The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
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"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 Pressure Dr. Oz to Exempt Stroke Survivors with Aphasia from Work Requirements and Extend Recertification Nationwide
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your senators: don't legislate any abortion restrictions!
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
You can also phone your congresscritter and deliver the same message. The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
If you message Congress please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to urge per to vote to restore federal workers unionization rights.
You can also phone your congresscritter and deliver the same message. The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
If you message Congress please spread the word!
US citizens: call for Congress to investigate Hegseth for war crimes and to block war with Venezuela.
You can also phone your congresscritter and deliver the same message. The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
If you message Congress please spread the word!
US citizens: call on media companies to stand up for free speech.
US citizens: call for protecting Earth from methane in the air, and the global heating it causes.
US citizens: call on Congress to vote to continue to fund medical coverage for non-wealthy Americans before it's too late.
You can also phone your congresscritter and deliver the same message. The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
If you message Congress please spread the word!
US citizens: call on federal agencies to protect endangered wildlife, not business interests.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: phone our congresscritter and say to impeach Hegseth.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, 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.
*More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US data centers.* Canada's environmental realism *Canada's environmental "realism" looks more like surrender.*
Plutocratist's favorites refrain is, "Be realistic -- don't aim for the change that would suffice for survival."
*Study of 8,300 US children suggests social media may be contributing to a rise in ADHD diagnoses… [it] damages children's ability to focus.*
Lenore Skenazy: risk-averse society demanded that facilities for children be designed to eliminate any identified risk.
When deportation thugs grabbed Any Lucia López Belloza as she was boarding a flight to see her family in Texas, other thugs went to her family home and sought to bluff their way into it without saying why.
Whether the López family should have residency in the US is a complex question which I can't judge. I don't know all the facts, all the US laws, nor all about the asylum treaty and its interpretation. So I have no opinion about that.
However, a few things are clear. No one should ever be deported in a rush, no one should ever be deported without a careful hearing, and no one should be deported without a reasonable time to say goodbye to friends and family.
And no one should be deported based arguments that rest on fabricated facts.
*Warner Bros. Discovery Should Remain Independent to Keep Film/TV Markets .*
As this instance shows, business owners generally prefer to increase their power by reducing the number of competitors -- often through mergers.
The original purpose of antitrust law was to prevent the gradual disappearance of real competition. Since the 1980s, plutocratist US politicians (including Democrats such as Bill Clinton) have undermined antitrust enforcement, and thus permitted more and more mergers, resulting in many fields which have only two competitors, or perhaps just one.
One of the things I admired about Biden was that he firmly opposed that tendency, including by appointing Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission.
Google deleted journalist Robert Inlakesh's YouTube account. The reasons it offers vary and are not credible; people suspect it was because of what he reported from Gaza.
Israel has more or less admitted its intent to annex half of Gaza, the half from which it has already expelled all Palestinians -- up to the slowly advancing "yellow line".
The underminer isn't satisfied with his outrageous practice of pardoning, for any federal crimes, whoever offers fealty to him. He wants to bully states into pardoning his servants for state crimes too.
Magas have canceled Biden's program that allows students who took out loans, but have low income, to repay less than the face value of their loans.
That will actually make education of future students in the US more expensive.
Aside from that, there will be lower limits on how much a student can borrow. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because borrowing more than that is taking a terrible risk. We recently saw the job market for programming graduates crash because of (perhaps foolhardy) use of Imitation Intelligence. That could happen in other fields too.
Every country should fund the education of capable students. That is an investment in its future.
Newly elected Representative Grijalva of Arizona accuses deportation thugs of spraying her with pepper spray, and a video supports the claim, but a magat official insists that it never happened.
Three Uyghur brothers have been jailed in India for 12 years, without a trial, for crossing the China-India border unknowingly since there was nothing to say it was a border.
The greatest danger to them is that India may expel them to China, which systematically brainwashes Uyghurs.
*DoJ moves to eliminate sexual abuse protections for LGBTQ+ people in prisons.* In effect, magats want to threaten those prisoners with rape.
*The giant [White House] ballroom is [the corrupter's] monument to corruption.* Countries are donating to it as bribes for government favors.
About Peter Francis, former police undercover infiltrator of protest movements, who became a whistleblower to expose that antidemocratic practice.
The Putin forces blew a hole in the Chernobyl reactor disaster shield, which was meant to contain radioactive materials in the old wreckage.
The damage makes it impossible to proceed to clean up the reactor.
Labour is considering bringing the UK partly back into the EU by negotiating a customs union. Corbyn advocated a customs union with the EU when he was head of the Labour Party.
Pentagon "press conferences" are now limited to right-wing extremists that will support the bully's militarist policy 110%.
Since that happened, the major US media have become mostly subservient themselves, on the big issues, but they remain willing to criticize smaller details of government actions.
*[The wrecker]'s pardon of an ex-Honduran president is shocking. So is the history of US support for him [in power].*
Hillary Clinton encouraged the coup in which he stole the presidency. Presidents Obama and Biden gave him support, as well as the wrecker.
Qatar and Egypt, designated as guarantors of the Gaza peace plan Israel has nominally accepted, call on Israel to withdraw its army from Gaza and allow the agreed-on international peace force to take over Gaza.
If Israel does this, that will mean an end to the bloodshed in Gaza (though not the sickness, hunger and cold). Otherwise, Israel will be visibly responsible for breaking the deal.
US citizens: call on federal agencies to protect endangered wildlife, not business interests.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
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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