Long-term action items

• In California, support the campaign against privacy-attacking "smart meters".

• Protect your data from government seizure without giving you a search warrant.

• Support La Quadrature du Net, and help defeat ACTA.

• US citizens: support the constitutional amendment to reenable regulation of corporations' political advertisements.

• Support Wikileaks.

• US citizens: support the Just Say Now campaign to legalize and regulate marijuana.

• US citizens: sign the petition for a real investigation of the Sep 2001 terrorist attacks.
  
  They especially seek architects and engineers, but others are welcome to sign.
• In the US: tell your senators to support the DISCLOSE act, which would require corporations to identify the political ads they fund.

  And phone them too — a phone call carries more weight. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

• Report information on the term "intellectual property"

  I am looking for volunteers to give me information for a research project: to determine when various US law schools started using the propaganda term "intellectual property" in names of classes. If you are at a university which has a law school, you could probably easily find out when it did so.

  If you have information for me, please email it to rms at gnu dot orgy minus the y.

• Support the Robin Hood Tax on speculative financial transactions.

• Citizens of India: oppose mandatory ID.

• Everyone: sign the petition for libel reform in the UK.

• EU citizens: sign the petition against software patents in Europe.

• Australians: support the blackout campaign against Internet censorship.

• Remind the religious fanatics who oppose gay marriage what they should really be fighting against: eating shrimp.

• Buy an RFID detector and start checking the products you buy.

• Support the campaign to free the Cuban five: political prisoners in the US, accused of "espionage" because they warned Cuba about the plans of US-supported anti-Castro terrorists.

  The Cuban government disrespects fundamental freedoms, but that is no excuse for the US to do likewise. At least it doesn't harbor terrorists. If the US government is serious about ending terrorism, it could start by freeing these men and prosecuting the terrorists instead.

• Answers to climate change deniers.

• Japanese citizens: sign the petition to abolish fingerprinting of visitors to Japan.

• Support the ACLU's campaign to hold the US government and its agents accountable for torture.

• Americans: add your voice to the campaign to stop global warming, at the Repower America Wall.

• In the UK, support the Open Rights Group's campaign against disconnecting Internet users for sharing files. I support this campaign because its aim is good, but the reasons it gives exemplify a common mistake: criticizing only side effects of the unjust law has the effect of granting legitimacy to its purpose, which is the unjust War on Sharing.

• How to detect corporate fronts posing as citizens' groups.

• Support I'm a photographer, not a terrorist in the UK

• US citizens: phone or write your congresscritter to oppose the "Fair Copyright in Research Works" act, proposed by the journal publishers to sabotage open access to scientific works. See http://taxpayeraccess.org/fcrwa.html.

  For more information.

  Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641, and 888-355-3588.

• Support the Appel de Blois, which calls for an end to laws that censor views on historical events.

• The fish species you should avoid eating. Either they are endangered or catching them is very destructive.

• Buy a printer which does not report your activities to the police.

• Personal ways to reduce climate change.

  We cannot assume that personal voluntary changes will suffice, so treaties and laws are needed as well.

• http://hfopi.org A project to plan a world order that would be good for people.

  Also, see the Simultaneous Policy.

• After reading this, I have a suggestion: to denounce the term "piracy" as a propaganda smear when applied to copying and sharing. (See words to avoid.)

  A crucial part of rejecting the term is never using the term yourself. Another crucial part is explaining frequently that it is propaganda, that you reject it, and that that is why you don't use it.

• Choose tap water rather than bottled water.

  (I only get bottled water in the US when I am going to take a long bus ride.)

• Sign the petition to the UN Secretary General to call on China to free the Panchen Lama, who has been a political prisoner for over a decade.
• Support the campaign for Net Neutrality. This campaign does not go far enough; it has adopted too narrow a definition of "neutrality". Net Neutrality ought to include rejecting discrimination based on what system or application the user is using.
• Support the campaign to repeal the overbroad "authorization for use of military force", adopted by a panicky congress in 2001, which gives Bush carte blanche to start wars anywhere.
• With new US passports designed insanely with an RFID, this article discusses good and bad methods for making it stop disclosing your personal information.
• Buy fair trade goods.
• Boycott Coca Cola Company for using paramilitaries to murder union organizers.
• Support the National Union of Journalists' boycott of Yahoo.
• Support Amnesty International's campaign against Internet censorship.
• Donate to Gush Shalom's campaign for food and medicine for occupied Palestine.
• Support the Identity Project, which opposes ID card requirements in the US.
• Boycott Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
• Request your Secure Flight Secret File
• Boycott Harry Potter Books
• Sign the petition to legalize peer-to-peer sharing in the US.
• Support conscientious objectors in Israel.
• Build RFID-zappers for yourself and for your friends.
• In the US and Mexico: establish butterfly gardens to help migrating monarch butterflies survive.
• Don't publish papers with the IEEE! As the IEEE rejects public-domain papers, let the public reject the IEEE. See http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html.

