Once a fixture on the lecture circuit, GNU’s creator — and the father of Free Software — is slowly re‑emerging in the US, updating his message for the 2020s.
This Wednesday Richard Stallman will be speaking at the University of Texas at Austin.
That’s a quick turnaround.
You might remember that about 2 1/2 months ago Stallman appeared at Georgia Tech to give a talk that was sponsored by a newly formed campus organization called LibreTech Collective. Ten years ago, that sort of scheduling would’ve been business as usual for Stallman, who had a pretty full schedule as a lecturer on Free Software, all things GNU, and tech freedom in general.
Since 2019, however, Stallman has been largely incognito after he was suddenly forced to resign his job at MIT and step down from the presidency at Free Software Foundation, the organization he’d founded nearly 35 years earlier. This came after his contribution to a discussion on an MIT internal mailing list went public, and was interpreted by many as defending Jeffrey Epstein and blaming his victims. Except for appearances at FSF events, that pretty much removed him from public view for a while.
By 2023, he was beginning to make a comeback and had returned to the speakers circuit in the EU, before he was forced to take time off to recover from a treatable form of lymphoma. That’s evidently in complete remission now, and he’s recently begun making appearances back home in the US (in addition to appearances at FSF sponsored events, which never quit).
In late January of this year, Stallman gave a talk at the Georgia Institute of Technology, one of only a very few talks he’s given at US-based institutions this decade, even though he’s been appearing with increasing frequency at EU-based universities. At the time of his Georgia Tech appearance, we began to hear from knowledgeable sources that we could expect more appearances from Stallman on US soil going forward, and now that there’s an announced lecture at UT Austin we’re already hearing rumors of other lectures that might be in planning stages.
The upcoming talk — “Free/Libre Software and Freedom in the Digital Society” — will take place at 4 pm at the university’s Husain Auditorium in the Computer Science Building. The event will be free to attend (“my talks are always gratis to enter,” his website says).
It also has this to say about the contents of this talk:
Computing and software put people’s freedom in danger, as the usual practices nowadays give software developers and “service” providers power over the users. Resisting this requires that the software you use be free/libre, and that you do your own computing activities on your own computers, not on companies’ servers.
Nonfree programs and online “services” are often designed to snoop on users, restrict users, control users and/or manipulate users. Meanwhile the War on Sharing, with its DRM, aims to stop people from sharing copies of published works. Machine learning, which we should not presume constitutes “intelligence”, can cause various injustices.
I would say that this sounds like pretty standard Stallman fare (nothing to see here, move on), if not for this tidbit appended to the end of the description:
The talk will present an alternative to “age verification” schemes that all enable identifying each and every user, facilitating Orwellian monitoring and repression.
That should be interesting and timely. Numerous legal jurisdictions are in the process of requiring operating systems to do the heavy lifting to meet “proof of age” verification requirements as governments attempt to bar children and younger teenyboppers from social networks. During the last couple of weeks there’s been push-back from the Linux community, with numerous distributions saying they will not take part.
Similar to the event at Georgia Tech, Stallman’s presentation will take about an hour, and will be followed by another hour of Q&A from the audience. Additionally, there’ll be some FSF gear on sale to raise funds for the organization, so attendees might be advised to bring some cash.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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