Speech by Stallman in Moscow - how our team leader bought a plush toy for 12k

On December 1, at the conference “Why the Future is Free Software,” Richard Stallman was the author of the esoteric text editor emacs, co-author of gcc and gdb, founder and head of the Free Software Foundation. One of the strongest programmers in the world, a person known and even a bit legendary.


Despite the fact that Famatech's main activity is the development and sale of proprietary software - Radmin, we cannot but appreciate the enormous contribution of free software and open source movements. History does not know the subjunctive mood, but we are sure that twenty years ago Stallman would not have raised the question of the human rights to use programs, now the software world would be completely different.

Stallman spoke in the second half of the conference, right between the reports on the national software platform and the large round table - these presentations were also not uninteresting, but I hope someone else will highlight them, there is something to tell about.

The performances of Stallman are generally similar - he has a clear position set forth by the Free software foundation, which he conveys to the audience. Entries can be viewed on youtube, there are plenty of them. Stallman himself is a very charismatic speaker, perfectly fluent in oratorical art and speaks lively and fascinating. True, the organizers had an epic fail — instead of translating into headphones, a translator was invited to the stage who translated in real time — while he always managed to speak at the same time (!!!) with Stallman. How it looked for the listeners can be found here in this fragment:

')
I will not retell the performance, I note an interesting point. While Stallman was talking about the bright and good world of free software, we have formulated a nasty question of this kind: “Dear Richard, what is the difference between books and programs? Why is the author selling books a good thing, and the author selling a program is bad? ” But in the course of Stallman's story, this question “answered” in a natural way - we do not depend on books as much as on programs. Stallman, as we understand his position, does not advocate communism - he advocates that people should be able to use free software to solve their problems. Interested in the opportunity itself - it does not have to use it. If there is a possibility (even at such a level as GNU / Linux, which is not very popular, and the gimp is inferior to Photoshop), this affects the entire ecosystem of the software very much - in particular, it deprives commercial program makers of easy abuse of the fact that users depend on them. This gives some guarantees that if tomorrow Adobe’s management (for example) goes crazy and prohibits users from Russia from using Photoshop, I wo n’t be left without the ability to edit graphics.

After the speech, Stallman held a traditional auction at which he offered the people to buy a plush toy from him, Gnu, with a dedication. Here our team leader excelled, eyeofhell , who said that Famatech’s complete development department with the set of Dmitry Znosko’s autograph is vitally important for Stallman’s autograph :). It was not possible to convince him, so now the symbol of the movement for software freedom is hoisted to a place of honor in the department and raises the morale of the O_O team.