Free Software Free Society, 2nd Edition

English language

Published Dec. 27, 2010

ISBN:
978-0-9831592-0-9
Copied ISBN!

View on Inventaire

Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman is a collection of writings (mostly essays, with occasional articles, interviews and speech transcripts) by Richard Stallman. It introduces the subject of history and development of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, explains authors philosophical position on Free Software movement, deals with the topics of software ethics, copyright and patent laws, as well as business practices in application to computer software. The author proposes Free software licenses (mostly GPL) as a solution to social issues created by proprietary software and described in essays. The introduction is written by Lawrence Lessig, professor at Harvard Law School. The book is available online allowing verbatim (without making changes) copying and distribution of the whole collection, while each essay is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International License.

1 edition

While I cannot agree with his recommendation of a "software development tax" where the government could potentially pay the salary of free software developers, everything esle in here is fantastic. returnreturnHis many arguments, even the one I disagreed with, are well thought out and well written. He makes the case not only for the development community but for the community of the whole. We are loosing our rights everyday to restrictive end user license agreements (EULA) Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and the like from Governmetns, the media, and corporations. We need to be teh residence. The more of our life is tied to computers the less it matters who controls the state and the more it matters who controls our computers. returnreturnreturnThis collection is a few years old, and misses some of the developments like Android/Linux and Microsoft joining the Linux foundation, which make me fearful that the open source …