In recent times, if you ask me to name one personality in the free software community who has been as much reviled as being adored, I would say it is Richard M Stallman - the father of GNU. He has been bashed in the media as much for his dedication towards furthering the cause of free software and his firm stand against DRM. I believe that if not for GNU and GPL, the Linux movement would have been a non-entity. It was GNU which provided the wings to Linux to soar up and meet the competition head on. In many ways GPL gave it the moral edge over the BSDs which are also released under a free license.
Recently Robin Good had the honor of putting up RMS at his apartment in Rome and he used this occasion to ask him a couple of questions regarding free software. And RMS was good enough to clarify his doubts. During the course of the interview, he asks the following question :
RG: To support those, who like me, favor change over the control exercised by large corporations and media, what are the type of actions that individuals can take?
Richard Stallman: I wish I knew.
This is the greatest political question of our time.
How can we put an end to the empire of the mega-corporations and restore democracy? If I knew I would be the savior of the world.
What I think I can tell is that the media are crucial.
The power of the corporate media enables truth to be suppressed and lies to be passed as truth.
You’ve probably heard that a half truth can be worse than a lie. A lot of the things that our government’s and media say are one-tenth truths, nine-tenths lies. And it doesn’t take many of them together to create a completely fictional world view...
So I recommend that people stop listening to the mainstream media. Don’t watch television news, don’t listen to news on the radio, don’t read news on ordinary newspapers. Get [your news] from a variety of web sites, which are not operated under the power of business money, and you have better chance of not being fooled by the systematic lies that they all tell, because they’re all being paid by the same people to tell the same lies. Or nine-tenths lies.
Read the rest of this interesting interview.
This is the greatest political question of our time.
How can we put an end to the empire of the mega-corporations and restore democracy? If I knew I would be the savior of the world.
What I think I can tell is that the media are crucial.
The power of the corporate media enables truth to be suppressed and lies to be passed as truth.
You’ve probably heard that a half truth can be worse than a lie. A lot of the things that our government’s and media say are one-tenth truths, nine-tenths lies. And it doesn’t take many of them together to create a completely fictional world view...
So I recommend that people stop listening to the mainstream media. Don’t watch television news, don’t listen to news on the radio, don’t read news on ordinary newspapers. Get [your news] from a variety of web sites, which are not operated under the power of business money, and you have better chance of not being fooled by the systematic lies that they all tell, because they’re all being paid by the same people to tell the same lies. Or nine-tenths lies.
