Talk by RMS


Yesterday evening my wife and I visited a talk by Richard M Stallman at the university here in Linköping. He is currently doing a tour in Sweden. He had a talk with over 1000 visitors in Gothenburg on Wednesday and in Linköping were it close to 300 people. They had to close the doors fifteen minutes before the talk started. He will today talk at the Swedish green party's congress in Norrköping. The picture is when I am buying a pin from RMS.

It was the first time I listened to a talk by Stallman live. He is a classic politic agitator, no slides. He just stands and talks absorbed about his subject copyright and free information. The title of the talk was "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks". He started with the history of copyright. Then he entered into discuss the problems with currently done changes in copyright laws and introduction of DMCA.

The talk was interesting, but he is some times to much fundamentalist and mark words. Like, if you say Digital Rights Management about DRM, he points out that it should be Digital Restriction Management and of course Linux is GNU+Linux.

I like the vision of his ideas but I think we have to accept the compromise of Open Source a a pragmatic solution.

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