Codendi Blog

Richard Matthew Stallman defines the free software by those 3 words :

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (In french in the text: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” which is the national motto of France). Present in Grenoble on Thursday, January 19th, without paper and in a fluent French, he presented the philosophy and the issue of the free software. Notice that Stallman is the free software father, founder of the GNU project and an outstanding evangelist of his philosophy. Evangelist is the right word:

he doesn’t hesitate to caricature his personality wearing monastic scapular and halo to close his show.

Therefore, during around two hours, Richard Stallman gave us his famous three words definition of the free software, defined the 4 fundamental freedoms (freedom to use the software, freedom to study the source code, freedom to redistribute copies, freedom to improve the program), explained how the proprietary software (sorry, user-subjugating

software!) are evil and addressed related issues like GNU/Linux, Hadopi or the free software at school. At the end, Richard Stallman presented himself as Saint IGNUcius and the guru accepted to answer the public questions.

Codendi, as a free software, had to be present at this talk. A reminder of the fundamentals by such a man of principles could not be a bad thing and allows us to strengthen our vision of the software evolution.

Have you participated to the conference? What are your thoughts about it?

PS: You can find some videos of his talk (FR) on the web.