The Free Software Foundation: 30 Years In Slashdot posting tells that the Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. Things have changed a lot in 30 years, but nowdays open source software is even more important. In The Free Software Foundation: 30 years in interview article, FSF executive director John Sullivan discusses the most prominent risks to software freedom today, Richard M. Stallman, and more.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Richard Stallman ‘basically’ has no problem with the NSA using GNU/Linux
http://www.itworld.com/article/2946683/linux/richard-stallman-basically-has-no-problem-with-the-nsa-using-gnulinux.html
Credit: Swapnil Bhartiya
It’s Stallman’s philosophy that ‘a program must not restrict what jobs its users do with it’ — and that includes the NSA.
If you have been keeping an eye on what the NSA has been up to while they were busy reading your emails, you might be aware of the XKEYSCORE program run by the agency. According to Edward Snowden, as told to Glenn Greenwald, the program was used to “sweep up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications.”
This is old news, you say. We’ve all known about it since 2013. So what’s the big deal and why am bringing it up now?
The big deal is that the NSA was allegedly running the program on ‘Free and Open Source’ software. Greenwald disclosed it yesterday on The Intercept:
XKEYSCORE is a piece of Linux software that is typically deployed on Red Hat servers. It uses the Apache web server and stores collected data in MySQL databases. File systems in a cluster are handled by the NFS distributed file system and the autofs service, and scheduled tasks are handled by the cron scheduling service. Systems administrators who maintain XKEYSCORE servers use SSH to connect to them, and they use tools such as rsync and vim, as well as a comprehensive command-line tool, to manage the software.
This story generated mixed responses from the Open Source community.
I recalled a discussion around the same topic with Richard M Stallman in India a few years ago. But I had vague recollection of it so I reached out to him and asked him outright: “Should free software care or dictate who should use it? Shouldn’t any such free project be agnostic to ‘who’ uses it?”
He came back with a simple reply: “I basically agree with you.” And pointed me to an FSF article where he discussed the issue. I highly recommend that everyone interested in this story read his blog in it entirety. But the key takeaway is this: “A program must not restrict what jobs its users do with it.”
nd the fact remains that the herculean task that the NSA decided to take on is better done with Free Software than proprietary software.