-
Thank you. Congratulations to the students
[of the Digital Freedoms association]
-
who organized this meeting.
-
They are right, not only
because Richard is famous
-
but also because the subject
is very interesting to us.
-
They are especially interesting
here at Sciences Po
-
since first, we try to study
controversies;
-
some of you here have studied
controversies
-
and Richard himself
is a controversial character.
-
I have not found anything on the Web
that allows to find consensus
-
nor about what he does, nor what he says, nor
the words he uses, so he's an ideal case study
-
for us who study cartographies of
controversies in this institution.
-
Somehow we have a controversial character
-
on subjects that are important to us.
-
Second, obviously, is the subject itself
-
and the question of how much
freedom and control
-
that are at the core of all these
digital innovations
-
are directly interesting, for political science
-
sociology, also law.
-
All questions that interest us
in this institution.
-
It's by the way interesting that
Richard comes here
-
a few days after Steve Jobs died, a death that
he celebrated in his own way if I dare to say
-
explaining that his loss was not
a huge disaster
-
for all those questions of
digital freedoms
-
because - even though Steve Jobs
could be esteemed
-
the control he had on software
-
and its domination make us
in some way free
-
but under the form, as he says it
in several opinions,
-
of a "jail made cool" --
a jail that I like myself
-
since I am myself an adept
of the Macintosh
-
but this is obviously not
the kind of character
-
or the kind of freedom that Richard
is thinking about.
-
The third reason is that, obviously
-
for a lot of questions
that are directly interesting to us
-
in this institution about
scientific humanities
-
is the link between technical innovation
-
and political devices
that interests us directly.
-
So we have at least, anyway myself
at the scientific direction
-
three reasons to enjoy
the initiative of the students group
-
which organized this meeting
-
and I am happy to let
Richard Stallman speak
-
and please applause him before.
-
Projects with the goal of digital
inclusion are making a big assumption.
-
They are assuming that participating
in a digital society is good;
-
but that’s not necessarily true.
-
Being in a digital society can be good or bad
-
depending on whether that
digital society is just or unjust.
-
There are many ways in which our freedom
is being attacked by digital technology.
-
Digital technology can make things worse,
and it will, unless we fight to prevent it.
-
Therefore, if we have an unjust digital society
-
we should cancel these projects
for digital inclusion
-
and launch projects for digital extraction.
-
We have to extract people from digital society
if it doesn’t respect their freedom;
-
or we have to make it respect their freedom.
-
So, what are the threats? First, surveillance.
-
Computers are Stalin’s dream.
-
They are ideal tools for surveillance
-
because anything we do with computers,
the computers can record.
-
They can record the information
-
in a perfectly indexed
searchable form in a central database
-
ideal for any tyrant
who wants to crush opposition.
-
Surveillance is sometimes done
with our own computers.
-
For instance, if you have a computer
that’s running Microsoft Windows
-
that system is doing surveillance.
-
There are features in Windows
that send data to some server.
-
Data about the use of the computer.
-
A surveillance feature was discovered
in the iPhone a few months ago
-
and people started calling it
the “spy-phone”.
-
Flash player has a surveillance feature too
-
and so does the Amazon “Swindle”.
-
They call it the Kindle,
but I call it the Swindle, l’escroc
-
because it’s meant to swindle
users out of their freedom.
-
It makes people identify themselves
whenever they buy a book
-
and that means Amazon has a giant list
of all the books each user has read.
-
And such a list must not exist anywhere.
-
Most portable phones
will transmit their location
-
computed using GPS, on remote command.
-
And the phone company is accumulating
a giant list of places that the user has been.
-
A German from the Green Party
asked the phone company
-
to give him the data it had
about where he was.
-
He had to sue, he had to go
to court to get this information.
-
And when he got it, he received
forty-four thousand location points
-
for a period of six months.
-
That’s more than two hundred per day.
-
So what that means is someone could form
a very good picture of his activities
-
just by looking at that data.
-
We can stop our own computers
from doing surveillance on us
-
if we have control
of the software that they run.
-
But the software these people are running,
they don’t have control over.
-
It’s non-free software and that’s why
it has malicious features, such as surveillance.
-
However, the surveillance is not
always done with our own computers
-
it’s also done at one remove.
-
For instance ISPs in Europe are required
-
to keep data about the user’s
internet communications for a long time
-
in case the State decides to investigate
that person later
-
for whatever imaginable reason.
-
And with a portable phone,
even if you can stop the phone
-
from transmitting your GPS location
-
the system can determine
the phone’s location approximately
-
by comparing the time when
the signals arrive at different towers.
-
So the phone system can do surveillance
-
even without special cooperation
from the phone itself.
-
Likewise, the bicycles
that people rent in Paris.
-
Of course the system knows
where you get the bicycle
-
and it knows where you return the bicycle
-
and I’ve heard reports
that it tracks the bicycles
-
as they are moving around as well.
-
So they are not something we can really trust.
-
But there are also systems that have nothing
to do with us that exist only for tracking.
-
For instance, in the UK
all car travel is monitored.
-
Every car’s movements
are being recorded in real time
-
and can be tracked by the State in real time.
-
This is done with cameras on the side of the road.
-
Now, the only way we can prevent surveillance
-
that’s done at one remove
or by unrelated systems
-
is through political action
against increased government power
-
to track and monitor everyone.
-
Which means of course we have to reject
whatever excuse they come up with.
-
For doing such systems, no excuse
is valid to monitor everyone.
-
In a free society, when you go out
in public you are not guaranteed anonymity.
-
It’s possible for someone
to recognize you and remember.
-
And later that person could say
that he saw you at a certain place.
-
But that information is diffuse.
-
It’s not conveniently assembled to track
everybody and investigate what they did.
-
To collect that information is a lot of work
-
so it’s only done in special cases
when it’s necessary.
-
But computerized surveillance
makes it possible
-
to centralize and index all this information
-
so that an unjust regime can find it all
and find out all about everyone.
-
If a dictator takes power,
which could happen anywhere
-
people realize this and they recognize
-
that they should not
communicate with other dissidents
-
in a way that the State could find out about.
-
But if the dictator
has several years of stored records
-
of who talks with whom, it’s too late
to take any precautions then.
-
Because he already has
everything he needs to realize
-
“OK this guy is a dissident and he spoke
with him. Maybe he is a dissident too.”
-
“Maybe we should grab him and torture him.”
-
So we need to campaign to put
an end to digital surveillance now.
-
You can’t wait until there is a dictator
and it would really matter.
-
And besides, it doesn’t take an outright
dictatorship to start attacking human rights.
-
I wouldn’t quite call
the government of the UK a dictatorship.
-
It’s not very democratic and one way
it crushes democracy is using surveillance.
