The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
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For the sake of separation, this site has always been
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I am thinking of making another trip to Europe during February - April. If you would like to invite me to speak during that trip, please write to me at rms-invitation@gnu.org with "feb-apr" as the subject.
If you want to send me GPG-encrypted mail, do not trust key servers! Some of them have phony keys under my name and email address, made by someone else as a trick. See gpg.html for my real key.
Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphoma. Treatment put it into remission, and he can expect to live many more years. However, he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to
US citizens: call on the US government to require comprehensive environmental impact statements from proposed data centers. Don't let them lock in fossil fuels.
US citizens: call on the corruptor to fully staff the Federal Election Commission.
US citizens: call on news media to stop presenting oversimplified statements about inflation and its effects.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call for impeaching RFK Jr.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject renaming the Kennedy Center as the "Trump-Kennedy Center".
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: phone your state legislators and call on them to reject digital state ID systems. Details may vary, but those systems will surely require people to run nonfree software to use them; in addition, they will enable government agencies to identify people more often.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: Condemn the official White House enemies list as an attack on the press and on democracy.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the corporations that have donated to the cheater's new ballroom.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
I'm looking for a cartoonist who would like to draw cartoons for me once in a while. If you're interested, please write to rms, which refers to me, at the location gnu period org.
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
* Abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells are now one of the biggest sources of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, new data shows, and little effort is being made to clean them up.*
I expect that the fossil fuel companies to divest themselves from old mines and wells in ways that will avoid liability for them — just as they sometimes disconnect themselves from responsibility for supporting former workers.
So I suggest making it a felony to implement a restructuring of business or assets in a way that is likely to result predictably in strand assets that carry financial responsibilities with no one capable of shouldering the responsibilities.
A pitifully weak attempt to solve a real problem: asking for a federal law that would permit victims of domestic abuse and stalking to demand that data brokers delete information about them.
Data, once collected, will be abused. The way to prevent that abuse is to facilitate refusing to hand it over in the first place.
Here is my proposal for protecting the specific people known to be in particular danger, and everyone else who could be harmed if individuals, businesses or governments use their personal data against them without a search warrant: require services to be available anonymously.
The selfish interest of those who keep trade secrets is rational but antisocial. In many cases the only harm it does is to hold back the general advance of technology. But sometimes it does really nasty things. For digital hardware and software, it often gives companies a way to subjugate their users. Regarding use of toxic chemicals, it endangers public health.
Why would legislators pass laws to "protect" companies instead of protecting the people they harm? I suspect it is partly because these companies are influential and the legislators seek their support, and partly because the legislators ask them for campaign funds.
But it is also partly the result of the mindset of "trickle down", which assumes that the only way to get more funds for the state is to let increase the size of the economy by letting companies have what they want. Unfortunately, what they want is often to be allowed to harm the public.
Most Democrats in Congress got corrupted this way in the 80s and 90s. (The exceptions are the progressive Democrats.) Now in the UK Starmer is guiding Labour into that sort of corruption.
Clearly our laws should say that any public need to know about the presence of toxic substances in a business facility overrides the desire to keep them secret.
Whether the owners are Chinese is a question that there is no need to ask, because the state should never give money to a business "to support it." Instead it should offer to lend money to the company for suitable repayment, or else buy equity at a fair price.
These two ways of supporting a company avoid giving the owners an opporunity to rip off the state -- which the company's owners are likely to try to do, if they can, regardless of which country they are from.
With a policy like this, it wouldn't matter which country the company's owners are from.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
Canada warns that US government institutions should not be trusted for medical advice.
I've urged my clinics and my state government to refer to something reliable rather than US institutions such as the CDC.
The bully no longer tries to justify the war with Venezuela based on alleged drug trade, but rather claims that the US (or US oil companies?) owns Venezuelan oil deposits.
It is unlikely that the US intervention in Venezuela will have a simple resolution.
The wrecker and his henchmen have stated no plan for what to do next, which suggests that whatever they do will make an even bigger mess.
The US used to intervene militarily often in weaker countries in the Americas.
