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+<!-- pubdate: 20090227 -->
+<!-- author: V. Sasi Kumar -->
+
+# Liberating cyberspace - Interview with Richard M. Stallman, founder, Free Software Foundation, FRONTLINE
+
+Richard Mathew Stallman needs no introduction to the reading public in
+India. He has visited India several times during the last eight years
+or so, and has given lectures in many parts of the country. He started
+the GNU1 project in September 1983 to create software that gives users
+the freedom to use, share, modify and redistribute. Though he was
+alone in this task at the beginning, today there are tens of thousands
+of programmers world-wide helping to create such software. The GNU
+project has inspired a large number of projects for creating Free
+Software, and has led to the development of a wide variety of ap-
+plications from text editors to office suites, browsers, email
+clients, audio and video editors and even 3D animation tools. And this
+is beginning to challenge large companies that create proprietary
+software. GNU/Linux, formed from the kernel (core) Linux developed
+initially by Linus Torvalds and tools like compilers, editors,
+etc. developed under the GNU project, is the most popular Free
+Operating System and this is being increasingly adopted by
+governmental and other agencies in many developed and developing
+countries. In India, Free Software has been mandated for government
+purposes by the Government of Kerala in its ICT policy, and has become
+part of the syllabus of state schools. Several organisations in the
+country use Free Software, including LIC and Tamil Nadu’s ELCOT.
+
+Stallman also developed the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), under
+which most Free Software is published, the Free Documentation Licence
+for software documentation and the Lesser GPL for certain types of
+software. In 1984, he left his job in the Artificial Intelligence Lab
+of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fearing that the
+Institute may demand the copyright for his work. In 1985, he started
+the Free Software Foundation in Boston, USA, to promote Free
+Software. Today, it has its sister organisations in In- dia, Europe
+and Latin America. The philosophy of Free Software has led to
+movements to free various kinds of information from the severe
+restrictions imposed by copyright laws. These include Wikipedia
+(<http://wikipedia.org>), Creative Commons
+(<http://www.creativecommons.org>) and the Open Access movement in
+scientific publication (<http://soros.org/openaccess>). The new
+culture of co-operative production of goods of value, though the goods
+are vir- tual, is leading people to explore the possibility of an
+economy where production will increasingly become ‘peer-to-peer’ and
+could take over completely from the capitalist mode of production
+eventually.
+
+Stallman was in India recently to participate in the International
+Free Software Free Society conference at Thiruvananthapuram in
+December 2008. This interview was done through email after his return.
+
+**Question**: Twenty five years after you launched the GNU project,
+how do you see the progress it has made? What do you feel about its
+achievements and failures?
+
+**Stallman**: The GNU Project has succeeded – we developed the free
+GNU operating system and made it work well enough for millions to
+use. Of course, not every specific programming project that we
+undertook was a success, but the overall project succeeded. It
+succeeded so well that it has inspired thousands of other projects to
+develop and release free software, which is why a GNU/Linux system
+distro today usually contains thousands of application programs.
+
+However, the GNU Project was just the beginning of the free software
+movement’s mission. Our mission is the liberation of cyberspace. That
+won’t be finished until proprietary software disappears and all
+computer users are free. [Read More (archived)][artcl].
+
+[artcl]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110308110501/http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2604/stories/20090227260408500.htm