"Free/Libre software and freedom in the digital society" by R. Stallman // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025

[applause] So this talk is not about free software but free software is basic to right and wrong in any computing activity. If you are doing computing and it's your computing that's being done and it's being done with a non-free program, you're making a mistake because you can't trust the owner of that program to develop it to work legitimately and ethically. It's an great tempting opportunity to mistreat you. And nowadays, it is normal for companies of all sizes to mistreat users. And you'll find some occasionally that don't, but really, why be a sucker?

And likewise, if you are using a service as a software substitute, meaning your computing is being done on somebody else's server where that somebody else controls what the software does, you're basically making a terrible mistake. And uh what's going to happen is you can't control anything about how that server does your computing. Even if there's a free program running in the server, it's not your copy. It's the copy belonging to the server operator. And the server operator is free to change it and change what it does to you.

But you have no control. In order for you to have control of the free program, you've got to be running your copy. So if you do your computing in some cloudy place where you can't see what's actually happening, you're making a mistake. So, uh this is important in any computing activity and that includes anything having to do with encryption, anything uh crucial for privacy because a non-free program can't be trusted to preserve your privacy even if it uh says that its purpose is to preserve your privacy. The uh cryptographers say that you can't trust any encryption algorithm unless it's been studied for a long time by cryptographers looking for weaknesses in it.

Now, these weaknesses could be designed intentionally or they could be accidental because nobody's perfect. But either way, if we don't want flaws and weaknesses in our encryption, we've got to make sure that it's free software.

[snorts and clears throat]

So now turning to issues that have to do specifically with encryption that's all that issue of free software is always important in the background even if it's not the the foreground topic. So, one thing that many of you are surely enthusiasts for is cryptocurrency. [snorts] I disagree. I have never used a cryptocurrency partly because there are obstacles to my actually doing so. For one thing, if I wanted to spend some cryptocurrency, I'd need to get cryptocurrency.

Now, I don't want to set up a mining system, especially since nowadays those are big systems with big investments and I've got other things to do in my life. So, uh, how would I get the cryptocurrency? I'd have to buy it. I could buy it from an exchange, but how would I pay the exchange? I'd probably have to use a digital payment system, a nonprivate digital payment system like a credit card.

And uh well, it's not just that those purchases are not private and they're being snooped on. It's also that almost all websites require you to run nonfree software to make the payment. You may not notice this cuz usually it's non-free JavaScript code that's sent to your browser and it runs on your computer, but you don't control the code that's running. Well, I don't do that. I consider it being victimized an injustice and I refuse.

So what would I do? I guess I could find a friend who's willing to buy the cryptocurrency and uh and then give it to me. Well, okay, I could do that.

[snorts]

I don't like very much doing things like that, but I do them because in that case, I'm not running the non-free software and I'm not being snooped on. But still, it's not exactly ideal. But there's a worse problem for society with cryptocurrency, which is that it makes it easy for rich people to hide millions of dollars of wealth so that they don't pay their share of taxes to keep society going. Now, I'm sure you're aware that in the past few decades, uh, society's wealth has shifted massively from the non-rich to the rich, creating a situation in which rich people control governments. It may seem un unbelievable that there were times in the US when uh ordinary people's votes controlled Congress and the presidency and laws were passed to help non-rich people and increase taxes on rich people.

And this made a society where which was tolerable for everyone and that's what we need of course I mean you are right now in a country which has surrendered to the IMF uh and basically has sold its future. This is a disaster and how the Argentines will ever escape from this I don't know. They'd made a similar mistake in the '9s and President Chaveis of Venezuela, I believe, paid off their debt. He he bought their debt and forgave it. It wasn't that much by this comparison with oil wealth.

So, uh, who's going to do that for them next time? But it happens even in the US. Uh the mainstream parties have become mostly in control of the rich and the comfortable and uh what's needed by poor people so that they don't starve on the street and get sick and untreated is not their concern. And this is because the rich now shamelessly buy government policies. They send massive numbers of lobbyists to important events such as the climate conference that's happening right now in Brazil.

[clears throat] How will we save the world from global heating disaster if the oil companies can buy the decisions? Well, we need to make rich people pay their share of taxes rather than squeezing it out of poor people. And this means we have to stop the practice of hiding wealth so it goes untaxed. And so therefore, it's a problem with cryptocurrencies that they facilitate hiding wealth. That's not the only cause of this problem.

