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 US media to take seriously the threates by the saboteur in chief and his henchmen to sabotage the 2026 congressional election.
Everyone: call on news organizations to cover the SAVE Act clearly and directly as a voter suppression measure — examining who would be blocked from voting, how implementation would work, and why these requirements are being advanced now.
How section 702 of the PAT RIOT act allows the US government to collect and search Americans' communications without warrants.
Section 702 will expire soon unless renewed.
Please phone your senators to call on let this section expire, by refusing to extend it.
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 investigate the deportation thugs' mass surveillance and use of widespread face recognition.
US citizens: call on state attorneys general to stop Paramount's mega-media monopoly.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
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.
US citizens: call on US media to take seriously the threates by the saboteur in chief and his henchmen to sabotage the 2026 congressional election.
Everyone: call on news organizations to cover the SAVE Act clearly and directly as a voter suppression measure — examining who would be blocked from voting, how implementation would work, and why these requirements are being advanced now.
Britain's right-wing extremist politician, Farage, bizarrely says that Iran is a bigger threat to the UK than Putin.
This seems bizarre and irrational, but it is understandable seeing that that's what the corrupter thinks of the question. Farage is simply acting as a repeater for him.
The influential spokespeople of the British political class are pushing for joining the wrecker's war with Iran, giving absurd reasons that the people are solidly rejecting.
Why, I ask, are people with those views the ones highlighted in the media?
The British major media are mostly right-wing, often viciously so. I conjecture that the media's owners, and those of big advertisers, want to keep business in charge, and they have decided that if Britain swears fealty to the wrecker, he will reward those owners. What happens to the rest of Britain counts for little with them.
*Bombing of Iran's oil infrastructure to have major environmental fallout, experts warn.*
*[The bully's Iran war will reinforce North Korea's view that nuclear weapons are the only path to security.*
How section 702 of the PAT RIOT act allows the US government to collect and search Americans' communications without warrants.
Section 702 will expire soon unless renewed.
Please phone your senators to call on let this section expire, by refusing to extend it.
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.
Fired CDC workers have organized the National Public Health Coalition to advocate for public health, despite the wrecker's damage to the CDC.
*US to offer passport services to citizens in illegal West Bank settlements.* Step the US moves towards legitimizing mass expulsion and annexation.
The German state has fired the head of the Berlin film festival, apparently for refusing to ban criticism of Israel there.
She had opposed calls for the festival itself to take a specific stand, instead saying that artists presenting films there should be free to express their views. Apparently such freedom is now considered "antisemitic".
Germany is abandoning laws designed to decrease future fossil fuel use.
This can only be called a surrender to planet roasters. The US and UK are doing similar things. The inevitable result is disaster.
The Taliban have banned music, and have a campaign to destroy all the musical instruments in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's traditional musical styles are now threatened, as they can only be passed on outside the country.
Islam has had a thread of such fanaticism for a thousand years, at least. Muslim fanatics, the Almohads, took over Morocco in the 12th century, then parts of Spain. The Wikipedia entry does not mention this, but they banned music too.
If you want to listen to the example linked in the article, please don't simply follow the link to Youtube! Use invidio.us or yt-dlp, preferably through a proxy so that it can't be tracked to you.
Later in the article, there is a link for a different kind of music. I warn you, it is on Spotify.
Out, out, damned Spotify!
(satire) *Kash Patel Faces Backlash After Partying With Nancy Guthrie's Captors.*
Deportation thugs falsely claimed to be city cops in order to enter a Columbia University dorm and seize an international student.
Was this an instance of the crime of impersonating an officer? Can they be prosecuted and imprisoned for this?
Performances of Shen Yun are encountering bomb threats emanating from China.
I watched a Shen Yun performance once in Paris with a French friend. The impression it produced on me was curious: it reproached the Chinese government as cruelly repressive (which indeed it is), and spread on such a thick layer of this teaching that I began to find it annoying, despite the fact that I agreed in advance with that reproach.
I told this to my friend, and she had felt the same. "It preaches too much," she said.
I still condemn China's repression and threats — like what the bully is trying to impose in the US — but I have no appetite to see another Shen Yun performance.
Hillary Clinton testified at a congressional committee hearing in which the questions were meant primarily as harassment and distraction.
She had to repeat that she did not know Epstein, and was asked repeatedly about UFOs and about Pizzagate.
Republicans imposed a rule against releasing photos, then Rep. Boebert (Republican) secretly took a photo and released it, violating that rule.
The saboteur in chief is thinking of requiring US banks to check the citizenship of all their clients. This might imply that some non-citizens could no longer have bank accounts, who now are permitted to have them.
Individual US states can deny corporations the power to support political campaigns.
Montana is planning to do this, and soon maybe California too.
*Ancient stepwells brought back to life as India begins to run out of water.*
This is a nice form of historical preservation, but it can't get more than a tiny fraction of the water that's needed for India's rapidly growing population. India (and the world as a whole) need to stop population growth.
*Two women arrested in Uganda for allegedly kissing in public could face life sentence.*
That is one item in a long catalog of unjustified cruel bigotry that is fueled by various religions.
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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