Richard Stallman Responds to Morozov’s “Meme Hustler”

Dear Editor,

I am honored by Evgeny Morozov’s description of the Free Software Movement, but I would like to correct a few specific points.

1. “Open source” did not replace the Free Software Movement. We are still here, still spreading the idea that the users of computing deserve to control their computing. We have more influence in some other countries than in the US. See gnu.org and fsf.org.

2. The article refers to “the Linux operating system”, but that term is a misnomer. The system people have in mind, when they say this, is basically the GNU operating system that I launched in 1984 to give users control over their computing. Linux is one system component, developed by Linus Torvalds starting in 1991, which filled the last gap in the GNU system. Since the combination is much more GNU than Linux, it is appropriately called GNU+Linux or GNU/Linux. See
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html.

3. The article mentions the General Public License. Actually, it is the GNU General Public License. I wrote it for the GNU system; but anyone can write and release software under that license. Hundreds of GNU programs, and thousands of other programs (including Linux) use this license to liberate their users and resist conversion into proprietary software. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html.

4. How the use of web services affects users’ control freedom is an important question, and our first proposed conclusion is that you should not entrust your own computing to a service that does it using software chosen by the service operator. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html.

Sincerely,

Dr. Richard Stallman

President, Free Software Foundation

Boston