The US government is expected to claim that its attack on Venezuela was justified self-defense by pretending that smuggling of drugs — mostly not even from Venezuela — constituted making war on the US.
The US will surely veto any effort in the Security Council to oppose this act of US aggression. But demonstrating the weakness of the UN in restraining the great powers from making war will be nothing new. The UN's effectiveness for keeping peace has long been limited, and it will remain limited, but it is not zero.
What will be next? Maybe China will attack Taiwan.
US citizens: call on the US government to require comprehensive environmental impact statements from proposed data centers. Don't let them lock in fossil fuels.
US citizens: call on the corruptor to fully staff the Federal Election Commission.
US citizens: call on news media to stop presenting oversimplified statements about inflation and its effects.
The bully's henchmen arbitrarily ordered denial of US visas to five Europeans who campaign against online hatred. One of them, Imran Ahmed, lives with his wife in the US as a permanent resident, and they want to jail him and deport him. A judge ruled he is entitled to a court hearing about that.
Robert Reich asks why the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association have not taken action against lawyers and medical professionals who violate the ethical rules of their professions obeying the saboteur in chief.
Most of the Americans that magats seek to kick off Medicaid for "not working" do in fact work, but the difficulty of proving this over and over will kick them off anyway.
*Israel used to lie about killing journalists; now it barely bothers to do so. What happened?*
*Court staff cover up Banksy image of judge beating a protester.* Banksy painted in on the side of a court building.
(satire) *RFK Jr. Warns Mistress That Condoms Cause Autism.*
Right-wing extremists are trying to eliminate all vestige of the 20th century ideas of equal rights for non-whites, for non-Christians, and for women.
When part of San Francisco had a power outage, and traffic lights shut off, Waymo driverless taxis (which are not "autonomous") were commanded simply to stop at intersections. That was better than driving normally without traffic lights, but it blocked intersections and they stayed blocked.
Crisis Intervention Training for cops, teaching them how to treat someone having a drug overdose, makes for a decrease in overall deaths from drug overdose.
Writing Cyrillic letters as "funny" stand-ins for similar-looking letters in the Roman alphabet is annoying to some people whose languages use that alphabet. And it has no wittiness to make up for that.
I too look down on mockery of the Cyrillic alphabet, or of umlauts. Not as strongly as Viv Groskop does, but enough to give me a low opinion of whoever did it. Likewise for mockery of Chinese characters and Indian alphabets. The first time someone did these things, it may have been clever, but nowadays it is merely silly and trite.
I was just a little more clever when I pronounced Toys-Я-Us as if the Я were Cyrillic — as Toys-Ya-Us. I wasn't the one who chose to write it that way, rather I mocked the company by pronouncing its name in the correct way which it probably did not expect.
European institutions including hospitals and courts have been using a company called Zivver to transmit and save confidential documents and records. Investigators report finding that documents are sent to Zivver's server in plain text, and encrypted only on the server. That is fundamentally insecure and untrustworthy.
However, things have got worse. Zivver was recently sold to a US company, so now the US government can access all those documents, including before they are encrypted.
Making it even worse, the executives of that US company are associated with Israeli Intelligence. So the Israeli government can get that access too.
Europe should insist that purchasers of companies that hold European people's personal data be European companies, with no exceptions.
But this is a secondary issue compared with how bad Zivver itself did. Even before Kiteworks purchased Zivver, Zivver was offering fundamentally weak security, which no one should have accepted.
Secretary of Politicized Justice Hegseth threatened a military trial of Senator Kelly (a former Navy officer) for reminding the US military that it is lawful to disobey an illegal order, but the Pentagon shows no particular interest in prosecuting Americans who committed war crimes in Vietnam.
*White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List.*
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth) to express your rejection of Facebook.
Non-oppressive Commercial E-books
Facebook's face recognition demonstrates a threat to everyone's privacy. I therefore ask people not to put photos of me on Facebook; you can do likewise.
Of course, Facebook is bad for many other reasons as well.