-
A few years ago, people believed to be
on their way to a protest
-
they were going to protest.
-
They were arrested before
they could get there
-
because their car was tracked through
this universal car tracking system.
-
The second threat is censorship.
-
Censorship is not new,
it existed long before computers.
-
But 15 years ago, we thought that
the Internet would protect us from censorship
-
that it would defeat censorship.
-
Then, China and some other obvious tyrannies
-
went to great lengths to impose
censorship on the Internet, and we said:
-
“well that’s not surprising, what else
would governments like that do?”
-
But today we see censorship
imposed in countries
-
that are not normally
thought of as dictatorships
-
such as for instance the UK, France,
Spain, Italy, Denmark…
-
They all have systems of
blocking access to some websites.
-
Denmark established a system
-
that blocks access to a long list
of webpages, which was secret.
-
The citizens were not supposed to know
how the government was censoring them
-
but the list was leaked,
and posted on WikiLeaks.
-
At that point, Denmark added
the WikiLeaks page to its censorship list.
-
So, the whole rest of the world can find out
-
how Danes are being censored,
but Danes are not supposed to know.
-
A few months ago, Turkey,
which claims to respect some human rights
-
announced that every Internet user
-
would have to choose between
censorship and more censorship.
-
Four different levels of censorship
they get to choose!
-
But freedom is not one of the options.
-
Australia wanted to impose filtering
on the Internet but that was blocked.
-
However Australia has a
different kind of censorship.
-
It has censorship of links.
-
That is, if a website in Australia has a link
-
to some censored site outside Australia
-
the one in Australia can be punished.
-
Electronic Frontier Australia
-
which is an organization
that defends human rights
-
in the digital domain in Australia
-
posted a link to
a foreign political website.
-
It was ordered to delete the link
or face a penalty of $11,000 a day.
-
So they deleted it,
what else could they do?
-
This is a very harsh system of censorship.
-
In Spain, the censorship
that was adopted earlier this year
-
allows officials to arbitrarily
shut down an Internet site in Spain
-
or impose filtering to block access
to a site outside of Spain.
-
And they can do this
without any kind of trial.
-
This was one of the motivations
for the Indignados
-
who have been protesting in the street.
-
There were protests in the street
in Turkey as well after that announcement
-
but the government refused to change its policy.
-
We must recognize that a country
-
that imposes censorship on the Internet
is not a free country.
-
And is not a legitimate government either.
-
The next threat to our freedom comes
from data formats that restrict the users.
-
Sometimes it’s because the format is secret.
-
There are many application programs
-
that save the user’s data in a secret format
-
which is meant to prevent the user
-
from taking that data and using it
with some other program.
-
The goal is to prevent interoperability.
-
Now evidently, if the program
implements a secret format
-
that’s because the program
is not free software.
-
So this is another kind of malicious feature.
-
Surveillance is one kind of malicious feature
-
that you find in some non-free programs;
-
using secret formats to restrict the users
-
is another kind of malicious feature
-
that you also find in some non-free programs.
-
But if you have a free program
that handles a certain format
-
ipso facto that format is not secret.
-
This kind of malicious feature
can only exist in a non-free program.
-
Surveillance features could theoretically
exist in a free program
-
but you don’t find them happening.
-
Because the users would fix it.
-
The users wouldn’t like this,
so they would fix it.
-
In any case, we also find secret data
formats in use for publication of works.
-
You find secret data formats
in use for audio
-
such as music, for video, for books…
-
And these secret formats are known as
Digital Restrictions Management, or DRM
-
or digital handcuffs (les menottes numériques).
-
So, the works are published in secret formats
-
so that only proprietary
programs can play them
-
so that these proprietary programs can have
the malicious feature of restricting the users
-
stopping them from doing something
that would be natural to do.
-
And this is used even by public entities
to communicate with the people.
-
For instance Italian public television
makes its programs available on the net
-
in a format called VC-1
-
which is a standard supposedly,
but it’s a secret standard.
-
Now I can’t imagine how any
publicly supported entity
-
could justify using a secret format
to communicate with the public.
-
This should be illegal.
-
In fact I think all use of Digital
Restrictions Management should be illegal.
-
No company should be allowed to do this.
-
There are also formats that are not secret
-
but almost might as well be
secret, for instance Flash.
-
Flash is not actually secret but Adobe keeps
making new versions, which are different
-
faster than anyone can keep up
and make free software to play those files.
-
So it has almost the same effect as being secret.
-
Then there are the patented formats,
such as MP3 for audio.
-
It’s bad to distribute audio in MP3 format!
-
There is free software to handle MP3 format,
to play it and to generate it
-
but because it’s patented in many countries
-
many distributors of free software
don’t dare include those programs.
-
So if they distribute the GNU+Linux system
-
their system doesn’t include a player for MP3.
-
As a result if anyone
distributes some music in MP3
-
that’s putting pressure on people
not to use GNU/Linux.
-
Sure, if you’re an expert you can find
a free software and install it
-
but there are lots of non experts
-
and they might see that
they installed a version of GNU/Linux
-
which doesn’t have that software
and it won’t play MP3 files
-
and they think it’s the system’s fault.
-
They don’t realize it’s MP3′s fault.
But this is the fact.
-
Therefore, if you want to support freedom,
don’t distribute MP3 files.
-
That’s why I say if you’re recording my speech
and you want to distribute copies
-
don’t do it in a patented format
such as MPEG-2, or MPEG-4, or MP3.
-
Use a format friendly to free software,
such as the Ogg format or WebM.
-
And by the way, if you are going
to distribute copies of the recording
-
please put on it the
Creative Commons-No derivatives license.
-
This is a statement of my personal views.
-
If it were a lecture for a course,
if it were didactic
-
then it ought to be free,
but statements of opinion are different.
-
Now this leads me to the next threat
-
which comes from software
that the users don’t have control over.
-
In other words: software
that isn’t free, that is not “libre”.
-
In this particular point
French is clearer than English.
-
The English word free
means ‘libre’ and ‘gratuit’
-
but what I mean when I say free software
is ‘logiciel libre‘. I don’t mean ‘gratuit’.
-
I’m not talking about price.
-
Price is a side issue, just a detail,
because it doesn't matter ethically.
-
You know if I have a copy of a program
-
and I sell it to you for one euro
or a hundred euros, who cares?
-
Why should anyone think
that that’s good or bad?
-
Or suppose I gave it to you ‘gratuitement’…
still, who cares?
-
But whether this program respects
your freedom, that’s important!
-
So free software is software
that respects users’ freedom.
-
What does this mean?
-
Ultimately there are just
two possibilities with software:
-
either the users control the program
or the program controls the users.
-
If the users have certain essential freedoms
-
then they control the program
-
and those freedoms are
the criterion for free software.