  It is not surprising to me that an official whose title includes the term "intellectual property rights" would act in the grasping, greedy fashion reported in that page. The term is propaganda, and interferes with clear thinking about the various disparate laws it lumps together. In general, anyone who uses the term is either trying to confuse you, or confused himself.

• Get even for 9/11: support gay marriage!

  People will say, "That makes no sense--what does one have to do with the other?" Which provides a chance to explain:

  We don't know who the perpetrators are--perhaps Muslim fanatics, perhaps Christian fanatics (in the Bush regime), perhaps both. It is tricky to get even with people when you can't identify them. How can we do it in this case?

  Both of those groups hate gays and oppose gay rights. Thus, supporting gay marriage offers us a way we can be sure to make the perpetrators miserable, whoever they were.

• There is a boycott of Caterpillar--the company that makes the bulldozers Israel uses to knock down Palestinian homes.
• US voters, support Kucinich's campaign to create a Department of Peace which would encourage nonviolent solutions to international problems.
• In France, people are vowing to boycott the record companies due to the laws that they are lobbying for.
• Evidence of wide-ranging and persistent FBI misconduct, including sheltering murderers, shows that other instances of alleged FBI misconduct, such as the fabricated evidence against Leonard Peltier, deserve fresh investigations. Sign this petition.
• US citizens: you can sign your name to the campaign to repeal part of the U.S.A. P.A.T. R.I.O.T. Act. This would make the police once again have to get search warrants before they can get information from bookstores or libraries about what you have read or borrowed.

  This is a step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough. The PAT RIOT act was extended in December 2003 to give the police equally easy access to many kinds of transaction records about you. The PAT RIOT act attacks your freedom in other ways, too. See http://www.aclu.org/safefree/.

• Israelis who refuse military service in the occupation of Palestine have trouble supporting their families. Yesh Gvul is asking for donations of funds to help these families. (The idea is that this will help more people decide to refuse.)
• Support the call for a Nobel Prize in Sustainable Development.
• Citizens of Europe: sign the resolution that demands a voter-verifiable audit trail for electronic voting machines.
• Please sign the petition against unsafe computerization of elections and careless purging of voter lists.
• Support federal medical marijuana legislation.

Political Articles

This is a list of my political articles that are not related to the GNU Project. For GNU-related articles, see the GNU philosophy directory. You can also order copies of my book, 'Free Software, Free Society', signed or not signed.

• Protect Your Friends — Protect Julian Assange (Jan 2011).

• Global Patronage: This describes the Global Patronage system of supporting artists on the Internet. Francis Muguet and I were working on it together at the time of his death in September 2009. He sent me a draft for version 1.2.1, and I responded with this modified version which I call 1.3. The principal change was to describe correctly what sort of function would be used to calculate the shares of the non-attributed funds. I did not expect him to have any objections, but he died before responding. (French Translation)

