Richard Stallman: Free software costs the environment less

What did you make of the UK government’s recent announcement that it had decided to “level the playing field” for open source when it comes to government IT projects?
In the past they have only allowed proprietary software so it’s a step forward but its still not the right policy. But you know the UK government has no respect for any kind of human rights. Tony “Bliar” and now Gordon “Clown” seem to be on a campaign to completely abolish traditional human rights. The UK has made it a crime to be suspected – literally they can charge people with the offense of being suspected.

Do you think that any software can ever really be considered “green” and if it can is free software more sustainable than proprietary?
Directly speaking these are unrelated issues. But it is a fact that Microsoft in particular, uses the power it has got to make people buy more hardware and junk their old hardware and this is why the US Green Party joined with the Free Software Foundation to condemn Windows Vista.

Also free software is under the control of its users. Proprietary software puts the users under the control of the developer. When the developer is a greedy corporation it is going to use that power to get what it wants from those users and in doing so it can push them into doing all sorts of harmful of unpleasant things. So in general I think you are going to have less environmental costs with free software but its an indirect result.

Do you think the European Union does enough to encourage the use of free software?
No, in fact the European Union does not want to talk about issues of freedom. They established a group to study the use of “open source” but I read today that this group was infiltrated by organisations financed by Microsoft which sabotaged it totally. But what can you hope for when they set out the question in a way that is designed to ignore the ethical issues. Microsoft for years has been trying to pretend that it is a participant in “open source” but because that term is not associated with any form of ethical behaviour, unlike free software, it is easy for Microsoft to develop some programmes that qualify as open source and say “See, we are an open source developer”, so they can get invited into these commissions and make sure they do no good at all.

So what should the EU change?
The European Union should recognise that computer users deserve freedom and it should stop adopting directives that take away everyone’s freedom.

Would you have thought back in the 1970s that Windows, a proprietary operating system, would be used in over 90 percent of computers?
Who knows, I wasn’t thinking about that back then.

What is your position now?
I am very sad to see proprietary software used by so many people because that means the developers have subjugated those users. Microsoft has the kind of power that no one should ever have and Apple likewise has power over users.

Windows has a backdoor which enables Microsoft to change software anytime it likes. The user has no control at all – no defence. Windows has no security against the worst perpetrator of Windows malware which is Microsoft itself. Apple has done the same thing in Mac OSX. And no in general GNU/Linux doesn’t have such a backdoor.

You decide which version of the system to install. You see with free software, the users have control. If users find a backdoor in free software, someone will publish a version that doesn’t have it and people will all switch to that. Users of Window can do that because they don’t have control over it.