-
But if the users don’t fully
have the essential freedoms
-
then the program controls the users.
-
But somebody controls that program
and, through it, has power over the users.
-
So, a non-free program is an instrument
-
to give somebody power
over a lot of other people
-
and this is unjust power
that nobody should ever have.
-
This is why non-free software, les logiciels
privateurs, qui privent de la liberté
-
why proprietary software is
an injustice and should not exist?
-
Because it leaves the users without freedom.
-
Now, the developer who has
control of the program
-
often feels tempted
to introduce malicious features
-
to further exploit or abuse those users.
-
He feels a temptation because
he knows he can get away with it:
-
because his program controls the users
-
and the users do not have
control of the program.
-
If he puts in a malicious feature,
the users can’t fix it;
-
they can’t remove the malicious feature.
-
I’ve already told you about
two kinds of malicious features:
-
surveillance features,
such as are found in Windows
-
and the iPhone and Flash player
and the “Swindle”.
-
And there are also
features to restrict users
-
which work with secret data formats
-
and those are found in Windows,
Macintosh, the iPhone, Flash player
-
the Amazon “Swindle”, the Playstation 3
and lots and lots of other programs.
-
The other kind of malicious
feature is the backdoor.
-
That means something in that program
-
is listening for remote
commands and obeying them
-
and those commands can mistreat the user.
-
We know of backdoors in Windows,
in the iPhone, in the Amazon “Swindle”.
-
The Amazon “Swindle” has a backdoor
that can remotely delete books.
-
We know this by observation,
because Amazon did it:
-
in 2009 Amazon remotely deleted
thousands of copies of a particular book.
-
Those were authorized copies, people
had obtain them directly from Amazon
-
and thus Amazon knew exactly where they were.
-
Which is how Amazon knew where
to send the commands to delete those books.
-
You know which book Amazon deleted?
-
It’s a book everyone should read
because it discusses a totalitarian state
-
that did things like
delete books it didn’t like.
-
Everybody should read it,
but not on the Amazon “Swindle”.
-
Anyway, malicious features are present
in the most widely used non-free programs
-
but they are rare in free software, because
with free software the users have control:
-
they can read the source code
and they can change it.
-
So, if there were a malicious feature
-
somebody would sooner or later
spot it and fix it.
-
This means that somebody who is considering
-
introducing a malicious feature
does not find it so tempting
-
because he knows he might
get away with it for a while
-
but somebody will spot it, will fix it
-
and everybody will loose
trust in the perpetrator.
-
It’s not so tempting when
you know you’re going to fail.
-
And that’s why we find that malicious
features are rare in free software
-
and common in proprietary software.
-
Now the essential freedoms are four.
-
Freedom 0 is the freedom
to run the program as you wish.
-
Freedom 1 is the freedom to study
the source code and change it
-
so the program does
your computing the way you wish.
-
Freedom 2 is the freedom to help others.
-
That’s the freedom to make exact copies
and redistribute them when you wish.
-
Freedom 3 is the freedom
to contribute to your community.
-
That’s the freedom to make copies
of your modified versions
-
if you have made any, and then
distribute them to others when you wish.
-
These freedoms, in order to be adequate,
must apply to all activities of life.
-
For instance if it says: “This is free
for academic use”, it’s not free.
-
Because that’s too limited.
It doesn’t apply to all areas of life.
-
In particular, if a program is free
-
that means it can be modified
and distributed commercially
-
because commerce is an area of life,
an activity in life.
-
And this freedom has to apply to all activities.
-
Now however, it’s not obligatory
to do any of these things.
-
The point is you’re free to do them
if you wish, when you wish.
-
But you never have to do them.
You don’t have to do any of them.
-
You don’t have to run the program.
-
You don’t have to study
or change the source code.
-
You don’t have to make any copies.
-
You don’t have to distribute
your modified versions.
-
The point is you should be free
to do those things if you wish.
-
Now, freedom number 1, the freedom to study
and change the source code
-
to make the program do
your computing as you wish
-
includes something
that might not be obvious at first.
-
If the program comes in a product
-
and a developer can provide
an upgrade that will run
-
then you have to be able to make
your version run in that product.
-
If the product would only run
the developer’s versions
-
and refuses to run yours, the executable
in that product is not free software.
-
Even if it was compiled from free source code
-
it’s not free because
you don’t have the freedom
-
to make the program do your computing
the way you wish.
-
So, freedom 1 has to be real,
not just theoretical.
-
It has to include the freedom
to use your version
-
not just the freedom to make
some source code that won’t run.
-
I launched the free software movement in 1983
-
when I announced the plan to develop
-
a free software operating system
whose name is GNU.
-
Now GNU, the name GNU, is a joke.
-
Because part of the hacker’s spirit
-
is to have fun even when
you’re doing something very serious.
-
Now I can’t think of anything more seriously
important than defending freedom.
-
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t give
my system a name that’s a joke.
-
So GNU is a joke because
it’s a recursive acronym
-
it stands for “GNU is Not Unix”,
so G.N.U.: GNU’s Not Unix.
-
So the G in GNU stands for GNU.
-
Now in fact this was
a tradition at the time.
-
The tradition was:
if there was an existing program
-
and you wrote something
similar to it, inspired by it
-
you could give credit
by giving your program a name
-
that’s a recursive acronym
saying it’s not the other one.
-
So I gave credit to Unix for
the technical ideas of Unix
-
but with the name GNU, because I decided
to make GNU a Unix-like system
-
with the same commands, the same system calls
so that it would be compatible
-
so that people who used Unix
can switch over easily.
-
But the reason for developing GNU,
that was unique.
-
GNU is the only operating system,
as far as I know
-
ever developed for the purpose of freedom.
-
Not for technical motivations,
not for commercial motivations.
-
GNU was written for your freedom.
-
Because without a free operating system
-
it’s impossible to have
freedom and use a computer.
-
And there were none, and
I wanted people to have freedom
-
so it was up to me to write one.
-
Nowadays there are millions of users
of the GNU operating system
-
and most of them don’t know
they are using the GNU operating system
-
because there is a widespread
practice which is not nice.
-
People call the system “Linux”.
-
Many do, but some people don’t
and I hope you’ll be one of them.
-
Please, since we started this
-
since we wrote the biggest piece of the code
-
please give us equal mention
-
please call the system GNU+Linux
or GNU/Linux. It’s not much to ask!
-
But there is another reason to do this.
-
It turns out that the person who wrote Linux
-
which is one component of the
system as we use it today
-
he doesn’t agree with
the free software movement.
-
And so if you call the whole system Linux
-
in effect you’re steering people towards
his ideas and away from our ideas.
-
Because he’s not gonna say to them
that they deserve freedom.
-
He’s going to say to them that he likes
convenient, reliable, powerful software.
