[Gllug] Talk by Richard Stallman in London, 12 Feb

[Alex Hudson]

On Sat, 2002-01-26 at 16:24, Richard Cottrill wrote:
> Well if you pay for software as a service (particularly if it's remote) then
> the software may be open, or closed, but in no case is it free.

Payment doesn't have much to do with this: the issue of proprietary
software versus free software is not one of cost. If you get software as
a service for no charge (e.g., hotmail) that doesn't make it free
software. I personally pay for a set of services at my ISP, some of
which are delivered over the web. The software it runs on is free
software..

I presume you're talking about the problem where people can make
software available without actually having to give you a copy. This
isn't just a problem of web services - you could do it with X if you
were really odd - but it is an important problem. However, I don't
believe that this is going to be a major issue any time soon - ASPs
haven't caught on, probably won't catch on and really only serve to
confuse people (who generally tie it in with .Net and other unrelated
technologies).

An example of where ASPs go wrong could be seen to be Sourceforge - I
don't think SF is generally acknowledged to be free software anymore.
However, any notional GPLv3 (or whatever) doesn't solve this problem:
ASPs tend to develop bespoke software to provide a service (the GnuE
framework isn't here yet ;), so the licence of the software is more or
less irrelevant.

> eventually settled. Actually he got himself sufficiently worked up to
> endorse piracy of software in no uncertain terms.

Good god, surely not....

.. I would be surprised if that was what he _actually_ said, because he
tends to be quite careful about what he says politically due to the
amount of misinterpretation he gets, but so what. However, I don't see
anything particularly wrong with so-called 'piracy' (a dodgy concept
anyway) in a political context, because I believe in direct action. 

> software in the Australian government to some considerable degree. Canberra
> is utterly a Microsoft town - departmental managers simply refuse to believe
> that free software can be useful - 'you get what you pay for'.

Perhaps someone should let them in on the secret that free software does
actually cost money to purchase, implement and use. Training especially
is expensive. However, the cost is less relevant than the freeness of
the software.

Cheers,

Alex.

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