In 2011, boy genius Mike Saunders met Stallman at the Institute of Engineering and Technology in London, where he put to him some of the questions you’d asked…

RMS: First, I want to tell you about free software because I want that to be the interview. Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing.

Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can’t change it since they don’t have the source code. The owner of the program has unjust power over the users, and the program is simply an instrument of that power. This is an injustice, and the idea of free software is to escape from that injustice and put an end to it. Free software respects the user’s freedom.

A program is free if it gives the user the four essential freedoms. Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish. Freedom one is the freedom to study the source code and change it so the program does your computing as you wish. Freedom two is the freedom to help others – the freedom to redistribute exact copies when you wish. Freedom three is the freedom to contribute to your community, which is the freedom to distribute your modified copies. These four freedoms mean the social system of using and distributing the program is an ethical system.

With these four freedoms, the users control the program. Without these four freedoms, the program controls the users. This is not a technical issue – it’s an ethical issue. It’s an ethical issue that arises from the use of certain technology. But because it’s an ethical issue and not a technical one, it’s important – it’s more important than any mere technical issue.

LXF: Most of our readers are passionate about free software…

RMS: But do they think of it as free software?

LXF: Many use the term ‘free software’, some use ‘open source’. RMS: That’s different. Open source refers to different ideas

– a different philosophy. And the difference is fundamental, because it’s at the level of values. It’s not a disagreement over some detail; it’s a disagreement over the most basic thing. We are aiming for a free society, where users have freedom. Open source organisations say they’re aiming for better-quality code. These are as far apart as you can get, because we’re saying it’s for freedom and social solidarity; they’re saying it’s for quality.

LXF: But if you can ease a company that makes proprietary software into the idea of open source, by talking about the benefits of quality, perhaps you can expand to free software… RMS: In fact, when the open source philosophy spreads a lot – which it has – it tends to close people’s minds to the ideas of free software. It even tends to cover up our existence. Most of the articles that talk about the GNU system don’t call it the GNU system and don’t call it free software. They describe it as open source, and give the impression that we – its developers – agree with the open source ideas that readers have heard of, and you’d never guess at what we really stand for.

LXF: When some people hear ‘free software’, they think of rubbish spyware on Windows machines.

RMS: It took me time to recognise that this distinction was vital. In 1983, when I announced [GNU], I hadn’t separated these concepts. It took a few years. So again, in the GNU Manifesto, posted in 1985, there’s still some confusion between the two meanings of ‘free’. After that I became aware of the need to emphasise that it’s free as in freedom, not free as in price.

I notice there’s a statement here in your magazine [LXF143] about LibreOffice, which is an important illustration. Sun acquired StarOffice and released it as free software under the name OpenOffice.org. But the people at Sun who did this were not supporters, politically, of the ideas of free software. They were open source supporters. So their goal was to make their program good quality and a success – not to give the users freedom. That wasn’t their goal, although since their source code was free software, it did respect the user’s freedom, but they weren’t thinking about it in those terms. So they made a list of extensions, and in it they put proprietary extensions.

This shows that people who don’t think about or value freedom can do things for other reasons that help freedom. But you can’t count on it. Sometimes it suits people’s motives better to do things that work against our freedom.

LXF: What is the biggest threat to free software in 2011?

RMS: There are several. There are legal prohibitions, such as software patents in some countries that have foolish policies. And there are laws that censor free software explicitly, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, which censors free software that you can break digital handcuffs with. The European Union has similar laws. Both the US and the EU try to push nasty laws like that on to other countries, through treaties that they ask them to sign. So these are malicious governments. Then there are the obstacles created by manufacturers, working together often with Microsoft.

LXF: One of our readers wanted to ask: is a world of only free software still feasible? Should that still be the ultimate goal? RMS: Yes, it’s the goal, I think. That’s my goal. Now, it may be impossible to totally eradicate the last little bits of non-free software. After all, in almost 200 years of abolitionism, we haven’t eliminated slavery.

LXF: A lot more people are using smartphones and tablets as their primary computing platforms, with their app stores…

RMS: That doesn’t change anything, really. A smartphone is a computer. So, everything we say about computers, that the software you run should be free – you should insist on that – applies to smartphones just the same. And likewise to tablets.

What should we say about those app stores? First of all, the Apple App Store forbids free software. It only allows non-free software. This shows how evil it is. But remember, it’s on the basis of a non-free operating system. If you want to live in freedom, you need to not just insist on apps that are free, but to insist on an operating system that’s free, too.

The source code of Android is free as Google releases it, but it uses a non-copyleft licence, except for the case of Linux – which is under GPL v2. The result is that the licence doesn’t protect the users from lockdown, or Tivoization – which is the practice of making a free program’s executable non-free, by stopping the user from installing and using his own version.

LXF: There’s still a battle going on here to win the minds of a lot of people – they don’t even know what source code is.

RMS: Absolutely.

LXF: It’s a case of trying to find the right approach…

RMS: I use the analogy of recipes. Cooks cook recipes freely, they study and change them when they wish, they redistribute copies, and if they make a modified version, they might distribute copies of their version. So imagine if businesses and the state decided to impose proprietary recipes. Suppose the state said: starting tomorrow, if you copy or change your recipe, we will put you in prison and call you a pirate. Imagine how angry all cooks would be. A lot of people who don’t know anything about programming will understand this. The state hasn’t tried to do it with recipes – but that’s exactly what it’s tried to do with software.