• Kettling Wikileaks: the Anonymous protests are the Internet equivalent of protests on the street. (Spanish Translation and Norwegian Translation)
• Internet Sharing License in Brazil. Internet taxa de licença para o compartilhamento (Portuguese version). Spanish translation. Also see compartilhamentolegal.org.
• Responding to Beggars
• UK extreme pornography law.
• Response to the climate change email leak.
• End the War on Sharing (Spanish translation).
• The Zeitgeist Movement
• A letter to Costa Rica (about the referendum on the proposed sweatshop treaty with the US).
• An interview about the Steamed Bread Murder Case and what it implies about right and wrong and copyright. (This is the English version--it was also published in Chinese.)
• A letter on the Animal Rights movement.
• A response to Financial Times article on "intellectual property rights".
• The Conundrum of the Bush Forces Soldier
• Here are my responses to the consultation in this link. They might interest some readers.
• Here's a recording of a radio show that I was on.
• The Knife- Stupid Airport Security Tricks
• What Should the US do in Iraq?
• Biopiracy or Bioprivateering?
• The states need to form a union.
• A slightly revised version of an article that appeared in Salon Magazine on 11 September 2002.
• Dear President Musharraf...
• On July 22, Israel killed a Hamas leader, Salah Shaheda, who was in charge of many Hamas attacks.
• Is the US killing many Afghan civilians to save one US soldier?
• Political fencing in Israel.
• I got a message with a series of points criticizing Americans for blaming companies and institutions rather than themselves. I partly agree with the underlying message that people should take charge and solve problems, rather than just cast blame on others. However, the points go too far--they whitewash companies and institutions that really did something wrong.
• British book publishers plan to put a microchip into every book to record who owns it -- an unprecedented surveillance measure. Given the publishers' opposition to such institutions as free lending libraries and used book stores, we must suspect that this scheme is aimed at them. Will they try to collect a fee every time a used book is resold, as part of storing the new owner's name on the chip?
• Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. I was shocked to learn recently that there is no border fence dividing Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories. The reason is that expansionists want to annex these territories permanently. In their eyes, a fence would be an admission that those territories are not part of Israel, so they won't allow it.
• When President Chavez of Venezuela was ousted in a military coup, newspaper coverage in the US hinted that Chavez was mentally unstable. He thought he could make his country independent of the IMF. He thought that the generals of his Venezuela would be loyal to Venezuela instead of Washington. A man would have to be crazy to believe such things--or would he?
• When police say "No witnesses", one must suspect they are up to some kind of dirty work that they don't want to admit to the public. An encounter in a Paris airport.
• Human Rights in the US, and in China. The Chinese government has released a report detailing human rights violations in the US. The abuses include torture of detainees by police, sometimes resulting in death. All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights; from Bolivia to Spain, from the US to China, no government should escape.
• Someone to watch over me. Nowadays, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you aren't really under surveillance.
• Stopping terrorists before they start. Making sure that the CIA does not create new enemies to attack us tomorrow surely deserves high priority in any sincere "War on Terrorism".
• Bush has proposed a large increase in military spending, including pay raises for soldiers, reserves to cover the expenses of possible combat, unmanned vehicles, and ballistic missile defense. Some of these make sense, more or less -- but ballistic missile defense? It's clear what is happening here: Bush is at his old tricks.
• The Injustice of Military Courts. Bush has a plan to try alleged terrorists in military courts---courts where the prosecutor, the defense lawyer, and the judges all work for Bush. If we could only be sure that the accused are really guilty, shoddy trials would not matter--we wouldn't need trials at all. But accusations against innocent people happen with terrible regularity, and the danger of false convictions is immense.
• Police State Minus One Day And Counting. In late October Congress signed an anti-terrorism bill that undermined basic protections against police intrusion. It also attacks freedom of assembly. This article was originally published on Newsforge the day before the bill (S.1510) was passed. The only proposed provision that Congress rejected was that for indefinite detention of noncitizens without trial; Bush then proposed military trials as a way to get the same job done.
• Who watches the watchmen? Whenever police ask to be allowed to bypass search warrants, we must be on guard. First published on Newsforge.
• If we are not careful, the deadly attacks on New York and Washington will lead to far worse secondary damage, if the U.S. Congress adopts "preventive measures" that take away the freedom that America stands for. Thousands are dead -- but millions could be deprived of civil liberties. First published on Newsforge.
• While traveling from South Africa to Sweden in June, I became a victim of the War on Drugs. First published on Newsforge.
• Science must "push copyright aside." Written for a debate about electronic access to scientific literature. First published 8 June 2001.
• The antidemocratic suppression of public protest is now a standard part of the effort to impose antidemocratic trade treaties.
• Waiting for the Knock, an article about Britain's plans for secret police raids to seize decryption keys. First published in the Guardian (London), 25 November 1999.

  Sad to say, this law was adopted in Britain in July 2000. Residents of the UK must now start using steganography to protect themselves from secret raids.

