‘Free’ as in free speech not as in free beer!

Written on 10:12 PM by Tushar

You guessed it right! Richard Stallman or RMS as he is better known to the world was at Hopkins today to deliver a seminar on ‘Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks’.

I have seen him many times in documentaries and no book on Linux will be complete without the mention of his name. His work in GCC, GDB, Emacs etc is truly extraordinary. I was standing outside the lecture hall before the lecture started and he just walked in with no air of superiority. His speech was as usual impressive and he narrated how the entertainment companies such as Sony,Disney as trying to exploit the copyright laws through various measures such as ‘Mickey Mouse’ Act and the DRM technologies.

He mentioned about 4 degrees of freedom –

Degree 0 – Freedom to run the program

Degree 1 – Freedom to modify the source code

Degree 2 – Freedom to send your modified code to another user

Degree 3 – Freedom to send your modified code to the community

Seems to me that the student community is a true believer in the freedom of degree 0 , 1 and 2 even before RMS coined these terms;)

Posted in grad life

If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to our feed