Interviewing Richard Stallman is a challenge.

The terms sheet for the interview carries a half dozen caveats and requests, most relating to Stallman’s desire to not be identified as an advocate for open source software. There’s also a long suggested reading list of articles and FAQs on the GNU.org website he founded that carefully lay out the distinctions between free software and everything else. And Stallman doesn’t hesitate to take interviewers to task over terminology. If it isn’t completely free, Stallman doesn’t support it.

The distinction is somewhat ironic because much of Stallman’s work over the last 30-plus years has contributed to the ascendancy of open source as the premier licensing model for new enterprise software. In 1982 he launched the GNU Project, a collaborative software development effort aimed at building a complete library of free software. The project produced the GNU operating system and thousands of programs, including the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) a bedrock technology that has played an important role in the growth of free software. The prestigious Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced yesterday that Stallman has received the organization’s Software System Award for his development and leadership of GCC.

Stallman is frequently described as an advocate of open source computing, even its father. It’s a characterization he vehemently denies. “I want people to associate me with free software, not open source,” he said. “I don’t want to make statements about open source except how it differs from free software.”

Or, as a statement on GNU.org sums it up: “The free software movement campaigns for your freedom in your computing, as a matter of justice. The open source non-movement does not campaign for anything.”

In short, free software is as much a philosophy as a licensing model. “Free software is not gratis software and price is not the issue,” Stallman said. “Freedom is what matters.”

For software to be truly free, “users have to have control to run the program as they wish and to study the program’s source code and change it,” Stallman said. “This is based on two essential freedoms: to make exact copies and to copy and distribute your modified versions as you wish.”

Anything less “subjugates the user,” Stallman said, and that’s in an infringement on freedom as a whole

SiliconANGLE interviewed Stallman from his Boston office.

Understanding your aversion to being associated with open source, the fact is that the barriers to accessing sophisticated software are falling. Are we making progress toward your goals?

Are we talking about access to free or non-subjugating proprietary software? If the software puts users under the power of the owner of that program, I don’t think it’s progress.

We have made progress in some areas and in other areas we’re going backward. You can now buy a computer with only free software in it. It has a free BIOS, free drivers, free applications, even free games. The Free Software Foundation now has almost 4,000 members, which is a growth of many hundreds over the last year.

[On the other hand,] mobile devices from Apple and Microsoft are totally locked down. There’s a free version of Android called Replicant, but the peripheral interfaces are secret. New kinds of PC graphics accelerators communicate over the network even when the computer is switched off.

So are you saying broader access is not progress?

Making it easier for people to use technology that controls them and spies on them is not a step forward for society. I disagree with the idea of making digital inclusion a goal if control is the prices of access.

Has the Internet made us freer?

Internet sites have created new forms of suppression, I’m sad to say. I won’t identify myself in order to connect to the Internet, so there are things I can’t do. I can’t see stuff people post on Facebook because I won’t agree to their terms of service. If a service is run by someone else, you can’t possibly have control over it.

Snowden revealed to us how much surveillance we are subject to. It’s much more than was the case in the Soviet Union. If the government knows who goes where and who talks to whom, it will kill democracy. We need whistleblowers to tell us these things so we can stop it, but the government calls those people criminals.

Given the momentum of open source, wouldn’t it be more productive for you to collaborate with open source advocates rather than stressing your differences?

The open source non-movement was launched in 1998 as a reaction against our movement. They liked free software, but they disagreed with our reasons for supporting it. In practice, open source and free software are nearly equivalent, but the open source people reject our philosophy. They think it’s just fine if someone wants to write proprietary extensions to their software. So we have to differ with them.

Are your goals realistic?

It’s easy to look at a long-term goal and say it’s impossible, so let’s give up. But you won’t win without trying. Conquering the world is not my definition of success. The GNU Linux operating system is used by maybe one or two percent of PC users. Is that failure or success? Given that we started from nearly zero, I’d say we’ve had tremendous success compared to where we started.

Developers of free software have struggled to come up with viable business models. Doesn’t removing the profit motive inhibit innovation?

You’re mixing two issues. The profit motive gets people writing software that no one should use because it subjugates the users. Is that really better? Suppose there is a known business model for making food that poisons people and no good business model for making food that’s good for people. Is it better to make a lot more poison or less food?

Your question implies that software is good, even if it takes our freedom away. I don’t accept that.

What can an IT manager do to advance the free software cause?

Don’t use proprietary software that puts them under the power of someone else. Proprietary software developers treat users as suckers. They come from an environment with no shame.

It’s not just control; proprietary software is typically full of malware. They make programs that spy on you, restrict you and let you not do things with your computer. There are dozens of examples documented at http://www.gnu.org/proprietary.

We now have access to the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. You would think that would make us a more enlightened society, but the U.S. is more politically polarized than it has been since the Vietnam War. Does that surprise you?

It makes sense when you look at the way systems that track people are designed to gather information and sort them into buckets that only see what they agree with. This is the filter bubble. Systems must not track people. I don’t mind paying to download something as long as I can do so anonymously. There should be no restrictions and no digital rights management.

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