UIC for a talk on the philosophy of free software tomorrow. But today evening, all computer science students at UIC were invited for an informal chat. This guy is really motivated to do something he likes to do! So much so that he doesnt care if he didnt have a day time job. It is very rare to see such people around. Everyone is worried about making money first and then doing what they like to do; thats one of the fisrt commnets he had made in today's session.
The one thing that stuck like new to me today is his philosophy that proprietary software is unethical! is it? or is it not? I dont know. I have to listen to the bigger talk tomorrow. For today, that topic is almost taboo coz he didnt want to repeat things. Therefore we decided to ask him about "careers" in free software. Hmm, thats a crazy idea and once the question is put out Stallman sais "Thats a stupid question to ask! People contribute to free software during their spare time. They dont get paid for it generally". Well well, if we kill proprietary software and write free software for free, what are computer science graduates going to live off?
"Write custom software" he says "thats not evil". Other questions were like - do you still maintain emacs? (he was the author of GNU emacs), whats the status if GNU HURD (a GNU kernel), what should universities do to support free software - now theres an interesting answer to that one - "stop using proprietary software. Use free software for all assignments!". To that we asked if GNU Linux was really easy to use for a beggining computer user. "Yes" was the simple and clear answer. Apparently he had seen it employed in several schools and places. He even mentioned about a state in spain that has adoopted a rule to use only free software.
Hmm, he seems to be a determined guy. He says one day he'd like to see the whole world using only free software. At the end of it all somebody asked him how he'd explain this concept to someone new to computers - "Recepies!!" he says. Software should be like recipies. Anyone who had followed and customized a recipie would know the pain if the recipie was proprietary and cannot be modified or distributed!!!!!!!!!!!
The one thing that stuck like new to me today is his philosophy that proprietary software is unethical! is it? or is it not? I dont know. I have to listen to the bigger talk tomorrow. For today, that topic is almost taboo coz he didnt want to repeat things. Therefore we decided to ask him about "careers" in free software. Hmm, thats a crazy idea and once the question is put out Stallman sais "Thats a stupid question to ask! People contribute to free software during their spare time. They dont get paid for it generally". Well well, if we kill proprietary software and write free software for free, what are computer science graduates going to live off?
"Write custom software" he says "thats not evil". Other questions were like - do you still maintain emacs? (he was the author of GNU emacs), whats the status if GNU HURD (a GNU kernel), what should universities do to support free software - now theres an interesting answer to that one - "stop using proprietary software. Use free software for all assignments!". To that we asked if GNU Linux was really easy to use for a beggining computer user. "Yes" was the simple and clear answer. Apparently he had seen it employed in several schools and places. He even mentioned about a state in spain that has adoopted a rule to use only free software.
Hmm, he seems to be a determined guy. He says one day he'd like to see the whole world using only free software. At the end of it all somebody asked him how he'd explain this concept to someone new to computers - "Recepies!!" he says. Software should be like recipies. Anyone who had followed and customized a recipie would know the pain if the recipie was proprietary and cannot be modified or distributed!!!!!!!!!!!
posted by Satya at 6:58 PM
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