Richard Stallman's Personal Site
If you participate in the commercial ritual of end-of-the-year
presents, please avoid the digital products that would mistreat
the people you give them to.
Send comments/questions about the search engine to: rms at gnu dot org
RSS site feed for the most recent
political notes and new material.
This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
the Free Software Foundation or
the GNU Project.
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.
I am looking for a few more volunteers to help install new
political notes on the site. If you'd like to help me in this
way, please write to rms at gnu period org.
Link Policy
The largest part of the site is the
political notes, and they
are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to…
- help install new political notes on the site. If you'd like to
help me in this way,
please write to rms at gnu period org.
- write a firefox extension that will properly
display the images in a Guardian page such
as this
in IceCat with LibreJS enabled?
-
find articles about games that lure and pressure users
into spending a lot of money on competitive advantages, or letting
their children do so. I've concluded this is a form of malicious
functionality, and I want to make a list to add to
https://gnu.org/malware/. If you know of an article, please email me
the URL.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to be addictive.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to cause programmed obsolescence of products.
- find replacements
for a few of the
broken links in political notes and send them to
mail@danmun.ro. If you look thoroughly for a replacement link
but you don't find one, please report that too.
- browse various sites and show me
items that I ought to see and link to. If you would like to help me
in this way, please write to rms at gnu dot o r g.
- (in India) make and sell buttons that say, "DON'T BE
TRACKED PAY CASH", in English and/or a local
language, to resist the campaign against
cash. Talk with a local company that makes buttons, buy a
batch of 50 to 500 buttons for a quantity price, then sell
them for 2 or 3 times that price.
- volunteer to post videos of my talks on audio-video.gnu.org.
- help
maintain and operate savannah.gnu.org.
- help web sites put free licenses
on their Javascript code.
- write site-specific Firefox extensions
or local scripts to operate specific web sites.
- experiment to find good ways to attach
fruits to a Grav-mass tree.
Please email rms at the gnu site if you want to volunteer for any
of those activities. For the Grav-mass decorations, please write
if you come up with a good way.
Civil Liberties Minute:
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
graphic by Susan Henson
Americans, you may wish to copy this icon to your own page, as a
way of showing what patriotism means to you.
US
citizens: call
on Speaker Pelosi to lead the change Democratic voters want to
see.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on Congress to pass the BE HEARD in the Workplace Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on the Social Security Administration to stop pushing policies
that undermine Social Security.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: Become
a Grassroots Co-Sponsor of Medicare for All.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on your state to join the National Popular Vote Compact.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on Florida legislators to respect amendment 4 and let
ex-cons vote.
US citizens: call on businesses not to hire, or put on the board,
anyone involved in the bully's family separation policy.
US citizens: call on Congress to start the process of eliminating the
electoral college.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US
citizens: call
on Congress to end the harassment and surveillance of journalists
at the US southern border.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on airlines to stop installing cameras and microphones that can
observe passengers in their seats.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on Congress to support Medicare for All.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on the Senate to reject nominees that support family separation.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on your congresscritter to reduce the military budget.
Recording of Guantanamero
Listen to the
recording
of
Guantanamero,
a protest song written in Spanish. The recording is in
Ogg Vorbis format. To install an Ogg Vorbis player,
see
the FSF's Ogg Players page.
-
"Zumigo, which sold the location data of American cell phone
users, wanted the FCC
to remove
requirements around user consent."
Requiring consent is not sufficient to make this acceptable. We
need to require that any software that can send a user's
location offer the option of spoofing the location.
-
Socialism for the rich now includes oil companies in the UK,
which are
shirking
the responsibility to clean up and shut down oil drilling
platforms in the North Sea.
Big companies have a history
of using
bankruptcy to evade responsibilities, even pension
obligations. Rather than trust a company to come up with money
later to carry out its responsibilities, we should make it put
the money in escrow in advance when it incurs the obligation, on
a schedule that collects the money while the project is
profitable.
-
Facebook and
Google provide
support on contract to specific political campaigns. Given
the role they play in communication between citizens, this is a
conflict of interest, and should be prohibited.
-
The way
to reduce
the waste from plastic things is to reduce the quantity of such
things that are made.
"Recycling" plastic by burning it is even more ironic than the
article says. The process consists basically of extracting
petroleum from the ground and then burning it, but differs from
the usual way of doing so in that the petroleum (more precisely,
some fraction of it) passes through an intermediate stage as
plastic. This does not reduce the greenhouse gas output.
Imagine if every item made of plastic — even fairly
durable items — carried a deposit. If the item is
recycled in less than 5 years, the consumer gets the deposit
back. If it is recycled after 5 years, the consumer refund is a
decreasing fraction of the original deposit; after 10 years, the
refund goes to zero.
This law would engourage making plastic items that would remain
usable for a longer period of time. It could even help put an
end to planned obsolescence.
More items where there
ought to be a law.
Quotes
Here are some
quotations that I particularly like.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
[More Cartoons]
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth)
to express your rejection of Facebook.
E-books
Non-oppressive Commercial
E-books
Don't use Facebook
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.
No national identity cards
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.
Borders
Stay away from certain countries because of their
bad
immigration policies.
Flight connections
Avoid flight connections in these airports because
of their
treatment of passengers.
The Lifelong Activist
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.
Bob Chassell
Writing (mostly science fiction) by my
friend Bob Chassell who recently died.
Solidarity Economy and Free Software
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance
on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
Falkvinge articles
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 order copies of my
book, 'Free
Software, Free Society, 3rd edition', signed or not signed.
"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."
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.
Media/Press/Bios
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things
of interest to the press, have been moved to a
separate page.
Earth
under attack from planet Koch.
On doxing, and how to spell it.
Futon Physics
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
The
Night before M-x-mas
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
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
New song (06/2016)
- Si la face ay pale.
My Cartoons
My Puns in English
(Chicken crossing the big street, April 2019).
My Puns in Spanish
(New pun: Estofado sin carne
November 2018)
My Puns in French
(New pun: Un grand fruit April 2019)
My Puns in Portuguese
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.)
What Republicans Believe.
--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.
Pre-Zen Studies.
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.
Un malentendido gracioso.
ESR's favorite programming language:
Objectivist C.
American
Extremists
My Small Mouth
The huns and the writs.
I don't know who wrote this, but I hope he does not
object to sharing it here.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
A science fiction story: Jinnetic
Engineering (in
Portuguese,
Farsi,
Spanish,
Armenian,
Russian,
French, and
Italian).
The Right to
Read
Made for You (December 2012)
(local copy)
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.
Resolving the trolley
problem
Quantum Theory and
Abortion Rights
A
proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both
speech and writing.
Origin of the POSIX name.
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".
My Childhood Sweetheart
Love and Dance
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
I would like to thank:
- Positive Internet for sponsoring this web site.
-
Pawel Bokota,
Lake Denman,
Mark Eriksen,
Eduardo Freitas,
and Joe P. Lee
for installing new
text.
- Mark Eriksen for providing the new search feature.
- Craig Metrolis for working on making pages valid html.
- John C. Vernaleo for helping to run the site.
- Graziano Sorbaioli for
improving the layout of the main page.
Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003,
2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013,
2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are
permitted provided this notice is preserved.
Verbatim copying and redistribution of any of the photos in the
photos subdirectory is permitted under the
Creative
Commons Noderivs license version 3.0 or later. You can copy and
redistribute the photo of me playing music to
the butterfly under the
Creative Commons Noderivs
Nocommercial license version 3.0 or later. Any other photos of
me in this (the toplevel) directory may be copied and redistributed under
the
Creative Commons Noderivs license version 3.0
