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 for protecting the CFPB from being made to show humility" towards the banks it is supposed to regulate.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to restore PBS and NPR funding.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on congressional Democrats to reject any new abortion restrictions in ACA funding talks.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on legislators to protect safe abortion access: no one should die because doctors are afraid they will be imprisoned if they save her.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to protect workers' rights by rejecting the nomination of Scott Mayer, union-busting lawyer, to the NLRB
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: support Rashida Tlaib's resolution to acknowledge and put an end to the genocide in Gaza.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: support the members of Congress who reminded the US military that their legal and moral duty is to disobey illegal orders.
The criminal in chief threatened to have them killed for making this statement, so they need our support.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call for holding the deportation thugs accountable for surveillance abuses.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: support the members of Congress who reminded the US military that their legal and moral duty is to disobey illegal orders.
The criminal in chief threatened to have them killed for making this statement, so they need our support.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call for holding the deportation thugs accountable for surveillance abuses.
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.
Magat officials have threatened to withhold food stamp funds from states that don't hand over all their personal data about all recipients.
Border thugs broke into and raided a humanitarian aid station in the Arizona desert, without a warrant.
This station gives food, water and medical care, and a chance to rest -- but not transportation -- to people who have crossed the border. The thugs could have entered the place lawfully by first applying for a warrant, but they look for opportunities for lawlessness that will diminish constitutional rights in the US.
*A Guardian investigation reveals Dollar General and Family Dollar stores often fail to honor their shelf prices – charging more at checkout for everything from frying pans to Frosted Flakes.*
The companies let such errors accumulate systematically "by accident"; not doing the work required to update the price stickers on the products themselves. When they are caught, the fines are minuscule. Morally it is the equivalent of deciding to lie and defraud, and it ought to be punushed as such.
Some dollar stores also explicitly lie by presenting fake "discount prices".
I've heard these stores criticized also for (1) not offering much in the way of fresh vegetables and fruit, thus imposing a less healthful diet, and (2) driving all competitors out of business, so that whole neigborhoods have no access to those foods.
The wrecker has given the US military permission to keep attacking alleged drug smuggling boats until they ae completely destroyed, even if this will result in killing survivors.
This second attack is a secondary crime on top of the first crime -- the first military attack an alleged drug smuggling boat. The US could easily capture these boats and their crews, then prosecute the people on the boat for smuggling drugs, if it turns out they were really smuggling drugs. That is the legitimate thing to do, respecting the law.
But the wrecker doesn't want to carry out justice under laws, rather to twist them into a fascist regime's laws -- a means of compelling everyone's submission.
*Exclusive: Brazil’s environment minister talks about climate inaction and the course we have to plot to save ourselves and the planet.*
A campaign calls on Israel to release Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti from imprisonment without trial, hoping he can end the fighting among Palestinians and then negotuate peace with israel.
The magat government wants to shield pesticide companies from lawsuits by people who accuse pesticides of causing them cancer.
*Fertilising arable land with human waste leaves array of toxins that could re-enter food chain, study finds.*
This practice was effectively used for millennia, so I wonder whether the waste contained toxins back then or not. Perhaps it was chemically safe back then because these toxic substances had not been invented yet. Or perhaps some were present but nobody was aware of them, since the life expectancy was shorter then.
There were of course germs that could be transmitted this way, but people took some precautions against such spreading.
The wrecker has bullied the UK's NHS into paying more for patent medicines from the US.
This is the bully's fight to make medical treatment more expensive and deny it to many poor people.
US citizens: call on Spotify to stop showing recruiting ads for the deportation thug department, ads which demonize immigrants.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code—not trivial, but not hard.
Spotify does wrong to all its customers and to most musicians. I urge people to refuse absolutely to use Spotify or any dis-service that acts like Spotify. But I did not raise those issues in the letter I sent for this campaign, as it would have been counterproductive.
But I did mention in my letter the systematic lawlessness of the deportation thugs, who often defy court orders as well as the constitutional rights of the victims.
The UK government has decided on a major expansion of Heathrow airport, which will put the country on a path of ever more flying, and a faster and bigger climate disaster.
The decision cites various short term advantages. They would be quite desirable, if the price were limited to the cost of construction.
A Hong Kong man has been charged with "sedition" for calling for action against the corruption that was responsible for the recent fire in a tall residential building that killed more than 135 people.
If the muskrat's Imitation Intelligence could really think and have views and opinions, we would have to conclude it is a Nazi.
The UK's arbitrary declaration that Palestine Action is a terrorist organization is being reconsidered by a sort of trial, but some of the evidence is being kept secret, so that there is no way for the organization and its supporters to dispute the validity of what is claimed.
*Israel still committing genocide in Gaza, Amnesty International says.*
Israel is still "deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction," which is one of the conditions listed in the definition of genocide. This includes denial of food, denial of shelter, and denial of medicine and destruction of doctors and medical facilities.
The persecutor has ended temporary protected status for Burmese refugees, threatening to deport them to Burma. The Burmese military dictatorship is delighted with this show of support.
Some Republicans oppose, for various reasons, the press for gerrymandering more intensely the House of Representatives.
*Use on crops of 8m pounds of antibiotics and antifungals a year leads to superbugs and damages human health, lawsuit claims.*
*John McAuliff won against a Republican by focusing on something affecting all his constituents: the cost of energy,* increased by building lots of datacenters, meant for use with bullshit generators.
This article lays out the moral basis of resistance against magatry, then tries to give it an unneeded "spiritual" basis. I think the first is useful, but the second is not.
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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