-
He’s going to tell people that
those are the important values.
-
But if you tell them the system is GNU+Linux,
the GNU operating system plus Linux the kernel
-
then they’ll know about us
and then they might listen to what we say.
-
You deserve freedom, and since freedom
will be lost if we don’t defend it —
-
there’s always going to be
a Sarkozy to take it away —
-
we need above all to teach
people to demand freedom
-
to be ready to stand up for their freedom
-
the next time someone threatens to take it away.
-
Nowadays, you can tell who doesn't want
to discuss these ideas of freedom
-
because they don’t say “logiciel libre”.
-
They don’t say “libre”,
they say “open source”.
-
That term was coined by
the people like Mr Torvalds
-
who would prefer that these
ethical issues don’t get raised.
-
And so the way you can help us
raise them is by saying libre.
-
You know, it’s up to you where you stand
you’re free to say what you think.
-
If you agree with them,
you can say open source.
-
If you agree with us, show it: say libre!
-
Now the most important
point about free software
-
is that schools must teach
exclusively free software.
-
All levels of schools from
kindergarten to university
-
it’s their moral responsibility to teach
only free software in their education
-
and all other educational activities as well
-
including those that say that
they’re spreading digital literacy.
-
A lot of those activities teach Windows,
which means they’re teaching dependence.
-
To teach people the use of proprietary
software is to teach dependence
-
and educational activities must never do that
because it’s the opposite of their mission.
-
Educational activities have
a social mission to educate good citizens
-
of a strong, capable, cooperating,
independent and free society.
-
And in the area of computing,
that means: teach free software.
-
Never teach a proprietary program
because that’s inculcating dependence.
-
Why do you think some proprietary developers
offer gratis copies to schools?
-
They want the schools
to make the children dependent.
-
And then, when they graduate,
they’re still dependent
-
and you know the company is not going
to offer them gratis copies.
-
And some of them get jobs
and go to work for companies.
-
Not many of them anymore,
but some of them.
-
And those companies are not going
to be offered gratis copies.
-
Oh no! The idea is if the school
directs the students
-
down the path of permanent dependence
-
they can drag the rest of society
with them into dependence.
-
That’s the plan! It’s just like
giving the school gratis needles
-
full of addicting drugs, saying
-
“inject this into your students,
the first dose is gratis.”
-
Once you’re dependent,
then you have to pay.
-
Well, the school would reject the drugs
-
because it isn’t right to teach
the students to use addictive drugs
-
and it’s got to reject
the proprietary software also.
-
Some people say “let’s have the school teach
both proprietary software and free software”
-
“so the students become familiar with both.”
-
That’s like saying “for lunch
lets give the kids spinach and tobacco”
-
“so that they become accustomed to both.”
-
No! The schools are only supposed
to teach good habits, not bad ones!
-
So there should be no Windows in a school
-
no Macintosh, nothing
proprietary in the education.
-
But also, for the sake
of educating good programmers.
-
You see, some people have
a talent for programming.
-
At ten to thirteen years old,
typically, they’re fascinated
-
and if they use a program, they want
to know “how does it do this?”
-
But when they ask the teacher,
if it’s proprietary, the teacher has to say
-
“I’m sorry, it’s a secret, we can’t find out.”
-
Which means education is forbidden.
-
A proprietary program is
the enemy of the spirit of education.
-
It’s knowledge withheld, so
it should not be tolerated in a school
-
even though there may be
plenty of people in the school
-
who don’t care about programming,
don’t want to learn this.
-
Still, because it’s the enemy
of the spirit of education
-
it shouldn’t be there in the school.
-
But if the program is free,
the teacher can explain what he knows
-
and then give out copies
of the source code, saying:
-
“read it and you’ll understand everything.”
-
And those who are really
fascinated, they will read it!
-
And this gives them an opportunity
to start to learn how to be good programmers.
-
To learn to be a good programmer,
you’ll need to recognize
-
that certain ways of writing code, even if
they make sense to you and they are correct
-
they’re not good because other people
will have trouble understanding them.
-
Good code is clear code that others
will have an easy time working on
-
when they need to make further changes.
-
How do you learn to write good clear code?
-
You do it by reading lots of code,
and writing lots of code.
-
And only free software offers the chance
-
to read the code of large
programs that we really use.
-
And then you have to write lots of code
-
which means you have
to write changes in large programs.
-
How do you learn to write
good code for large programs?
-
You have to start small, which
does not mean small programs, oh no!
-
The challenges of the code for large programs
don’t even begin to appear in small programs.
-
So the way you start small at
writing code for large programs
-
is by writing small
changes in large programs.
-
And only free software
gives you the chance to do that!
-
So, if a school wants to offer the possibility
of learning to be a good programmer
-
it needs to be a free software school.
-
But there is an even deeper reason
-
and that is for the sake of moral education
-
education in citizenship.
-
It’s not enough for a school
to teach facts and skills
-
it has to teach the spirit of goodwill,
the habit of helping others.
-
Therefore, every class should have this rule:
-
“Students, if you bring software to class,
you may not keep it for yourself”
-
”you must share copies
with the rest of the class”
-
”including the source code
in case anyone here wants to learn!”
-
”Because this class is a place
where we share our knowledge.”
-
”Therefore, bringing a proprietary program
to class is not permitted.”
-
The school must follow
its own rule to set a good example.
-
Therefore, the school must bring
only free software to class
-
and share copies, including the source code
with anyone in the class that wants copies.
-
Those of you who have
a connection with a school
-
it’s your duty to campaign and pressure
that school to move to free software.
-
And you have to be firm.
-
It may take years, but you can succeed
as long as you never give up.
-
Keep seeking more allies among the students,
the faculty, the staff, the parents, anyone!
-
And always bring it up as an ethical issue.
-
If someone else wants
to sidetrack the discussion
-
into this practical advantage
and this practical disadvantage
-
which means they’re ignoring the most
important question, then you have to say:
-
“this is not about how to do
the best job of educating“
-
“this is about how to do a good
education instead of an evil one.“
-
“It’s how to do education right
instead of wrong“
-
“not just how to make it
a little more effective or less.”
-
So don’t get distracted with those secondary
issues and ignore what really matters!
-
So, moving on to the next menace.
-
There are two issues that arise
from the use of internet services.
-
One of them is that the server
could abuse your data
-
and another is that
it could take control of your computing.
-
The first issue, people already know about.
-
They are aware that, if you
upload data to an internet service
-
there is a question of what
it will do with that data.
-
It might do things that mistreat you.
-
What could it do? It could lose the data,
it could change the data
-
it could refuse to let you get the data back.
-
And it could also show the data to
someone else you don’t want to show it to.
-
Four different possible things.
-
Now, here, I’m talking about the data
that you knowingly gave to that site.
