
Richard Stallman – "Free Software and Your Freedom" (Beijing, China) - drydot
http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140517-beijing
======
danford
Unfortunately too many people just give you a blank stare when you mention
that 100 years from now we'll be printing up everything we can't augment.
We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize'
copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories
in the future? Just go with whatever laws the corporations come up with? Are
we going to continue to deprive children of software knowledge so that they're
dependent on downloading worthless digital copies of closed source code with
who knows what coded into it? Thing is once everyone can code, free and open-
source digital goods will undoubtedly prevail.

~~~
general_failure
Everyone can code is a pipe dream. It requires high skill and specialization.

It's like saying all of us can at some point make cars, houses, electricity
and so on.

~~~
lwhalen
I disagree. Others have said (much more eloquently than I) that software is
the new literacy. In a hundred years, I believe someone who can't at least
read code will be at a disadvantage similar to someone who can't read English
today.

~~~
teacup50
Literacy is not the same thing as the ability and interest necessary to write
a novel.

~~~
danford
But it is the ability to read and (for the most part) understand that novel,
which is important. There are definitely more books (and things in general)
being written in the age of literacy than there was before.

------
mark_l_watson
This is one of Richard's recurring topics, and I agree with matt__rose and
higherpurpose that there is some irony since China, along with a few other
countries like the USA, Iran, Russia, could do with a more free and open
internet. The Internet should be basic infrastructure, inexpensive, and very
secure. That is the goal.

I know I have the minority opinion, but I believe that a FSF world is the way
go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open
source, and an unfettered Internet will have long term advantages.

Edit: typo

~~~
dengnan
free/open Internet in China? No way!

\- You do not have choice of service providers. All providers are government
department and there's nearly no competition.

\- Try to use Google in China, lots of fun!

\- Try to access any popular web site in China like Youtube, facebook, etc.
Good luck.

\- If you say something bad about the government on Internet, you may have the
risk of being kidnapped by some unknown person and thrown into some unknown
mountain area. (No kidding, one of my friend had this experience.)

Specific to RMS: I'm the translator of Free as in Freedom (Chinese edition.)
Until now, I have no idea if the word "free" (自由) could appear in the title
when we publish it.

Edit 1: grammar

~~~
schoen
I think the parent commenter was agreeing with you. The English idiom "could
do with" (which I think is somewhat uncommon in California, where I live)
means something like "could benefit from", "still needs", or "would like". It
suggests that someone doesn't yet have the thing that they "could do with",
but that it would be good if they did, at least from the speaker's
perspective.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/could_do_with](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/could_do_with)

~~~
dengnan
Thank you! I didn't know thus expression before. (I can always learn a lot
from HN.) Upvote for the Wikipedia link.

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rahimnathwani
Can anyone who attended this comment on the content and, particularly, the
reaction and questions from the audience?

(It's already 9pm here in Beijing; the event was scheduled for 2pm-5pm.)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Ya, it ended 4 hours ago, a bit late to post an invitation.

~~~
rahimnathwani
He's talking at FUDCon (Fedora Users' and Developers' Conference) on the same
topic next weekend:

[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Beijing_2014#Schedule](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Beijing_2014#Schedule)

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gbog
I regret I missed the event. It should be noted that rms came to China already
quite a few times. I hope his message goes thru and reaches a wide audience
here, because keeping full control on ones digital life is as important in
China as in other places, or even more. (And I think the main threat for
laymen is not from government, but from companies who would sell their users'
souls for a short-term increase of their market shares.)

~~~
zhte415
I regret so too.

Having just checked the FSF website, there will be a similar function on May
19th, at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Admission open to the public, with
or without registration.
[http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou](http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou)

For readers unfamiliar with Chinese academic institutions, both UCAS (May
17th) and Zhejiang (May 19th) are institutions noted nationally and
internationally for graduate and research programs especially in sciences and
engineering.

~~~
bbody
I went but there were so many people that the lecture hall was overflowing so
I left.

------
LiweiZ
Just let you guys know that China is keeping increasing control of online
content. And the new leader has his plan to push it to another extent. Not a
nice outlook.

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xuesj
I do agree with freedom of individual,and free software is ok if it's authors
want to free.

