“Free software from legal control”


How good would it be to have software programmers who are committed to the idea of writing software and sharing it with each other and with anyone else who agrees to share alike? What if anyone could be a part of and benefit from this community even without being a computer expert or knowing anything about programming?

The Free Software movement envisages a society like that, and to drive home the idea behind using free software, Richard Stallman, founder, Free Software Foundation, interacted with free software activists, students and teachers of engineering colleges, e-governance consultants and network security experts, here on Monday.

He was delivering a lecture on ‘Free Software, Freedom, and Education' organised by the Free Software Foundation, Tamil Nadu at IIT-Madras.

“Not everybody needs to write programs to use free software in their devices. But they should not be forbidden to do that,” Dr. Stallman. Proprietary software, he said, asserts legal control over its users through a combination of copyrights, contracts, and patents, which abuse the rights of the users.

The distinction between free software and proprietary software was not a technical one, but a political and ethical choice, and the key element of this choice was the right to learn, and share what people learn with others.......Read More

 

Source: The Hindu


Comments (0)



Please Login or Register to join groups