Richard Stallman's personal site.

https://stallman.org

For current political commentary, see the daily political notes.

2013-06-25

I'd like to clear up some erroneous information about where I stand that is circulating on 4chan and perhaps elsewhere.

I have a low opinion of Gentoo GNU/Linux.
Gentoo is a GNU/Linux distribution, but its developers don't recognize this; they call it "Gentoo Linux". That means they are treating me and the GNU Project disresepectfully.
More importantly, Gentoo steers the user towards nonfree programs, which is why it is not one of our recognized free distros.
See the GNU distros list for the distros that I do recommend.
The latest Intel PC processors are useless in the Free World, because they require a proprietary program to initialize the memory and a signed proprietary blob in the northbridge chip.
I don't know how much better the current AMD processors are, but they are surely not worse.
Regarding graphics accelerators for PCs, ATI mostly cooperates with the free software movement, while nVidia is totally hostile. ATI has released free drivers.
However, the ATI drivers use nonfree microcode blobs, whereas most of nVidia's products (excepting the most recent ones) work ok with Nouveau, which is entirely free and has no blobs.
Thus, paradoxically, if you want to be free you need to get a not-very-recent nVidia accelerator.
I wish ATI would free this microcode, or put it in ROM, so that we could endorse its products and stop preferring the products of a company that is no friend of ours.
Android is not, in practice, an entirely free operating system. It has problems , larger or smaller depending on which product. The problems of nonfree driver libraries, and the universal back door in cell phone radio communication software, are imposed by the hardware and are not directly the fault of Android, but that does not make them ok.
There are two different licenses that some refer to as "the BSD license". Both are free software licenses, but the difference has major practical consequences. To avoid confusion, please always say which one you mean — don't say "the BSD license" as if there were just one.

If you support the idea of free software, how about helping our work? Most of the movement's work is done by volunteers, and you can be one of them. See gnu.org/help for a list of suggested ways to help. It is not necessary to be a programmer, because there are other kinds of help we need too.