Many different laws have been reshaped to make it easier to hide wealth using the lobbying power of the people who have hidden wealth and who want to hide more. But still I prefer a different kind of system for private digital payments. GNU Taler. GNU Tyler protects the privacy of the payer, but the payee always has to identify itself. The payee would normally be a store.

It's actually meant for digital purchases rather than just for sending money around any way you like. It's intended to be used for everyday purchases. It's not particularly intended for buying a house. such big transactions that most people make a few times in their lives. Uh they don't they're not anonymous anyway if they're done lawfully.

You have to register that you're the owner in most places. So [clears throat] we don't need both sides anonymity. It's enough that the the payer is anonymous and then I could use it to order something or pay for something on the net. Suppose I wanted to pay for a download. Well, I'm not against paying for a download on principle as long as I could do it anonymously, which nowadays I generally can't.

And so I won't do it. I refuse for the sake of my privacy, not because I am against buying a digital copy. I also wouldn't reach I would reject one if it had DRM. There are various unethical things that sellers of ebooks normally do, which I absolutely refuse to participate in. But assuming there was a store which didn't do those things, then I wouldn't refuse to pay for a book, for an article, whatever.

I just judge if the price is right. So, GNU Tyler is the thing we need for that. It's designed to be efficient for actual purchases, anonymous for actual purposes, and for digital downloads. It would be easy for the website if it's designed to respect your anonymity. It's it's not a hard thing to do.

Of course, you might want to connect through the tour network so that uh that nobody finds out who is purchasing in any other way.

[snorts]

So the payer obtains tour tokens from a bank or some other institution and the bank knows how much in how much money in tour tokens you got sorry in in Tyler tokens you got but it's done through a blind signature system so that uh when you spend those tokens neither the payee nor the bank nor anyone else can figure out who obtained the tokens originally. Of course, the rest of the website you're buying from has to be designed not to snoop on you. This is something though that can be checked. In order to snoop on you, it would pro basically have to run JavaScript code. So, to make it clear, it's not snooping.

It should work without JavaScript code.

[clears throat]

It's not really right for it to run any programs on your computer. For a physical product, it's a bit harder. But Amazon has set up stores full of basically their sales boxes. You buy something, it gets sent to one of these stores, and you go pick it up. Well, those sales boxes should be separated into unrelated businesses that are not connected with Amazon and are available for use with any seller.

And uh if there's a fee for using the box, you should be able to pay that with Tyler. And this way you could buy physical objects anonymously using Tyler. Once Tyler is in widespread use, it's currently functioning legally in Switzerland. uh once it's in wide widespread use for online purchases, I suspect it wouldn't be hard to find businesses to set up these stores, these storefronts full of product receiving boxes. [clears throat] So that I think is the right solution.

systems that permit use of taller are called tolerable systems and the others are intolerable. [snorts] [clears throat] Now there are various other kinds of computing that legitimately involve use of servers. One kind is if you're trying to do some kind of transaction or commerce with a company, it makes sense for you to connect to that company's website. The company's computers obviously have to be involved and your computer obviously has to be involved. So your laptop can talk to the company's server.

That is a joint computing activity in which you participate and the company participates. So it's reasonable for your computer and to do your part and the company's computer to do its part. That's how the worldwide web was originally designed to work. But the company shouldn't do anything but its part and your part should be done on your computer. Another use of of uh servers that's legitimate is for people's uh terminal nodes, your laptop or some smaller physically smaller computer to talk to someone else's laptop or physically smaller computer.

They have to talk through the network which means communicating through various other computers. It can't be done any other way. So we whether we like it or not, it's that or nothing. [clears throat] And [snorts] it's not anybody's fault that it's that or nothing. Nobody could choose to make it different.

So we just better accept that those nodes and servers are going to be involved. [clears throat] And then there are also uh group projects. It's sensible that Wikipedia sets up servers both to distribute the results of its work and to uh invite people to join in and contribute. Now, when they contribute to Wikipedia, they're not doing their own computing. They're doing Wikipedia's computing.

Wikipedia is text editing and comparison and so on. So it's proper that that's being done in a Wikipedia computer. But on the other hand, when Google Docs invites a group of people to put their work in goug Google Docs so that their work is done on a computer that none of them has any control over, that shouldn't be done. That's the wrong way to set things up. [clears throat] So, we need peer-to-peer kinds of cooperation to edit things because of this fundamental rule of justice.

