Richard Stallman will talk on Copyright vs Community
starting at 12 noon, on Tuesday 29 November 2005, in the Great Hall of Cooper Union at 7th Street at 3rd Avenue, on the Island of the Manahattoes, in the City of New York. This talk is open to the public and there is no admission fee. Please reproduce this notice and distribute as widely as you wish! Blurb from RMS: Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then we must make changes in the other direction. Richard Stallman is the founder of Project GNU, which was announced on 27 September 1983, by a post to the Usenet groups net.unix-wizards and net.usoft: Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site mit-eddie.UUCP From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]@mit-eddie.UUCP (Richard Stallman) Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.usoft Subject: new UNIX implementation Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, 27-Sep-83 13:35:59 EDT Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.771 Posted: Tue Sep 27 13:35:59 1983 Date-Received: Thu, 29-Sep-83 07:38:11 EDT Organization: MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA Lines: 90 Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed. To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation. GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP. Who Am I? I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines. Why I Must Write GNU I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free. How You Can Contribute I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work. One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power. Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU. If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way. For more information, contact me. Arpanet mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Usenet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] US Snail: Richard Stallman 166 Prospect St Cambridge, MA 02139 End quote. If you believe you have a right to own and use a computer in your own house, free of wiretaps and remote control by intellects small and hot and unsympathetic, if you use any Microsoft product and know, or do not know, that there is a better way, if you are an artist and you want to learn how copyright was meant to work, if you use Emacs, or gcc, or any GNU program, if you run any GNU/Linux system, if you run any free *BSD, if you know the Net is ours and we mean to keep it free, if you know little but want to know more, if you know much and want to know more, then come and join us and learn from Richard Stallman, who has fought since 1983 for our rights of privacy and our right to share, rights now at risk. Most of all, if you want to help, come and join us in the struggle. Subway stops: N,R,W lines, the 8th Street NYU stop, this is east of Cooper Union one block. 6 line, the Astor Place stop, this is catty corner from Cooper Union. For more information: http://www.fsf.org http://www.gnu.org http://www.eff.org http://www.nyfairuse.org http://www.freeculturenyu.org http://www.nycwireless.net http://www.cfsg.org http://www.gnubies.org http://www.lxny.org http://www.nylug.org http://www.sixgirls.org http://www.debian.org http://www.knoppix.net http://www.gnu-darwin.org http://www.squeak.org http://www.freebsd.org http://www.netbsd.org http://www.openbsd.org http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd http://www.apache.org http://www.mozilla.org http://www.emacswiki.org http://www.cliki.net http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric http://www.openoffice.org http://www.r-project.org http://www.perl.com http://www.python.org http://www.ruby-lang.org http://www.xbox-linux.org http://www.free60.org Our thanks to Cooper Union and to the Cooper Union Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery for arranging this talk. http://www.cooper.edu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union http://www.acm.org Jay Sulzberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Corresponding Secretary LXNY LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization. http://www.lxny.org _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