-
Of course, many of those
services do surveillance as well.
-
For instance, consider Facebook.
-
Users send lots of data to Facebook,
and one of the bad things about Facebook
-
is that it shows a lot of
that data to lots of other people
-
and even if it offers them a setting
to say “no!”, that may not really work.
-
After all, if you say “some other people
can see this piece of information,”
-
one of them might publish it.
-
Now, that’s not Facebook’s fault
-
there is nothing they could do to
prevent that but it ought to warn people.
-
Instead of saying “mark this as only
to your so-called friends”
-
“it should say “keep in mind that your
so-called friends are not really your friends”
-
“and if they want to make trouble
for you, they could publish this.”
-
Every time, it should say that, if
they want to deal with people ethically.
-
As well as all the data users of Facebook
voluntarily give to Facebook
-
Facebook is collecting through data
about people’s activities on the net
-
through various methods of surveillance.
But that was the first menace.
-
For now I am talking about the data
that people know they are giving to these sites.
-
Losing data is something that
could always happen by accident.
-
That possibility is always there,
no matter how careful someone is.
-
Therefore, you need to keep
multiple copies of data that matters.
-
If you do that, then, even if someone
decided to delete your data intentionally
-
it wouldn’t hurt you that much,
because you’d have other copies of it.
-
So, as long as you are
maintaining multiple copies
-
you don’t have to worry too much
about someone’s losing your data.
-
What about whether you can get it back.
-
Well, some services make it possible to get
back all the data that you sent, and some don’t.
-
Google services will let the user
get back the data the user has put into them.
-
Facebook, famously, does not.
-
Of course in the case of Google, this only
applies to the data the user knows Google has.
-
Google does lots of surveillance, too
and that data is not included.
-
But in any case, if you
can get the data back
-
then you could track
whether they have altered it.
-
And they are not very likely to start
altering people’s data if the people can tell.
-
So maybe we can keep a track
on that particular kind of abuse.
-
But the abuse of showing the data to someone
you don’t want it to be shown to
-
is very common and almost
impossible for you to prevent
-
especially if it’s a US company.
-
You see, the most hypocritically
named law in US history
-
the so-called USA Patriot Act,
says that Big Brother’s police
-
can collect just about all the data
that companies maintain about individuals.
-
Not just companies, but other
organizations too, like public libraries.
-
The police can get this massively,
without even going to court.
-
Now, in a country that was
founded on an idea of freedom
-
there is nothing more unpatriotic
than this. But this is what they did.
-
So you mustn’t ever trust any
of your data to a US company.
-
And they say that foreign subsidiaries
of US companies are subject to this as well
-
so the company you are directly
dealing with may be in Europe
-
but if it’s owned by a US company,
you got the same problem to deal with.
-
However, this is mainly a concern
-
when the data you are sending
to the service is not for publication.
-
There are some services
where you publish things.
-
Of course, if you publish something,
you know everybody is gonna be able to see it.
-
So, there is no way they can hurt you
-
by showing it to somebody
who wasn’t supposed to see it.
-
There is nobody who wasn’t supposed
to see it if you published it.
-
So in that case the problem doesn’t exist.
-
So these are four sub-issues
of this one threat of abusing our data.
-
The idea of the Freedom Box project is
you have your own server in your own home
-
and when you want to do something remotely
you do it with your own server
-
and the police have to get a court order
in order to search your server.
-
So you have the same rights this way that you
would have traditionally in the physical world.
-
The point here and in
so many other issues is:
-
as we start doing things
digitally instead of physically
-
we shouldn’t lose any of our rights, because
the general tendency is that we do lose rights.
-
Basically, Stallman’s law says
-
that in an epoch when governments
work for the mega-corporations
-
instead of reporting to their citizens
-
every technological change can be taken
advantage of to reduce our freedom.
-
Because reducing our freedom is what
these governments want to do.
-
So the question is: when
do they get an opportunity?
-
Well, any change that happens for some
other reason is a possible opportunity
-
and they will take advantage of it
if that’s their general desire.
-
But the other issue
with internet services
-
is that they can take
control of your computing
-
and that’s not so commonly known.
But It’s becoming more common.
-
There are services that offer to do
computing for you on data supplied by you
-
things that you should do
in your own computer
-
but they invite you to let somebody else’s
computer do that computing work for you.
-
And the result is you lose control over it.
It’s just as if you used a non-free program.
-
Two different scenarios
but they lead to the same problem.
-
If you do your computing
with a non-free program
-
well, the users don’t control
the non-free program
-
it controls the users,
which would include you.
-
So you’ve lost control of
the computing that’s being done.
-
But if you do your computing in his server
-
well, the programs that are doing it
are the ones he chose.
-
You can’t touch them or see them,
so you have no control over them.
-
He has control over them, maybe.
-
If they are free software and he installs
them then he has control over them.
-
But even he might not have control.
-
He might be running a proprietary
program in his server
-
in which case it’s somebody else who has control
of the computing being done in his server.
-
He doesn’t control it and you don’t.
-
But suppose he installs a free program
-
then he has control over the computing
being done in his computer, but you don’t.
-
So, either way, you don’t!
-
So the only way to have
control over your computing
-
is to do it with
your copy of a free program.
-
This practice is called
“Software as a Service”.
-
It means doing your computing with
your data in somebody else’s server.
-
And I don’t know of anything
that can make this acceptable.
-
It’s always something
that takes away your freedom
-
and the only solution
I know of is to refuse.
-
For instance, there are servers that
will do translation or voice recognition
-
and you are letting them have
control over this computing activity
-
which we shouldn’t ever do.
-
Of course, we are also
giving them data about ourselves
-
which they shouldn’t have.
-
Imagine if you had
a conversation with somebody
-
through a voice-recognition translation
system that was Software as as Service
-
and it’s really running
on a server belonging to some company.
-
That company also gets to know what
was said in the conversation
-
and if it’s a US company that means
Big Brother also gets to know. This is no good.
-
The next threat to our freedom in a digital
society is using computers for voting.
-
You can’t trust computers for voting.
-
Whoever controls the software
in those computers
-
has the power to commit
undetectable fraud.
-
Elections are special. Because there’s
nobody involved that we dare trust fully.
-
Everybody has to be checked,
crosschecked by others
-
so that nobody is in the position
to falsify the results by himself.
-
Because if anybody is in a position
to do that he might do it!
-
So our traditional systems
for voting were designed
-
so that nobody was fully trusted,
everybody was being checked by others.
-
So that nobody could easily commit fraud.
-
But once you introduce a program,
this is impossible!
-
How can you tell if a voting machine
would honestly count the votes?
-
You’d have to study the program that’s
running in it during the election
-
which of course nobody can do, and most
people wouldn’t even know how to do.
