Richard Stallman's Personal Home Page

This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or GNU Project. For information about them and their positions, see http://www.gnu.org/.

The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day. Please also look at the Urgent action notes, and occasionally at the Long-term action notes.

I'd like to make a list of countries that do not require a national identity card, and have no plans to adopt one. If you live in or have confirmed knowledge of such a country, please send email to rms at gnu.org.

Here's my current list of countries with no national ID cards and no plans for one: Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Canada, and India (but I've recently heard there are plans to institute one).

Can you find any of these records?

graphic by Susan Henson Americans, you may wish to copy this icon to your own page, as a way of showing what patriotism means to you.

[More Cartoons]

"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul."

-Mahatma Gandhi

A photo of RMS with a large "aureole" by Roberto Brenlla.

An imaginative painting of Richard Stallman, by Jin Wicked.

Urgent action items

First, some urgent action items.

• US residents: support the Leave My Child Alone campaign.

  The "No Child Left Behind" law requires public high schools to tell military recruiters how to contact the students. But parents can refuse access to their children. On June 1, activities are scheduled around the US to encourage parents to say no. Whether or not you are a parent, you can help.

• US residents: MoveOn is cleverly using the new Star Wars movie for a campaign against the Republicans' "nuclear option". You can help.

• US citizens: phone your senators now to oppose the Republican's "nuclear option".

• Sign the petition to "fire" Congressman DeLay.

• US residents: pressure the national pharmacy chains to reliably fill prescriptions for birth control.

  And pressure your congressmen to support a bill to make this a requirement:

• US citizens: tell your congressmen to oppose HR 1528, a cruel law to increase penalties for using marijuana. Among other things, people would be sent to prison just for failing to report someone else--the sort of policy that is typical of police states.

• Greg Palast is threatened with lawsuits for his investigative journalism, and asks for contributions to help fight them. See GregPalast.com.

  It was Palast who definitively exposed how Bush stole the 2000 election by falsely excluding some 50,000 Florida voters by labeling them as "felons".

• Participate on June 19 in the Global Day of Action to free Aung San Suu Kyi, the only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner (on her 60th birthday).

• Citizens of France: vote against the EU Constitution. It was designed to privilege business rights over citizens' rights, it is undemocratic, it prefigures the abolition of public services, and it is nearly impossible to amend.

  I base this information on a booklet called Quand l'Union Europene tue l'Europe, from http://www.urfig.org/. People tell me that this booklet is not on their web site, but perhaps you can get a printed copy from them.

Long-term action items

• There is a boycott of Caterpillar--the company that makes the bulldozers Israel uses to knock down Palestinian homes.
• Support Senator Boxer's campaign to pressure oil companies to stay out of ANWR.

  I'm annoyed by the gratuitous suggestion that you say that the ANWR wilderness was "god-given", which presumes absurd views on the nature of the universe. I suggest editing out that part of the letter.

• If you have a TIAA-CREF pension, join the campaign to convince TIAA-CREF to pressure Coca Cola Company.
• French citizens: participate in this forum to oppose biometric passports.
• Support the Green Party of the United States.
• US citizens: sign this petition in favor of the Kyoto treaty.
• There is a campaign to download and show Eyes on the Prize.
• US citizens: sign the new Not In Our Name statement.
• Sign the petition asking Canada to give refugee status to Americans who escape from the Bush forces.
• Sign the petition for independent inspection of voting machines in the US.
• Boycott Liberty Apparel--for running sweatshops.
• US voters, support Kucinich's campaign to create a Department of Peace which would encourage nonviolent solutions to international problems.
• UK citizens: read about the mandatory ID card plan and then sign Liberty's petition against it.

  Support http://www.no2id.net/.

  Also see http://www.defy-id.org.uk/ for another action.

• In France, people are vowing to boycott the record companies due to the laws that they are lobbying for.
• Evidence of wide-ranging and persistent FBI misconduct, including sheltering murderers, shows that other instances of alleged FBI misconduct, such as the fabricated evidence against Leonard Peltier, deserve fresh investigations. Sign this petition.
• US citizens: you can sign your name to the campaign to repeal part of the U.S.A. P.A.T. R.I.O.T. Act. This would make the police once again have to get search warrants before they can get information from bookstores or libraries about what you have read or borrowed.

