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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It is more likely I can actually go if you have funds to cover the additional cost, and a speaker's fee would be nice.
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
I will have a trip to Europe in the second week of October and I am looking for invitations for additional talks in the same trip. If you would like to invite me to speak in that trip, please write to me at rms-invitation@gnu.org with "october" as the subject.
It is more likely I can actually go if you have funds to cover the additional cost, and a speaker's fee would be nice.
Everyone: call for an immediate ceasefire in Sudan.
If you sign please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to end homelessness, by investing in housing, not internment.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you phone or sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to defend Mail-in voting before the 2026 mid-term elections.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you phone or sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress not to let the bully punish places where people did not vote for him.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Oklahoma's attorney general to investigate the decision that allowed a well-connected accused rapist to avoid possible prosecution.
You may find your state's or territory's major agencies contacts at USA.gov. If you contact them or sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: urge states to sue to stop the destruction of the Department of Education.
You can find your state governor phone number at USA.gov. If you phone, 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.
*[The tyrant] Told CBS What to Cut From 60 Minutes Interview — And They Listened.*
The persecutor's henchmen seek to merge state drivers' license databases into its database of citizens, which it intends to use to interfere with voting.
Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in the US, and it is very rare that they try to. But this data could include opportunity for confusion and error which could call the citizenship of citizens into question.
The Climate Analytics report asserts that governments' climate defense plans are inadequate, but that it isn't too late to avoid global disaster if we increase them.
The biggest challenges will be to convince the governments of China and the US, and the banks and billionaires that dominate the latter.
Salt lakes, when they dry up, give off blowing dust that contains toxins and bacteria that damage the biomes in people's lungs.
*NSW police accused of ‘sickening’ double standard over neo-Nazi rally [vs defense of Palestinians.]*
Both Jews and Palestinians are condemning this.
* Devastated hospitals, mass graves, bodies eaten by dogs in the street. After speaking out, I discovered my visa will not be renewed [by Israel].*
— Jonathan Whittall heads the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)'s mission in occupied Palestine.
*China's CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for past 18 months, analysis finds.*
"Moderate" (plutocratist) Senate Democrats dropped their demand to preserve medical insurance for poor Americans, in exchange for a purely symbolic concession by Senate Republicans to hold a separate vote on that insurance funding later this year.
With no leverage to pressure Republicans to vote for it, we must expect they will defeat it. And since the House of Representatives won't vote on it at all, it is a dead end that can't lead to any real restoration of the funding that was cut.
*US has sent $7.5m to Equatorial Guinea to accept noncitizens deportees.
Country is one of world’s most repressive and corrupt, raising concerns over rights abuses of those deported.*
Martin Decker's appeal against deportation from the UK was successful. This does not erase the injustice of imprisoning him for a nonviolent protest. The UK must abolish the laws that punish protests for mere inconvenience.
*Fannie Mae officers were investigating whether [the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)] inappropriately accessed mortgage details of Letitia James, Adam Schiff and others.*
An enterprising child distributed a flier in his neighborhood urging other kids to join him at a specific place and time for outdoor play. It was a success, and started regular meetings for play.
*Israelis attacked Palestinian water sources over 250 times in five years, data reveals.*
Introducing young children to peanuts at a younger age has greatly decreased the frequency of allergy to peanuts.
Everyone: call for an immediate ceasefire in Sudan.
If you sign please spread the word!
*A note to politicians hoping to emulate Mamdani's social media strategy: without the right policies, it's pointless.*
*The food stamp fight signals an era of unprecedented cruelty in America.*
The right-wing ideology ways that state help for poor people — either to survive, or to be more productive — is their idea of the greatest evil. (They also oppose regulations that protect people from other private citizens, such as gun control or even gun safety.) It is the ideology of the sadistic state, which when implemented tends to make life nasty, brutish and short (except for rich people).
However, in the past they were just a fringe group and could hardly ever get elected to office.
Now we see what happens when their sadism is unleashed.
A new regulation gave the Federal Protective Service the power to arrest people outside of federal government facilities.
I have a feeling it was established to protect against attacks launched by enemies of the US, such as the riot that the bully had launched on 6 Jan 2021. Of course, he now claims that that violent attack was not violent at all, and has pardoned all the people convicted of crimes in it, as a way of adding fake verisimilitude to that claim.
Now it seems he plans to use the opposite lie, accusing nonviolent protesters of rioting as an excuse to attack them.
Orwell referred to bidirectional lies like this as "blackwhiting".
He also plans to use distorted accusations to prosecute protesters for wearing masks.
*US judge orders Trump administration to fully fund Snap benefits in November.*
The persecutor will surely appeal this decision, and eventually it will go to the Supreme Court. If it follows recent practice, it will allow the persecutor to starve 40 million Americans until it makes a final decision, months later.
A protester prosecuted for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent was found not guilty.
Clearly the jury considered the charge absurd.
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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