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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
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