-
But even the experts who might theoretically
be capable of studying the program
-
they can’t do it while people are voting.
-
They’d have to do it in advance
-
and then how do they know
that the program they studied
-
is the one that’s running while
people vote? Maybe it’s been changed.
-
Now, if this program is proprietary,
that means some company controls it.
-
The election authority can’t even
tell what that program is doing.
-
Well, this company then
could rig the election.
-
There are accusations that this was done
in the US within the past ten years
-
that election results were falsified this way.
-
But what if the program is free software?
-
That means the election authority
-
who owns this voting machine
has control over the software in it
-
so the election authority
could rig the election.
-
You can’t trust them either.
-
You don’t dare trust anybody in voting
-
and the reason is, there’s no way
that the voters can verify for themselves
-
that their votes were correctly counted,
nor that false votes were not added.
-
In other activities of life, you can usually
tell if somebody is trying to cheat you.
-
Consider for instance buying
something from a store.
-
You order something, maybe
you give a credit card number.
-
If the product doesn’t come,
you can complain
-
and you can, of course if you got
a good enough memory,
-
you will notice if that product doesn’t come.
-
You’re not just giving total blind trust
to the store, because you can check.
-
But in elections you can’t check.
-
I saw once a paper where someone described
-
a theoretical system for voting
-
which uses some sophisticated mathematics
-
so that people could check
that their votes had been counted
-
even though everybody’s vote was secret
-
and they could also verify
that false votes hadn’t been added.
-
It was very exciting, powerful mathematics;
-
but even if that mathematics is correct
-
that doesn’t mean the system
would be acceptable to use in practice
-
because the vulnerabilities of a real
system might be outside of that mathematics.
-
For instance, suppose you’re
voting over the Internet
-
and suppose you’re using
a machine that’s a zombie.
-
It might tell you that
the vote was sent for A
-
while actually sending a vote for B.
Who knows whether you’d ever find out?
-
In practice, the only way to see
if these systems work and are honest
-
is through years, in fact decades, of trying
them and checking in other ways what happened.
-
I wouldn’t want my country
to be the pioneer in this.
-
So, use paper for voting. Make sure
there are ballots that can be recounted.
-
The next threat to our freedom in a digital
society comes from the war on sharing.
-
One of the tremendous benefits
of digital technology
-
is that it is easy to copy published works
and share these copies with others.
-
Sharing is good, and with
digital technology, sharing is easy.
-
So, millions of people share.
-
Those who profit by having power
-
over the distribution of these
works don’t want us to share.
-
And since they are businesses,
governments which have betrayed their people
-
and work for the empire of mega-corporations
try to serve those businesses
-
they are against their own people, they are
for the businesses, for the publishers.
-
Well, that’s not good.
And with the help of these governments
-
the companies have been waging war on sharing
-
and they’ve proposed a series
of cruel draconian measures.
-
Why do they propose cruel draconian measures?
-
Because nothing less has a chance of success:
-
when something is good
and easy, people do it.
-
And the only way to stop them
is by being very nasty.
-
So of course, what they propose is nasty,
nasty, and the next one is nastier.
-
So they tried suing teenagers for hundreds
of thousands of dollars — that was pretty nasty.
-
And they tried turning
our technology against us
-
Digital Restrictions Management
that means, digital handcuffs.
-
But among the people
there were clever programmers too
-
and they found ways to break the handcuffs.
-
For instance, DVDs were designed to have
encrypted movies in a secret encryption format
-
and the idea was that all
the programs to decrypt the video
-
would be proprietary with digital handcuffs.
-
They would all be designed
to restrict the users.
-
And their scheme worked okay for a while.
-
But some people in Europe
figured out the encryption
-
and they released a free program that
could actually play the video on a DVD.
-
Well, the movie companies
didn’t leave it there.
-
They went to the US congress and bought
a law making that software illegal.
-
The United States invented
censorship of software in 1998
-
with the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act [DMCA].
-
So the distribution of that free program
was forbidden in the United States.
-
Unfortunately it didn’t stop
with the United States.
-
The European Union adopted a directive
in 2003 I believe, requiring such laws.
-
The directive only says that
commercial distribution has to be banned
-
but just about every country in
the European Union has adopted a nastier law.
-
In France, the mere possession
of a copy of that program
-
is an offense punished by
imprisonment, thanks to Sarkozy.
-
I believe that was done by the law DADVSI.
-
I guess he hoped that with
an unpronounceable name
-
people wouldn’t be able to criticize it.
-
So, elections are coming.
Ask the candidates in the parties:
-
will you repeal the DADVSI?
And if not, don’t support them.
-
You mustn’t give up lost
moral territory forever.
-
You’ve got to fight to win it back.
-
So, we still are fighting
against digital handcuffs.
-
The Amazon “Swindle” has digital handcuffs
-
to take away the traditional freedoms
of readers to do things such as:
-
give a book to someone else,
or lend a book to someone else.
-
That’s a vitally important social act.
-
That is what builds society
among people who read: lending books.
-
Amazon doesn’t want to let
people lend books freely.
-
And then there is also selling a book, perhaps
to a used bookstore. You can’t do that either.
-
It looked for a while as if
DRM had disappeared on music
-
but now they’re bringing it back
with streaming services such as Spotify.
-
These services all require
proprietary client software
-
and the reason is so they can put
digital handcuffs on the users.
-
So, reject them! They already
showed quite openly
-
that you can’t trust them,
because first they said:
-
“you can listen as much as you like”,
and then they said:
-
“Oh, no! You can only listen
a certain number of hours a month.”
-
The issue is not whether that particular
change was good or bad, just or unjust;
-
the point is, they have the power
to impose any change in policies.
-
So don’t let them have that power.
-
You should have your own copy
of any music you want to listen to.
-
And then came the next assault on our freedom:
HADOPI, basically punishment on accusation.
-
It was started in France but it’s been
exported to many other countries.
-
The United States now demand such unjust
policies in its free exploitation treaties.
-
A few months ago, Columbia adopted such a law
under orders from its masters in Washington.
-
Of course, the ones in Washington
are not the real masters
-
they’re just the ones who control the
United States on behalf of the Empire.
-
But they’re the ones who also dictate
to Columbia on behalf of the Empire.
-
In France, since the
Constitutional Council
-
objected to explicitly giving
people punishment without trial
-
they invented a kind of trial
which is not a real trial
-
which is just a form of a trial
-
so they can pretend that people
have a trial before they’re punished.
-
But in other countries
they don’t bother with that
-
it’s explicit punishment on accusation only.
-
Which means that for the sake
of their war on sharing
-
they’re prepared to abolish
the basic principles of justice.
-
It shows how thoroughly
anti-freedom, anti-justice they are.