• Although generally supportive of President Hugo Chávez, Stallman has criticised some policies on television broadcasting, free speech rights, and personal privacy rights, in meetings with Chávez and in public speeches in Venezuela.

Political notes

"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an associate, 1849

Here are notes about various issues I care about, usually with links to more information. The first file is the current one; go there to see the latest notes.

[ Current (2010 November - February) | 2010 July - October | 2010 March - June | 2009 November - February 2009 July - October | 2009 March - June | 2008 November - February | 2008 July - October | 2008 March - June | 2007 November - February | 2007 July - October | 2007 March - June | 2006 November - February | 2006 July - October | 2006 March - June | 2005 November - February | 2005 July - October | 2005 March - June | 2004 November - February | 2004 July - October | 2004 March - June | 2004 January - April | 2003 November - February | 2003 September - December | 2003 May - August | 2003 January - April | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 ]

Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being archived on their own page

Travel experiences

• Richard Stallman's travel blog
• My visit to Machu Picchu
• Stories about visits to Tikal and Greece

Photos about my travels

• Photos of me working on my laptop at various places
• Photos from some of my trips
• OSCON
• More Photos from OSCON
• my visit to Switzerland in May 2003 (and the same photos at the original photographer's site.)
• Some pictures from Vaasa where I slipped on icy ground in the airport, broke my elbow, and gave my speech by telephone from the hospital bed
• my trips to Greece
• In Singapore in March 2001, a lovely parrot (50k jpeg) became enamored of me, while others enjoyed my recorder playing (91k jpeg)
• my visit to China in May/June 2000. I also visited Tibet unawares, because nobody told me that JiuZhaiGou was part of Tibetan territory annexed by China since the conquest
• my visit to Brazil: some from Rio de Janeiro and some from Porto Alegre where the Software Livre 2000 event was held.
• my trip to Slovenia

Scientific Links

• Homeopathy debunked, and thoroughly, as pseudoscience.

a Serious Bio

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also uses the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. However, the distributors of these systems often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important.

That is why, since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Stallman gives speeches frequently about free software and related topics. Common speech titles include "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software movement", "The Dangers of Software Patents", and "Copyright and Community in the Age of the Computer Networks". A fourth common topic consists of explaining the changes in version 3 of the GNU General Public License, which was released in June 2007.

In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles.

After personal meetings, Stallman has obtained positive statements about free software from the then-President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, from French 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, and from the president of Ecuador Rafael Correa. In Venezuela, Stallman has promoted the adoption of free software in the state's oil company (PDVSA), in municipal government, and in the nation's military.

Stallman's writings on free software issues can be found in Free Software, Free Society (GNU Press, ISBN 1-882114-98-1). He has received the following awards:

• 1986: Honorary life time membership in the Chalmers Computer Society
• 1990: Receives a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
• 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)."
• 1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology
• 1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award
• 1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award
• 2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being
• 2001: Honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow
• 2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership
• 2003: Honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
• 2004: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Salta, in Argentina
• 2004: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Peú
• 2005: Fundazione Pistoletto prize
• 2007: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in Peru
• 2007: First Premio Iternacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre
• 2007: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote, in Peru
• 2007: Honorary doctorate from the University of Pavia
• 2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru
• 2009: Honorary doctor of science degree from Lakehead University in Canada

Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.

Richard Stallman's 1983 biography

(this biography was published in the first edition of "The Hacker's Dictionary".)

I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically get paid for doing the last one. About a year ago i split up with the PDP-10 computer to which I was married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world is taking us in different directions. For the moment I still live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our old memories. "Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me "rms".

(jpeg 2k) (jpeg 64k) There is a black-and-white photograph of me as a 5820K Encapsulated Postscript file, a 3762K JPEG file, and a 5815K TIFF file.

Here is a color photo in JPEG format.

Curiosities

• Sometimes people write asking questions about how I use software. Here is some info on my computer use
• People also sometimes ask about my musical tastes as similar things. Some info on that is on this page.
• Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor

Photos and drawings

"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul."

-Mahatma Gandhi

A photo taken by Bill Ebbesen at the Danish Technical University on 2007/03/31. It is free to use and redistribute (placed in the public domain worldwide by the original copyright holder).

Photos from Copyright vs. Community event, Jan 31, 2008.

