Stallman took his philosophical message to an audience of students, professors and press at New York University's Stern School of Business here Tuesday morning. He held forth for more than 2 hours, in a talk that was billed as the FSF's response to Microsoft executive Craig Mundie's May 3 speech, in which Mundie dissed the GNU General Public License (or GPL) and open-source software. Microsoft has argued that sharing source code on a limited basis, rather than developing free software or open-source software, offers developers and customers the most sustainable business model.
Erroneously, "Microsoft called the GPL an open-source license," said Stallman. "They don't want people to think about freedom as an issue. They want people to think as consumers... not as citizens or statesmen."
Stallman addressed everything from the distinctions between open source and GNU/Linux to his take on how Microsoft might be best broken up by the government, in the aftermath of the Department of Justice antitrust trial.
On the latter issue, Stallman told the Free Software-friendly crowd--several were outfitted in Ximian, Debian and Perl wares--that he'd suggest breaking Microsoft into separate software and services companies, rather than along the operating system/application lines suggested by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in the case.
"Microsoft is preparing to do something dirty: They are tying services to programs," Stallman told the audience. By using these kind of (Hailstorm) services, they are "looking to achieve a greater lock, a greater monopoly on those services."
Stallman also had retorts to some of the suggested GPL-related questions forwarded to some reporters by Microsoft before Stallman's address. Microsoft's list, distributed via email, called into question what Microsoft presented as ambiguities in some of the licensing terms and conditions outlined in the new Free Software Foundation Frequently Asked Questions document.
"Would Microsoft let you use 1,000 lines of their code in your program?" Stallman asked. "Maybe you could negotiate a special license with them," but a free-software company could also hammer out an agreement with a customer desiring to use GPL-protected code, he said. "In both cases, the 'normal' (Microsoft and GPL) licenses wouldn't permit it."
"The GNU GPL defends your freedom. This is why Microsoft is attacking today," Stallman told the audience. "Microsoft would like to take the code we wrote and make improvements or even introduce some incompatible versions--and put it on everybody's desktop. But the GPL doesn't allow for 'embrace and extend.'"
What's Love got to do with it?
Microsoft wasn't the only company to incur Stallman's wrath. He also had nothing good to say about Caldera Systems and its CEO Ransom Love. Love recently went public with his claim that the GPL was holding back commercial Linux vendors like Caldera, and said that Caldera was considering switching to the BSD license for its commercial products.
"Caldera's not a free software company at all. They are just a parasite," Stallman claimed in a press conference following his talk. "Who in the world is Ransom Love to have any ideas about what's good for our community?"
Stallman went so far as to suggest that consumers who care about the philosophical ideas espoused by the Free Software Foundation possibly boycott non-free-software products, such as those produced by Caldera.
Despite Stallman's hard line on free software vs. open source, he joined a number of open-sofware luminaries in composing a retort to Microsoft's shared source strategy. In that document, Stallman and the other authors noted that: "Although Microsoft raises the issue of GPL violations, that is a classic red herring. Many more people find themselves in violation of Microsoft licenses, because Microsoft doesn't allow copying, modification and redistribution as the GPL does. Microsoft license violations have resulted in civil suits and imprisonment. Accidental GPL violations are easily remedied, and rarely get to court."