-
These are not legitimate governments.
-
And I’m sure they’ll
come up with more nasty ideas
-
because they’re paid to defeat
the people no matter what it takes.
-
Now, when they do this, they always say
that it’s for the sake of the artists
-
that they have “protect” the “creators”.
-
Now those are both propaganda terms.
-
I‘m convinced that the reason
they love the word “creators“
-
is because it is a comparison with a deity.
-
They want us to think of artists as super-human
-
and thus deserving special
privileges and power over us
-
which is something I disagree with.
-
In fact though, the only artists that benefit
very much from this system are the big stars.
-
The other artists are getting
crushed into the ground
-
by the heels of these same companies.
-
But they treat the stars very well,
because the stars have a lot of clout.
-
If a star threatens to move to
another company, the company says:
-
“oh, we’ll give you what you want.”
-
But for any other artist they say: “you don’t
matter, we can treat you any way we like.”
-
So the superstars have been corrupted by the
millions of dollars or euros that they get
-
to the point where they’ll do
almost anything for more money.
-
For instance, J. K. Rowling is a good example.
-
J. K. Rowling, a few years ago,
went to court in Canada
-
and obtained an order that people who
had bought her books must not read them.
-
She got an order telling
people not to read her books.
-
Here’s what happened. A bookstore put
the books on display for sale too early
-
before the day they
were supposed to go on sale.
-
And people came into the store and said:
-
“oh, I want that!” and they bought it
and took away their copies.
-
Then, they discovered the mistake
so they took the copies off of display.
-
But Rowling wanted to crush any circulation
of any information from those books
-
so she went to court, and the court ordered
-
those people not to read
the books that they now owned.
-
In response, I call for a total
boycott of Harry Potter.
-
But I don’t say you shouldn’t read
those books or watch the movies
-
I only say you shouldn’t buy
the books or pay for the movies.
-
I leave it to Rowling to tell
people not to read the books.
-
As far as I’m concerned, if you borrow
the book and read it, that’s okay.
-
Just don’t give her any money!
But this happened with paper books.
-
The court could make this order
but it couldn’t get the books back
-
from the people who had bought them.
-
Imagine if they were ebooks. Imagine if
they were ebooks on the “Swindle”.
-
Amazon could send commands to erase them.
-
So, I don’t have much respect for stars
who will go to such lengths for more money.
-
But most artists aren’t like that, they
never got enough money to be corrupted.
-
Because the current system of copyright
supports most artists very badly.
-
And so, when these companies demand
to expand the war on sharing
-
supposedly for the sake of the artists
-
I’m against what they want but I would
like to support the artists better.
-
I appreciate their work and I realize if we
want them to do more work we should support them.
-
I have two proposals
for how to support artists
-
methods that are compatible with sharing.
-
That would allow us to end the war
on sharing and still support artists.
-
One method uses tax money.
-
We get a certain amount of public
funds to distribute among artists.
-
But, how much should each artist get?
We have to measure popularity.
-
The current system supposedly supports
artists based on their popularity.
-
So I’m saying let’s keep that, let’s
continue on this system based on popularity.
-
We can measure the popularity
of all the artists
-
with some kind of polling or sampling,
so that we don’t have to do surveillance.
-
We can respect people’s anonymity.
-
We get a raw popularity figure for each artist.
-
How do we convert that into an amount of money?
-
The obvious way is: distribute
the money in proportion to popularity.
-
So if A is a thousand times as popular as B
A will get a thousand times as much money as B.
-
That’s not efficient distribution of the money.
-
It’s not putting the money to good use.
-
It’s easy for a star A to be a thousand times
as popular as a fairly successful artist B.
-
If we use linear proportion, we’ll give A
a thousand times as much money as we give B.
-
And that means that, either we have
to make A tremendously rich
-
or we are not supporting B enough.
-
The money we use to make
A tremendously rich
-
is failing to do an effective job of
supporting the arts; so, it’s inefficient.
-
Therefore I say: let’s use the cube root.
Cube root looks sort of like this.
-
The point is: if A is a thousand
times as popular as B
-
with the cube root A
will get ten times as much as B
-
not a thousand times as much,
just ten times as much.
-
The use of the cube root
shifts a lot of the money
-
from the stars to the artists
of moderate popularity.
-
And that means, with less money we can adequately
support a much larger number of artists.
-
There are two reasons why this system
would use less money than we pay now.
-
First of all because it would be
supporting artists but not companies.
-
Second because it would shift the money from
the stars to the artists of moderate popularity.
-
Now, it would remain the case that the more
popular you are, the more money you get.
-
So the star A would still get more
than B, but not astronomically more.
-
That’s one method, and because
it won’t be so much money
-
it doesn’t matter so much
how we get the money.
-
It could be from a special tax
on Internet connectivity
-
it could just be some of the general budget
that gets allocated to this purpose.
-
We won’t care because
it won’t be so much money;
-
much less than we’re paying now.
-
The other method I’ve proposed
is voluntary payments.
-
Suppose each player had a button
you could use to send one euro.
-
A lot of people would send it,
after all it’s not that much money.
-
I think a lot of you might
push that button every day
-
to give one euro to some artist
who had made a work that you liked.
-
But nothing would demand this
-
you wouldn’t be required or ordered
or pressured to send the money;
-
you would do it because you felt like it.
-
But there are some people
who wouldn’t do it
-
because they’re poor and they
can’t afford to give one euro.
-
And it’s good that they won’t give it.
-
We don’t have to squeeze money
out of poor people to support the artists.
-
There are enough non poor people
who’ll be happy to do it.
-
Why wouldn’t you give one euro to some
artists today, if you appreciated their work?
-
It’s too inconvenient to give it to them.
So my proposal is to remove the inconvenience.
-
If the only reason not to give that euro is
you would have one euro less
-
you would do it fairly often.
-
So these are my two proposals
for how to support artists
-
while encouraging sharing
because sharing is good.
-
Let’s put an end to the war on sharing,
laws like DADVSI and HADOPI.
-
It’s not just the methods
that they propose that are evil
-
their purpose is evil.
-
That’s why they propose
cruel and draconian measures.
-
They’re trying to do something
that’s nasty by nature.
-
So let’s support artists in other ways.
-
The last threat to our freedom
in digital society is the fact
-
that we don’t have a firm right
to do the things we do, in cyberspace.
-
In the physical world,
if you have certain views
-
and you want to give people copies
of a text that defends those views
-
you’re free to do so. You could
even buy a printer to print them
-
and you’re free to hand them out on the street
-
or you’re free to rent
a store and hand them out there.
-
If you want to collect
money to support your cause
-
you can just have a can and people
could put money into the can.
-
You don’t need to get somebody else’s
approval or cooperation to do these things.
-
But, in the Internet, you do need that.
