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1. What is your role in the FSF Foundation?
I am the president of the FSF; I have been its president ever since it was founded in October 1985 (about 20 months after the start
of the GNU Project).
2. Could you please explain the term, free, as spoken by GPL? (you can give
hints for programmers how they can get money from their work although they give source code for free)
Free software is a matter of freedom, not price. It means that everyone has the freedom to change and redistribute the
software -- in effect, to use it as part of a community where people have freedom and
are encouraged to cooperate and help each other.
The best way for non-programmers to understand why this is important is by comparing programs with recipes for cooking. This is a good
analogy because a recipe, like a program, is a series of steps that you
carry out in order to produce a result.
People who cook often make copies of recipes for their friends. And people who cook also often change
recipes -- you don't have to cook the dish exactly as the recipe says if you think a different method would
make it taste better for you. And if you have changed a recipe and cooked it for your friends, and they like to eat the dish, they
might ask you for the recipe. Then you might write down your version
and give them copies.
So imagine a world where you cannot change a recipe -- you can only cook it exactly as someone else wrote it. And imagine that if you share a
recipe with a friend you get called a "pirate" and imprisoned for
years. That would be an outrage! Fortunately, nobody tries to do that as regards recipes. But the world of non-free software is just
like that. It is an outrage.
To say that a program is free software says nothing whatsoever about who is or is not paid to work on it. That is a separate question. In
the 1980s, most people who worked on free software did so as unpaid
volunteers, aside from the FSF staff and a few university projects. Now some people have found ways to get paid in connection with their
work on free software -- but I think that most of the work is still done
by volunteers.
When you write about free software in Turkish, please translate "free" as a word that refers to freedom and never to
price -- if you have one. (In English, we use the imperfect word "free" because there is no
everyday word in English that means "free as in freedom" only. It is a gap in the language.)
The GNU GPL is not the only license that makes a program free software. There are other free software licenses; see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html for a list of some of
them.
3. How and when did all this begin? What made you think that all software
must be **free**?
I had the experience of living the free software way of life as part of a community of programmers that I belonged to in the 1970s. In the
early 80s this community came to an end, and I was faced with the
prospect of life as part of the developers of an ugly social system, the social system of proprietary (non-free) software, which and keeps
users helpless and divided and labels cooperation as "piracy".
I rejected that way of life and decided that the only way I could feel proud of my work was to dedicate it to promoting freedom and
cooperation.
4. How do you get paid? Did you ever write a proprietary software?
Nowadays I get paid mainly for giving speeches, but in the 1980s I got paid mainly for writing extensions to free software and teaching
classes about it.
I wrote some software in the early 1980s while working at MIT that was released as proprietary software. It was part of the MIT Lisp Machine
system. This experience helped convinced me to leave MIT and start
the GNU Project, and also suggested to me that I should quit my MIT job in order to do that.
5. Which applications are you currently and used to be working on?
The programs I wrote for the GNU system include GNU Emacs (the extensible text editor), GCC (the C compiler), GDB (the symbolic
debugger), GNU ld (but that version was totally rewritten), GNU sort,
Texinfo, and some other smaller programs.
Nowadays, I no longer have time to program. I spend all my time on activities to promote the GNU Project overall and the ideas of free
software, because that seems more important now than writing programs
(even though writing programs is in some ways more fun).
6. What is your favorite tool? Is there a process you follow when you code?
I look for some part of the program that I can see how to write, and I write it. Having written that, I usually see how to write some other
part, so I write that. This process continues until I have written it
all.
While doing this, I pay a lot of attention to designing the data structures and to documenting them well. If the data structures are
right, the code is usually easy. If some part of the code is really hard to write, often some of the data structure needs to be redesigned.
7. How do you see GNU, Linux, Hurd and yourself 5 years from now?
I don't know -- various outcomes are possible, depending on what other people do.
For instance, software patents could kill all of our work if we do not reject that form of legal impediment. There is right now a political
battle in Europe to reject software patents.
If we succeed in defeating software patents, some version of the GNU system might perhaps be as universal in five years as Windows is
today. But the next question will be: is this version a free system,
or will it include non-free programs that prohibit cooperation? Today, most of the distributors of the GNU/Linux system add non-free
programs to the system, which means that the system as a whole does
not entirely respect your freedom. If the community continues to accept this, the goal of freedom and cooperation could be forgotten.
