Richard Stallman's Personal Site
I
continue to be the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project.
I do not intend to stop any time soon.
Send comments/questions about the search engine to: rms at gnu dot org
RSS site feed for the most recent
political notes and new material.
This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
the Free Software Foundation or
the GNU Project.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
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.
For the US presidential election:
If your state is a swing state, vote for Biden. Otherwise, vote Green — vote for Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker for president/VP. I delayed my decision hoping that Biden would support the progressive programs that the US and the world desperately need, but by choosing Harris he reaffirmed his rejection of them. If we keep voting for the plutocratist lesser evil, each time the plutocrats give us something worse than the previous lesser evil.
California voters: vote no on prop 22, the Uber exploitation exception.
This doesn't go far enough — you should not be required
to identify yourself to any other "authority" before letting
the repair shop diagnose your vehicle's problem — but it is
a significant step in the right direction.
In San Francisco: Vote for progressive
Shahid Buttar in the Democratic primary to replace Nancy Pelosi.
US voters: refer to NORML's voting guide for candidates' stands
on legalizing marijuana.
I am looking for a few more volunteers to help install new
political notes on the site. If you'd like to help me in this
way, please write to rms at gnu period org.
Is your bank pressuring you to use biometric ID?
If so, please write to rms at gnu dot org.
It could be useful if you document what is happening.
Link Policy
The largest part of the site is the
political notes, and they
are typically updated every day.
- volunteer to post videos of my talks on audio-video.gnu.org.
- browse various sites and show me
items that I ought to see and link to. If you would like to help me
in this way, please write to rms at gnu dot o r g.
- (in India) make and sell buttons that say, "DON'T BE
TRACKED PAY CASH", in English and/or a local
language, to resist the campaign against
cash. Talk with a local company that makes buttons, buy a
batch of 50 to 500 buttons for a quantity price, then sell
them for 2 or 3 times that price.
- get info about Delta face recognition.
Delta
Airlines' web
site says clearly that using face
recognition to for departures is optional.
However, there are reports that in the airport they cover this up.
Would someone flying on Delta out of Atlanta please record the
announcements about face recognition for checkin and
boarding? And what the checkin agent says to you about
rejecting the face recognition. Also please take photos of
any signs that talk about the matter. Then please send me
email about what you saw/heard.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to be addictive.
- Write a program to scrape fridaysforfutureusa.org
and post the practical info about finding climate strike
rallies on another web site which makes that information
accessible without running JavaScript code.
I would like to publicize these events, as well as attend sometimes
myself.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to cause programmed obsolescence of products.
- develop a Firefox front end to search the Internet Archive
with Javascript disabled (or LibreJS active).
- If you know of a bank in the US that charges less than ten dollars for
incoming wire transfers, please tell me about it.
I can't do online banking, since most US banks require customers to
run nonfree apps or Javascript code for that, so I would need to open
an account in some other way. Therefore, it would be best if the bank
had an office in the Boston area. However, I'd be interested in whatever
banks you can recommend even if they are not near me.
- find articles about games that lure and pressure users
into spending a lot of money on competitive advantages, or letting
their children do so. I've concluded this is a form of malicious
functionality, and I want to make a list to add to
https://gnu.org/malware/. If you know of an article, please email me
the URL.
- write site-specific Firefox extensions
or local scripts to operate specific web sites.
- help
maintain and operate savannah.gnu.org.
- experiment to find good ways to attach
fruits to a Grav-mass tree.
- help web sites put free licenses
on their Javascript code.
Civil Liberties Minute:
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
graphic by Susan Henson
Americans, you may wish to copy this icon to your own page, as a
way of showing what patriotism means to you.
-
US citizens: tell your congresscritter to push to repeal the authorization
for use of military force.
It won't hurt to say this by phone, too.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
-
US citizens: call on secretaries of state of all states not to allow
private "security" heavies at polling places.
-
California voters: reject Proposition 22, the bow-down-to-Guber exception.
If we win on this, and eventually Uber accepts the requirement to pay
its workers better, that will not make Uber (or Lyft) acceptable
— it won't change their injustice to their customers. Nor the food
delivery gig companies.
-
*Pro-democracy advocates are organizing more than 170 events [on Nov
4] in anticipation of President Donald Trump illegitimately declaring
victory in the Nov. 3 election.*
That's a good idea, but they have messed up the web site where they
publish the details: it depends on nonfree Javascript code, and it is
totally inaccessible in the Free World. I can't see even one word of
the contents of their site, only a message saying "Enable Javascript."
No way!
It is a shame that I can't (without sacrificing my freedom and
principles) find an event near me, and neither can you, nor can I in
good conscience post an urgent note asking everyone to look at the
site and find an event to join.