-
For instance if you want
to distribute a text on the Internet
-
you need companies to help you do it.
You can’t do it by yourself.
-
So if you want to have a website, you need
the support of an ISP or a hosting company
-
and you need a domain name registrar.
-
You need them to continue
to let you do what you’re doing.
-
So you’re doing it effectively
on sufferance, not by right.
-
And if you want to receive money,
you can’t just hold out a can.
-
You need the cooperation
of a payment company.
-
And we saw that this makes all of our
digital activities vulnerable to suppression.
-
We learned this when the United States government
-
launched a distributed denial of service
attack [DDoS] against WikiLeaks.
-
Now I’m making a bit of a joke because
the words “distributed denial of service attack”
-
usually refer to a different kind of attack.
-
But they fit perfectly with
what the United States did.
-
The United States went to the various kinds
of network services that WikiLeaks depended on
-
and told them to cut off
service to WikiLeaks. And they did.
-
For instance, WikiLeaks had rented
a virtual Amazon server
-
and the US government told Amazon: “cut off
service for WikiLeaks.” And it did, arbitrarily.
-
And then, Amazon had certain domain names
such as wikileaks.org
-
the US government tried to get
all those domains shut off.
-
But it didn’t succeed, some of them were
outside its control and were not shut off.
-
Then, there were the payment companies.
The US went to PayPal and said:
-
“Stop transferring money to WikiLeaks
or we’ll make life difficult for you.”
-
And PayPal shut off payments to WikiLeaks.
-
And then it went to Visa and Mastercard and
got them to shut off payments to WikiLeaks.
-
Others started collecting money on WikiLeaks
behalf and their accounts were shut off too.
-
But in this case, maybe something can be done.
-
There’s a company in Iceland which began
collecting money on behalf of WikiLeaks
-
and so Visa and Mastercard shut off its account;
-
it couldn’t receive money
from its customers either.
-
Now, that business is suing Visa and
Mastercard apparently under European Union law
-
because Visa and Mastercard
together have a near-monopoly.
-
They’re not allowed to arbitrarily
deny service to anyone.
-
Well, this is an example
of how things need to be
-
for all kinds of services
that we use in the Internet.
-
If you rented a store to hand out
statements of what you think
-
or any other kind of information
that you can lawfully distribute
-
the landlord couldn’t kick you out just
because he didn’t like what you were saying.
-
As long as you keep paying the rent,
you have the right to continue in that store
-
for a certain agreed-on period
of time that you signed.
-
So you have some rights
that you can enforce.
-
And they couldn’t shut off
your telephone line
-
because the phone company
doesn’t like what you said
-
or because some powerful entity didn’t like
what you said and threatened the phone company.
-
No! As long as you pay the bills
and obey certain basic rules
-
they can’t shut off your phone line.
This is what it’s like to have some rights!
-
Well, if we move our activities from
the physical world to the virtual world
-
then either we have the same rights in the
virtual world, or we have been harmed.
-
So, the precarity of all our Internet activities
is the last of the menaces I wanted to mention.
-
Now I’d like to say that for more information
about free software, look at GNU.org.
-
Also look at fsf.org, which is the website
of the Free Software Foundation.
-
You can go there and find many ways
you can help us, for instance.
-
You can also become a member of the Free
Software Foundation through that site
-
if you're going to do e-commerce.
If you'd like to join and pay cash
-
right here you can do that too.
I've got cards you can fill out.
-
There is also the Free Software Foundation
of Europe fsfe.org. You can join FSFE also.
-
Can you accept membership in cash?
-
Is there someone who wants to join right now?
-
Ok, so you can join FSFE also
paying with cash.
-
Now it's time and, by the way
-
I know the case of the FSF
we get most of our funds from members
-
so joining is really important
and probably for FSFE as well.
-
Now it's time for me to raise funds
in another way.
-
This is an adorable gnu
that needs a home.
-
And I'm going to auction it on behalf
of the Free Software Foundation.
-
If you buy the gnu, I'll sign
a card for you, if you like
-
and if you have a penguin
you need to get a gnu
-
because as we all know a penguin
can hardly function without a gnu.
-
When you bid, please wave your arm
and shout the quantity you are bidding
-
so that I notice you.
-
If you are bidding, I think you
want me to notice that you're bidding.
-
The FSF can accept payments
either in cash or with a credit card.
-
If the credit card works for ordering
by telephone then it won't work with us.
-
So, I'm going to start with 20 euros.
Do I get 20 euros?
-
I've got 20 euros, do I have 25?
-
How much?
-
Trente?
Ok, I've got 30 euros, do I have 35?
-
How much?
I've got 35, do I get 40?
-
I have 42
-
I have 42 euros, do I have 50?
-
How much?
I've got 50, do I get 60?
-
I've got 60, do I get 70?
-
How much?
I've got 70, do I get 80?
-
I've got 80, do I get 90?
-
I've got 80 euros, do I get 90
for this adorable gnu?
-
How much?
I've got 100 euros, do I get 110?
-
I've got 110, do I get 120?
-
I've got 120, do I get 130?
-
I've got 130, do I get 140?
-
How much?
I've got 140, do I get 150?
-
I've got 150, do I get 160?
-
I've got 160, do I get 170?
-
How much?
I've got 170, do I get 180?
-
Do you bid?
I've got 200
-
I've got 200, do I get 210?
-
I've got 210, do I get 220?
-
I've got 220, do I get 230?
-
Do I get 230 for this adorable gnu
that needs a home?
-
Do I get 230 to the Free Software
Foundation to defend freedom?
-
Last chance to bid. How much?
-
I've got 230, do I get 240?
-
I've got 240, do I get 250?
-
For this adorable gnu
to defend freedom?
-
How much?
I've got 300
-
I've got 300, do I get 320 for this
adorable gnu to defend freedom?
-
I've got 320, do I get 340?
-
How much? 340?
I've got 340, do I get 360?
-
What? I've got 340.
-
No, no I don't want to go up by such
small increments, we'll be here all night
-
I've got 340, do I get 360?
-
I've got 360, do I get 380?
-
I've got 380, do I get 400?
-
to defend freedom?
for this adorable gnu, do I get 400?
-
I've got 380, do I get 400?
Last chance to bid, 400 or more.
-
Last chance, going...
-
I've got 400, do I get 420?
-
How much?
I've got 420, do I get 440?
-
Last chance to bid 440 or more
for this adorable gnu.
-
Do I get 440?
Last chance, going, going
-
sold for 420.
-
Please note that there are stickers
which are gratuit to take.
-
Please take as many as you can
and make good use of.
-
There are also various small things
to sell, like badges and elegant pins
-
and the money supports
the Free Software Foundation.
-
Anyway now it's time for me
to answer questions.
