Free Software and Education--Richard Stallman Speech from September 2005 in Taipei City, Taiwan

This speech on Free Software and education by Richard Stallman took place in Taipei City, Taiwan in September of 2005. It is in the form of an interview, where he is asked questions and an interpreter repeats in Chinese, so, although it is 40 minutes long, Mr. Stallman's part is finished roughly at the 16:15 mark.

After talking a little about the early history of the GNU project and some of the reasons he started it and the complementary Free Software Movement, like the fact that he thought it would be more effective for him to start developing an operating system rather than try to change laws about proprietary software, because he was already an accomplished systems developer and had little experience in politics. He also tells the story of how the kernel, Linux, became a part of the GNU operating system. Then he talks a little about how users lost sight of the importance of freedom and focused more on the fact that the GNU operating was technically superior to the proprietary systems being offered by large multi-national corporations, before launching into the topic of how Free Software fits into the education ecosystem.

His thesis is that schools must use Free Software and he gives four reasons why that's imperative. He also talks about how large companies giving gratis copies of their software to schools is like drug dealers offering schools free drugs to give to the kids. It's just a way of hooking students on their inferior software. He also talks a little about his experience as an employee of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab and how the fact that they had their own "in-house" Free Software operating system and how that influenced him.

By: Richard Stallman
Date: September 2005
Location: Sina.com, Taipei City, Taiwan
Language: English
Duration: 40min

Copyright © 2005 Richard Stallman
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 3.0 (CC BY-ND 3.0)