This time, we have considerable notice — 18 days to go before Nov 4.
Maybe this is enough time to correct the deficiency, rather than
merely bemoan it.
If you are a skilled web developer, and you have a web site where you
can make a page without Javascript, and run an hourly cron job on the
net, please try it. See if you can scrape the data from their site
and make a simple HTML file listing all the events, sorted in some
natural way. Put that that page on your site, with a bried
introduction saying what these events are for.
Then please email me about it, and I will post a reference to your
curved mirror.
-
In Illinois, vote for the graduated income tax.
-
Citizens of Massachusetts: vote yes on question 1,
giving car owners the right to authorize independent
repair shops to access the data stored in the vehicle.
This doesn't go far enough — you should not be required
to identify yourself to any other "authority" before letting
the repair shop diagnose your vehicle's problem — but it is
a significant step in the right direction.
-
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
Recording of Guantanamero
Listen to the
recording
of
Guantanamero,
a protest song written in Spanish. The recording is in
Ogg Vorbis format. To install an Ogg Vorbis player,
see
the FSF's Ogg Players page.
-
The US needs a constitutional amendment to limit the president's power
to pardon convicts whose crimes were related to the president. The
authors of the constitution may have supposed no president would sink
so low as to do that.
-
Automation in work is aimed at atomizing work, making workers fungible,
and running them to exhaustion.
I think these practices ought to be prohibited, even if it requires
imposing stiff, harsh penalties on employment systems. It is wrong to
apply such laws to people, but an employment system is not a person,
even if it is part of a business that belongs to a person.
-
I think there ought to be a law that when a company tells workers that their jobs will be outsourced, and that before they are let go they must train their own replacements, the workers don't have to do that.
The law would say that they can treat the order to train their replacements as being laid off, so that they can stop working, and start collecting unimployemnt insurance, on the day that the training process is supposed to begin.
The law could award them a paid vacation too, why not? That detail won't be crucial — the effect of this law is that companies won't do that sort of thing at all.
-
Let's put a substantial tax on all shipments of products from stores to retail customers. That would benefit all local stores, for which shipping is not needed.
Alternatively, put a substantial tax on all retail sales in which the store can identify the purchaser. That would encourage non-surveillance retail.
More items where there
ought to be a law.
Quotes
Here are some
quotations that I particularly like.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
[More Cartoons]
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth)
to express your rejection of Facebook.
E-books
Non-oppressive Commercial
E-books
Don't use Facebook
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.
No national identity cards
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.
Borders
Stay away from certain countries because of their
bad
immigration policies.
Flight connections
Avoid flight connections in these airports because
of their
treatment of passengers.
The Lifelong Activist
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.
Bob Chassell
Writing (mostly science fiction) by my
friend Bob Chassell who recently died.
Solidarity Economy and Free Software
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance
on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
Falkvinge articles
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 order copies of my
book, Free
Software, Free Society, 3rd edition', signed or not signed.
"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."
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.
Media/Press/Bios
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things
of interest to the press, have been moved to a
separate page.
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
Earth
under attack from planet Koch.
On doxing, and how to spell it.
Futon Physics
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
The
Night before M-x-mas
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
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
New song (06/2016)
- Si la face ay pale.
My Cartoons
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 Portuguese
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.)
What Republicans Believe.
--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.
Pre-Zen Studies.
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.
Un malentendido gracioso.
ESR's favorite programming language:
Objectivist C.
American
Extremists
My Small Mouth
The huns and the writs.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
A science fiction story: Jinnetic
Engineering (in
Portuguese,
Farsi,
Spanish,
Armenian,
Russian,
French, and
Italian).
The Right to
Read
Made for You (December 2012)
(local
copy) Esperanto
translation
My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom,
is available from the
GNU Press.
Love and Dance
My Childhood Sweetheart
Made for You
Avec des
chapeaux French song parody.
My radio program of Music from
Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on
Oct 13, 2014.
Resolving the trolley
problem
Quantum Theory and
Abortion Rights
A
proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both
speech and writing.
Origin of the POSIX name.
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".
My Childhood Sweetheart
Love and Dance
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
Certificate of confusion
I would like to thank:
- Positive Internet for hosting this web site.
- Graziano Sorbaioli for improving the layout of the main
page.
Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003,
2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013,
2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are
permitted provided this notice is preserved.
Verbatim copying and redistribution of any of the photos in the
photos subdirectory is permitted under the
Creative
Commons Noderivs license version 3.0 or later. You can copy and
redistribute the photo of me playing music to
the butterfly under the
Creative Commons Noderivs
Nocommercial license version 3.0 or later. Any other photos of
me in this (the toplevel) directory may be copied and redistributed under
the
Creative Commons Noderivs license version 3.0