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EGreg
Do I even have t read this article? I bet I know what it will say. It's by
Richard Stallman.

~~~
judk
RMS's ideas don't quite square with Chinese law, and Chinese law doesn't take
kindly to that sort of thing, which makes this interesting.

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octref
I found two relevant pictures:
[http://ww2.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhbj4ymj20xc18g1...](http://ww2.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhbj4ymj20xc18g14j.jpg)
[http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhf9xe0j20xc18g4...](http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhf9xe0j20xc18g49t.jpg)
Does this custome has any culture-specific connotation? As a Chinese student I
don't quite understand why RMS's dressing like this.

Below is my comment on this news:

Two years ago, when I left China for US college, I feel most people around me
don't care about FOSS, or respect originality & copyright. \- They use cracked
software. You can buy a disk that installs cracked Windows for less than 1
dollar. Cracked Photoshop & MS Office & whatever licensed software are all
over the internet. \- They download music & movie for free. \- China's
internet is full of copycats because the original websites aren't available
due to censorship. (Like FB & Twitter). One of the largest IT Company,
Tencent, is full of copied products.

But now I feel China is making some progress. Like: \- Online streaming
companies are paying for copyrighted material, and you can't easily download
movie/anime for free as you do in the past. \- As Apple becomes more popular,
many people start paying for music in iTunes. To my delight, websites like
[http://mou.li/](http://mou.li/) even let people buy Sublime Text & Alfred &
1Password easily in China. I really can't believe people would pay over $50
for a text editor two years ago, but now some of them do. \- A recent example.
A very large company in China named Guokr launched a website:
[http://www.15yan.com/](http://www.15yan.com/) . It's a blatant copy of
medium. And in their about page, they are literally saying something like "Our
product is currently a copycat of Medium, and we'll adpat it to Chinese market
to make it better". Shortly after the website went public, someone asked a
question in a Chinese Q&A website: "Can we tolerate such blatant plagiarism?"
Take a look at it:
[http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374](http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374)
. I know you can't read Chinese but take a look at the pictures in the highest
upvoted(2130)[1] and third highest(756)[2] answers. Two Chinese Web-Devs
compared the CSS and HTML of these two sites, expressed their anger, and
described the copycat as "humiliating" and "disgusting". Nearly all the
answerers requested this copycat going down immediately and said they'd never
use it.

I'm really happy China is really making some progress on this matter.

[1]:
[http://p3.zhimg.com/69/e3/69e3f847236c2257d925ff11cbb14cc4_m...](http://p3.zhimg.com/69/e3/69e3f847236c2257d925ff11cbb14cc4_m.jpg)
[2]:
[http://p3.zhimg.com/2f/6b/2f6b6e698413e0db745efdcb8be73867_m...](http://p3.zhimg.com/2f/6b/2f6b6e698413e0db745efdcb8be73867_m.jpg)

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matt__rose
RMS, once again, missing the forest for the trees.

~~~
jimktrains2
I believe your statement needs to be flushed out. It's very unclear and
uninformative.

~~~
matt__rose
deignan's comment says it best here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760080)

If I were Chinese, the license of the software I was using would be far, far
down my list of "Freedoms" that I was concerned about.

~~~
icebraining
And rms would be the first to agree with you that there are more important
freedoms:

 _" I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom,
because the more well-known and conventional areas of working for freedom and
a better society are tremendously important. I wouldn't say free software is
as important as they are."_

And he explains why he speaks about Free Software:

 _" It's the responsibility that I undertook, because it dropped in my lap and
I saw a way I could do something about it. But, for example, to end police
brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have,
to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who
do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important
issues, far more important than what I do. I just wish I knew how to do
something about them."_

 _" I wish I knew how to make a major difference on those bigger issues,
because I would be tremendously proud if I could, but they're very hard and
lots of people who are probably better than I am have been working on them and
have gotten only so far," he says. "But as I see it, while other people were
defending against these big visible threats, I saw another threat that was
unguarded. And so I went to defend against that threat. It may not be as big a
threat, but I was the only one there."_

Like any activist, he speaks of what he knows. That doesn't mean he considers
the rest unimportant.

Source:
[http://sisudoc.org/markup_samples.sisu_fn/free_as_in_freedom...](http://sisudoc.org/markup_samples.sisu_fn/free_as_in_freedom_2.richard_stallman_and_the_free_software_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman/5.en.html)

