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political notes and news items.
This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
the Free Software Foundation or
the GNU Project.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I am looking for volunteers to occasionally examine programs, web services, or hardware, and report to me about the freedom implications of them. If you would like to help me in this way, please write to rms at gnu dot o r g.
I'm looking for people to experiment with good ways to attach fruits to a Grav-mass tree. If you can, please send the results to rms at gnu dot org.
I'm looking for someone to monitor web sites for news articles I might be interested in. If you want to do this, please write to rms at gnu dot org.
I'm looking for someone to write site-specific Firefox extensions to operate specific web sites. Please email rms at the gnu site if you want to volunteer.
I'm looking for someone to write scripts to do certain operations on certain specific web sites. Please email rms at the gnu site if you want to volunteer.
I am making a list of the photos people like best, among those I have taken and posted here. Please look in the Photos directory and email rms at gnu period org with the URLs of your favorites. Please give the path to the full size image and not the web page the image resides in. No more than three photos per person please.
US citizens: call on the Senate to resist the NRA and approve Vivek Murthy as Surgeon General.
US citizens: call on Congress and Obama to limit US war in Syria and Iraq.
US citizens: call on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to protect coral and sponge habitat in the Bering Sea.
Everyone: tell GoFundMe to allow requests for funds for abortions. Abortion is not like terrorism, violence or addictive drugs.
US citizens: call on the Pentagon to stop distributing military hardware to thug departments in the US.
US citizens: tell Holder, send a bankster to jail before you leave office.
Everyone: call on giant fast food companies to stop using palm oil from farms created by destroying forests and peat swamps.
Everyone: write to the political leaders of Iran on behalf of Ghoncheh Ghavami, an Iranian woman threatened with dying in prison because she wanted to watch a sports match.
US citizens: Call for an investigation of submissive bank regulators that don't dare enforce regulations on Goldman Sachs.
US citizens: call on the USDA to require labeling of food containing ammonia-treated meat, "pink slime".
US citizens: call on the other Democratic FCC commissioners to support network neutrality.
US citizens: call on Congress to impeach judge Fuller.
Everyone: Participate in the Global Frackdown on Oct 11.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
See the current pol-notes page for more.
(You may need to scroll down for more text if there is blank space in this column.)
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth) to express your rejection of Facebook.
Non-oppressive Commercial E-books
Facebook's face recognition demonstrates a threat to everyone's privacy. I therefore ask people not to put photos of me on Facebook; you can do likewise.
Of course, Facebook is bad for many other reasons as well.
I'd like to make a list of countries that do not require a national identity card, and have no plans to adopt one. If you live in or have confirmed knowledge of such a country, please send email to rms at gnu.org.
Here's my list of countries with no national ID cards and no plans for one: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, the Philippines. Australia's previous government tried to institute national ID cards, but the Labor government dropped the plan.
India is now trying to institute national ID cards. Support the campaign against them.
Austria doesn't require people to have a national ID card, but requires people to notify the police of where they are staying even for 3 days.
Switzerland has national ID cards which are optional, but they or some other government ID card are needed for some purposes.
Denmark and Iceland don't have ID cards as such, but they have ID numbers that citizens are forced to use frequently. For example, in Iceland the national ID number is often required to rent a video or use a gym.
Wikipedia has a list of identity card policies by country.
Stay away from certain countries because of their bad immigration policies.
Avoid flight connections in these airports because of their treatment of passengers.
People often ask how I manage to continue devoting myself to progressive activism (such as the free software movement) for years without burning out. The best way I can answer is by recommending a book, The Lifelong Activist by Hillary Rettig.
I disagree with the book on one theoretical point in the last part of the book: we shouldn't think of political activism as being marketing and sales, because those terms refer to business, and politics is something much more important than mere business. However, this doesn't diminish the value of the book's practical advice about borrowing techniques from marketing and sales.
Disclosure: I am friends with the author.
The Mimi and Eunice book by Nina Paley is great.
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
These are my political articles that are not related to the GNU operating system or free software. For GNU-related articles, see the GNU philosophy directory. You can also order copies of my book, 'Free Software, Free Society, 2nd edition', signed or not signed.
Regarding Mark Vernon's attack on Peter Singer's philosophy. (May 2011)
How Egypt can help Libya. (Feb 2011)
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)
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.
"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 current notes are
here. For all previous
notes, see this page.
Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being archived on their own page
(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.
"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 of a painting of me.
A drawing of me.
A photo of me, in Svalbard, wearing a snowmobile suit. Taken by Håkon Wium Lie, released under CC BY.
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 from a recent interview.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.
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española.
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
Here I am struggling to open a bottle of water.
My application to an join Marian Henley's Ex Boyfriends List
My funny poetry and song parodies
New song (10/2013) - Poppycock
My Puns in English (New pun September 2014).
My Puns in Spanish (New pun, 10/2013)
My Puns in French (New puns 07/2014)
My Puns in Italian (New 09/2014)
Linguistic Swifties (Now with: Wintu, Penutian, Cochiti, Taos, and Towa.)
--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.
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.
Sleeping with Stallman at MIT.
ESR's favorite programming language: Objectivist C.
The huns and the writs. I don't know who wrote this, but I hope he does not object to sharing it here.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering (in Portuguese, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, French, and Italian).
Made for You (December 2012) (local copy)
My books on the Philosophy of Software Freedom, available from the GNU Press.
Quantum Theory and Abortion Rights
A proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both speech and writing.
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".
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
I would like to thank:
Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.
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Richard Stallman
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