I'd like to make a list of countries that do not require a national identity card, and have no plans to adopt one. If you live in or have confirmed knowledge of such a country, please send email to rms at gnu.org.
Here's my list of countries with no national ID cards and no plans for one: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK. Australia's previous government tried to institute national ID cards, but the Labor government dropped the plan.
India has mostly finished imposing a national biometric ID number in a grand act of oppression.
Switzerland has national ID cards which are optional, but they or some other government ID card are needed for some purposes.
Iceland doesn't have ID cards as such, but they have ID numbers that citizens are forced to use frequently. For example, the national ID number is often required to rent a video or use a gym.
Denmark issues non-photo ID cards with a "person number", and many services use this card to identify people.
Norway will impose a national biometric ID card.
Ireland - national ID card by stealth.
ACLU: the five dangers of national ID cards.
Wikipedia has a list of identity card policies by country.
Stay away from certain countries because of their bad immigration policies.
Avoid flight connections in these airports because of their treatment of passengers.
People often ask how I manage to continue devoting myself to progressive activism (such as the free software movement) for years without burning out. The best way I can answer is by recommending a book, The Lifelong Activist by Hillary Rettig.
I disagree with the book on one theoretical point in the last part of the book: we shouldn't think of political activism as being marketing and sales, because those terms refer to business, and politics is something much more important than mere business. However, this doesn't diminish the value of the book's practical advice about borrowing techniques from marketing and sales.
Disclosure: I am friends with the author.
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
I have reposted some of Rick Falkvinge's articles. As posted on his site, you can't see them in a browser without running some nonfree Javascript code which is apparently non-free. These versions show the same text, without the obstacle.
These are my political articles that are not related to the GNU operating system or free software. For GNU-related articles, see the GNU philosophy directory. You can also download copies of my book, Free Software, Free Society, 3rd edition.
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an associate, 1849
Here are notes about various issues I care about, usually with links to
more information. The current notes are
here. For all previous
notes, see this page.
See this page for information on efforts to maintain links in the political notes.
Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being archived on their own page.
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things of interest to the press, have been moved to a separate page.
The Free Software Song, by Richard M. Stallman. You can listen to a performance of the song: Free Software Song performed by Thor Here is a variant of this song called "The Free Firmware Song".
Earth under attack from planet Koch.On doxing, and how to spell it.
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
Wine snobs get their comeuppance.
Here I am struggling to open a bottle of water.
My application to an join Marian Henley's ex-boyfriends list.
My funny poetry and song parodies.
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
The text to a filk song, Johnny v. N., by Paul Rubin.
My Puns in English (Little Leaguer, August 2019).
My Puns in Spanish (New pun: Apostasía April 2019)
My Puns in French (New pun: Microsoft à l'école July 2019)
My Puns in Italian (New pun: Quale pesce fa starnutire? New 10/2018)
My Puns in German (New 02/2016)
Linguistic Swifties (Now with: Wintu, Penutian, Cochiti, Taos, and Towa.)
--Saint
IGNUcius-- The Church of Emacs will soon
be officially listed by at least one person as his religion for
census purposes.
There are no godfathers in the Church of Emacs, since there are no gods, but you can be someone's editorfather.
Stallman Does Dallas: "I have to warn you that Texans have been known to have an adverse reaction to my personality…"
The Dalai Lama today announced the official release of Yellow Hat GNU/Linux.
I found a funny song about the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act (officially the Sonny Bono Copyright Act) which extended copyright retroactively by 20 years on works made as early as the 1920s.
If you are a geek and read Spanish, you will love Raulito el Friki, who said "Hello, world!" immediately after he was born. Here's an archive of this now-defunct comic strip.
Sleeping with Stallman at MIT.
ESR's favorite programming language: Objectivist C.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
Made for You (December 2012) (local copy) Esperanto translation
A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering (in Portuguese, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, French, and Italian).My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom, is available from the GNU Press.
Avec des chapeaux French song parody.
My radio program of Music from Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on Oct 13, 2014.
Quantum Theory and Abortion Rights
A proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both speech and writing.
On Hacking: In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
I would like to thank:
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