Your computing must be under your control rather than under somebody else's control. If it's under somebody else's control, that somebody faces an enormous temptation to meddle with you, snoop on you, cheat you, manipulate you, restrict you, and so on. [clears throat] And uh [clears throat] I think it is time now to ask for questions. Oh, but I should first urge you to please join the free software foundation. The free software foundation fights for software to be free and thus to respect the freedom of users.

Every non-free program is a temptation for somebody to mistreat you. So, we shouldn't be using non-free programs. We should replace them with free software. The Free Software Foundation mostly campaigns to make people aware of this, recruits people to join, helps people organize in in joining in this ca in this work of development and campaigning. and we need your support.

Go to fsf.org and if you buy something from the fsf.org shop, you'll notice it doesn't send any non-free JavaScript to your computer. So, questions. Uh what are you current thoughts on how to achieve sustainable economics for well this person said open source but I do not advocate open source and I never did the term this is the most important raised by this question but I'll get to the one that was asked I founded the free software movement in 1984 and we began developing the GNU operating system which later was put together with Linux the kernel to make a free software operating system.

That was in 1994. In 1998, there were a lot of people in the free software community who liked free software and even contributed, but they didn't agree with our political philosophy of freedom. So they wanted to talk about the software but distance themselves from the philosophy and encourage the philosophy to be forgotten by society. So they came up with another term open source. You'll notice it doesn't refer to freedom in the slightest.

Openness is not the same thing as freedom. uh they wrote their own definition which they borrowed from Debian of what opensource meant. Uh Debian had used it to give a different statement of what free software meant but these people gave it the name open source and they studiously avoided ever talking about freedom as what's at stake. So they presented this they focused on a method of software development and its practical advantages. So basically at the deepest level they disagree with the free software movement and if I were ever to use that term I would be campaigning against what I stand for and I won't do it.

So I all I have to say about open source is please study what free software means and think about whether you want to support that. But uh how do how should I achieve sustainable economics for free software? There are many companies and many people making money from working on free software and they can people can make enough money to live on. I know people in various companies that do or help with free software development and they're profitable. Uh I have a a close friend who's part of a web development co uh cooperative and they develop all their sites as free software and they hand the source over to the client for whom they develop the website so that the client is not a prisoner of that company.

Any web development business that fails to do this is uh taking advantage of its customers is not acting ethically at all. So [clears throat] it happens that a large fraction uh 15 years ago it was most paid software development was projects specifically to be used by the client. the client was paying to develop software that the client was going to use. Now, if the company delivers the result of its work to the client as free software, that's part of the respect that any decent company will do and that every client who who is not foolish should demand. But the client will have to pay.

Nobody's going to do this kind of special purpose work except for pay. And there's no reason why it should cost any more this way than it would if it were non-free. Somebody's Oh, you want me to finish fast? Uh-oh. Uh, so what do you think of privacy preserving solutions that have embedded compliance for sovereign stakes or institutions?

Well, that depends whether they're actually privacy preserving or not because the re the usual reason why c countries want to stick those things in is so that the system won't really protect your privacy and obviously if it's not really privacy pres protecting then it's no good. Uh then there's what are your current thoughts on Oh, okay. Uh uh the one about Argentina, it's too vague. I don't know anything about what's actually happening, if it is happening, so I can't start to think about it. Uh okay, those are all the questions that I see here now, but there may be time for a little more if anyone.

Oh well. All right. Thank you for invite inviting me for [snorts] a basic introduction to free software. Look at watch the 14minute video fsf.org/ TEDex as you saw when I when someone asked me about open source there is a lot of very important misinformation spreading around presoftware and opensource how they relate how they are different how they overlap look at gnu.

org/f /fosophy/opensourcemissesthepoint.html for a full explanation. Many people have been misinformed that uh copy left licenses are free software and uh weak permissive licenses are open source. That's false. Both kinds of licenses are accepted as free software because they all respect users freedom and both of them are accepted as open-source because they all allow the open-source development methodology.

Uh different reasons but it basically the the distinction between free software and open source is orthogonal to the distinction between these two kinds of licenses. So, uh, I'm glad to have, uh, giving you a talk that you appreciate and happy hacking. Bye. [applause]