tag archive: richard stallman

In a post about the relicensing option from the GNU Free Documentation License to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Richard Stallman writes:

If a wiki site exercises the relicensing option, that entails trusting Creative Commons rather than the Free Software Foundation regarding its future license changes. In theory one might consider this a matter of concern, but I think we can be confident that Creative Commons will follow its stated mission in the maintenance of its licenses. Millions of users trust Creative Commons for this, and I think we can do likewise.

Sounds like a strong endorsement from someone with demanding standards.

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And seems like an opportunity to shill for donations to Creative Commons. They are running their annual fundraiser right now, and for $50 ($25 for students) you can become a member of the CC Network, which allows you to …

Happened to run across this last night:

mndaily.com: Comp. sci. activist to talk computing freedom at U

Which led me to dig up this press release with details. Willey Hall on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota at 6:30pm.

I’m not sure if I’ll make it. I’d love to hear Richard speak in person, even if it’s “just” his standard speech. It’s a lot more convenient for me to drive down to the U than fly to Boston.

I never got around to writing more about my trip to the FSF Associate Members meeting earlier in the year. Speaking of seeing the Great Man in person, the member meeting started with no RMS in sight. He wasn’t scheduled to appear until a panel later in the day, but I expected to see him …

We’ve had a long time to learn how to deal with a world of scarce goods, and that’s what most people understand. Scarcity. But I think our solutions will come more slowly until it’s widely understood that we shouldn’t try to create artificial scarcity for information (including software), knowledge, and ideas.

We’ll get there. A growing number of people understand. We’re slowly building up the free world. It’s great advice to not get overwhelmed by the job ahead, but just take steps toward the goal. Set that example. Improve those solutions.

And please share your solutions freely!

Which do you like best: the satisfying, rich taste of principle in free software? Or do you prefer the less morally filling and pragmatic goodness of open source? Do you wish people would stop endlessly rehashing the whole question of “free” versus “open source?” Or do you enjoy the chance to talk about goals and philosophy? As you might suspect, since I’m bringing it up…

…I like to talk about it. Is it too soon, though, following the lengthy debate stirred up by the recent “What should we call it?” FSM poll? Too dividing? Pointless? Do I …

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”
– Walt Whitman

A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then that I …