A photo of RMS with a large "aureole" by Roberto Brenlla.

An imaginative painting of Richard Stallman, by Jin Wicked.

Another drawing of me, by Banlu Kemiyatorn.

Some humor

I like computers, music and butterflies---among other things.

Here I am wearing my "power tie".

Here I am struggling to open a bottle of water.

My application to an Ex Boyfriends List

What Republicans Believe.

I am also a saint, in the Church of Emacs--Saint IGNUcius. The Church of Emacs will soon be officially listed by at least one person as his religion for census purposes.

There are no godfathers in the Church of Emacs, since there are no gods, but you can be someone's editorfather.

Here are my funny poetry and song parodies and some puns.

Stallman Does Dallas: "I have to warn you that Texans have been known to have an adverse reaction to my personality . . . "

The Dalai Lama today announced the official release of Yellow Hat GNU/Linux.

I found A funny song about the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act (officially the Sonny Bono Copyright Act) which extended copyright retroactively by 20 years on works made as early as the 1920s.

If you are a geek and read Spanish, you will love Raulito el Friki, who said "Hello, world!" immediately after he was born. Here's an archive of this now-defunct comic strip.

My Puns in Spanish

Linguistic Swifties

Fiction

A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering (in Portuguese, Farsi, Spanish, and Armenian).

Non-Political Articles

On Hacking: In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".

My Childhood Sweetheart

Links

• Israel is gradually eliminating human rights in order to crush nonviolent political opposition to its apartheid-style policies. Look here for more information.
• John Sundman has published some science fiction novels under CC by-nd-nc. I read one, Acts of the Apostles, and liked it.
• Reports on legal resistance to the record companies' lawsuits against music fans.
• Full Frontal Scrutiny exposes phony "consumer groups" funded by business.
• Courtney Love explains how the record companies are the real ``music pirates'' — and also why you should not refer to artistic works as ``content''. (However, she used the term ``intellectual property'' which is propaganda for those same record companies; see the explanation.
• xenu.net has copious information about the Church of Scientology. exscientologykids.com provides advice to children that want to leave the church, including statements by former members.
• Copwatch.org: A database of citizen complaints against police.
• The Fully Informed Juror Association: what the judge won't tell you if you are on a jury.
• Verified Voting pushes to make sure voting machines in the US are not vulnerable to massive centralized computerized fraud.
• WDM's campaigns tackle the root causes of poverty--the policies of governments and business that keep people poor.
• Information on DNA profiling and the risk of false matches.
• Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
• Patriotic Posters.
• MoveOn, with over a million US members, works to defend world peace, human rights, democracy and the environment from the man who stole the US presidency.
• Advice for consumers on how to resist being influenced by advertising.
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State respect the right of all people to practice religion as they please without government interference.
• http://d.webring.com/hub?ring=stop_abuse: a webring for sites presenting tangible facts about human rights abuse, lack of enforcement, selective enforcement, abuse of power by executive or judicial branches, abuse of power by religious authorities, waste of natural resources, pollution, disinformation, discrimination, covering-up fraud or dangerous experiments, government corruption and sites proposing practical ways to improve the situation.
• www.mpp.org: the Marijuana Policy Project focuses on "removing criminal penalties for marijuana use, with a particular emphasis on making marijuana medically available to seriously ill people."
• FAIR - the media watch group uses painstaking and careful statistics to document the bias of the mainstream media.
• WhiteHouseForSale.org tracks Dubya's fund-raising.

Thanks

I would like to thank:

• Positive Internet for sponsoring this web site.
• Victor Cortiano, Mark Eriksen, William Demchick, and John C. Vernaleo for installing new text.
• Mark Eriksen for providing the new search feature.
• Craig Metrolis for working on making pages valid html.
• Keith Goodman for typo corrects and proofing.
• John C. Vernaleo for helping to run the site.
• Graziano Sorbaioli for improving the layout of the main page.

Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.
Verbatim copying and redistribution of any of the photos in the photos subdirectory is permitted under the Creative Commons Noderivs license version 3.0 or later. You can copy and redistribute the photo of me playing music to the butterfly under the Creative Commons Noderivs Nocommercial license version 3.0 or later. Any other photos of me in this (the toplevel) directory may be copied and redistributed under the Creative Commons Noderivs license version 3.0 or later.