8. Do you think GNU/Linux should remain as a server system or do you
support efforts like KDE, Kylix, GNOME, Open Office?
GNU was never designed to be a "server system". In 1984, I had already written a couple of window systems in my work at MIT, and I
decided that GNU should have a window system. Later in the 1980s I
decided to adopt X11 as the low (general-purpose) level of the window system for the GNU system, but we still needed to implement
higher-level features such as drag-and-drop and a directory browser.
In other words, we needed a "desktop".
Our first attempt to develop a desktop was started in 1990 (before Linux was started). This attempt was abortive, though. Our second
attempt was in 1994 or 1995, and resulted in the development of Guile,
which we planned to use as an important mechanism for the desktop. Our third attempt, GNOME, finally succeeded.
GNOME, Open Office, and KDE, are all free software and can contribute to the extension of the GNU system into the desktop area.
My understanding is that Kylix is not free software (correct me if I am wrong), although I think its libraries are going to be available as
free software. If you want to write a free program that can be used
and developed within the Free World, you must make sure it can run and developed using only the free libraries and free development tools
that are available.
The worst example of the danger of non-free libraries and tools is in the area of Java. Many programmers who like free software are seduced
by the exciting Java language and use non-free Sun libraries and
non-free Sun tools without even thinking about what they are doing. The result is that they write free programs which cannot be used in a
free operating system.
Don't make that mistake yourself: before you write a Java program, check the platform you plan to use, and don't use Sun's tools or Sun's
libraries.
9. Could you please tell some about your private life? (status, children,
education, music, philosophy, food, homestyle...)
I am not sure what "status" refers to. I have never paid a lot of attention to seeking status in my life.
My only child is the Free Software Movement, which is now almost 17 years
old -- as you know, a very vulnerable age. Lately it is starting to hang around with an unprincipled crowd, the Open Source Movement.
As a result, I am concerned that it might be led into various forms of delinquency, such as adding non-free software to the system.
I studied physics and mathematics at Harvard, all the while learning operating system programming by doing it at MIT. But I also studied a
few unusual subjects, such as Chinese and ancient history of the near east (*ending* around 500bc).
By the time I graduated I was gradually losing interest in trying to be a
physicist -- programming was more exciting, since I could write something every day that was actually useful. So I switched to
programming entirely. But I am still very curious about physics, since it studies the fundamental nature and origin of the universe.
I like many kinds of music from many countries, including Turkish folk dance music, as well as that of neighboring countries such as Greece,
Bulgaria and Armenia. (Turkish and Armenian musicians had a very
close relationship, in Ottoman times, until the relationship between the two peoples reached its tragic end.) I have also sometimes liked
Turkish classical music.
I really enjoy delicious food; it is one of the great pleasures of my life. (I write this while munching on a crispy flaky croissant, in
Paris.) In Turkey I especially enjoyed the little peppers stuffed with rice, and ezo gelin soup. Alas I have not found that soup in
Turkish restaurants in other countries. (By the way, who was Ezo, and how did the soup get named after her?)
As for philosophy, I am a Secular Humanist. There is no scientific evidence for any sort of gods, so I do not believe in any. But even
if there did exist a superhumanly powerful being or beings, nothing would guarantee that they are morally good or that their commands are
morally right. A god could be simply the greatest dictator of all.
We want the world to be a good place. Since we cannot rely on anyone else to do this for us, in any case not in our
lifetimes, the job is up to us. We have to do our best to make the world better (after we
figure out what is "better"). GNU is the way I have found to do this. The problem GNU addresses is not the world's most important problem,
but I don't know how to solve the bigger problems. By working on GNU, I am trying to make things better in the way I know how.
10. Do you have a message for Turkish GNU users?
Many people switch to the GNU/Linux system because it is powerful, reliable, "cool", or available cheap. It is good that the system has
those advantages, but we should not get so absorbed in practical
advantages that we forget the most important advantage: free software respects our freedom; free software allows us to cooperate. Free
software encourages a good society where people help each other;
proprietary software imposes an ugly divided one where people are helpless.
Don't be absorbed in technology and forget about society.
Umut
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