  This is a step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough. The PAT RIOT act was extended in December 2003 to give the police equally easy access to many kinds of transaction records about you. The PAT RIOT act attacks your freedom in other ways, too, and not all of them will expire in 2005. See http://www.aclu.org/safeandfree/.

• UK citizens: renew your passport before 2005, so you can avoid contributing your biometric to the national ID card plan. If you don't have a passport, get one now!
• Israelis who refuse military service in the occupation of Palestine have trouble supporting their families. Yesh Gvul is asking for donations of funds to help these families. (The idea is that this will help more people decide to refuse.)
• European citizens: tell your government you do not want digital fingerprints in your passports. Push back against the US!

  Why should you be treated like a criminal just to get permission to leave your country?

• Support the call for a Nobel Prize in Sustainable Development.
• Citizens of Europe: sign the resolution that demands a voter-verifiable audit trail for electronic voting machines.
• Please sign the petition against unsafe computerization of elections and careless purging of voter lists.
• Boycott Coca Cola Company.
• Support federal medical marijuana legislation.
• Join the boycott of Chinese products to support human rights for Tibetans and Chinese.
• Precisely how the Bush team stole the Florida election is documented. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida and a close associate of Bush's brother, deliberately blocked careful checking of the list of felons, with the result that thousands of Black people who were not felons and were legally entitled to vote were blocked from voting.

  This gun is smoking enough for me. Dubya's forces stole the election; Dubya should resign!

  (He stole the second election too.)

Some humor

I like computers, music and butterflies---among other things.

Here I am wearing my "power tie".

Here I am struggling to open a bottle of water.

My application to an Ex Boyfriends List

What Republicans Believe.

I am also a saint, in the Church of Emacs--Saint IGNUcius. The Church of Emacs will soon be officially listed by at least one person as his religion for census purposes.

There are no godfathers in the Church of Emacs, since there are no gods, but you can be someone's editorfather.

Here are my funny poetry and song parodies and some jokes.

Stallman Does Dallas: "I have to warn you that Texans have been known to have an adverse reaction to my personality . . . "

The Dalai Lama today announced the official release of Yellow Hat GNU/Linux.

On Hacking: In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".

A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering

I found A funny song about the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act (officially the Sonny Bono Copyright Act) which extended copyright retroactively by 20 years on works made as early as the 1920s.

My Puns in Spanish

Political Articles

This is a list of my political articles that are not related to the GNU Project. For GNU-related articles, see the GNU philosophy directory.

• The Conundrum of the Bush Forces Soldier
• Here are my responses to the consultation in this link. They might interest some readers.
• Here's a recording of a radio show that I was on.
• The Knife- Stupid Airport Security Tricks
• What Should the US do in Iraq?
• Biopiracy or Bioprivateering?
• The states need to form a union.
• A slightly revised version of an article that appeared in Salon Magazine on 11 September 2002.
• Dear President Musharraf...
• On July 22, Israel killed a Hamas leader, Salah Shaheda, who was in charge of many Hamas attacks.
• Is the US killing many Afghan civilians to save one US soldier?
• Political fencing in Israel.
• I got a message with a series of points criticizing Americans for blaming companies and institutions rather than themselves. I partly agree with the underlying message that people should take charge and solve problems, rather than just cast blame on others. However, the points go too far--they whitewash companies and institutions that really did something wrong.
• British book publishers plan to put a microchip into every book to record who owns it -- an unprecedented surveillance measure. Given the publishers' opposition to such institutions as free lending libraries and used book stores, we must suspect that this scheme is aimed at them. Will they try to collect a fee every time a used book is resold, as part of storing the new owner's name on the chip?
• Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. I was shocked to learn recently that there is no border fence dividing Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories. The reason is that expansionists want to annex these territories permanently. In their eyes, a fence would be an admission that those territories are not part of Israel, so they won't allow it.
• When President Chavez of Venezuela was ousted in a military coup, newspaper coverage in the US hinted that Chavez was mentally unstable. He thought he could make his country independent of the IMF. He thought that the generals of his Venezuela would be loyal to Venezuela instead of Washington. A man would have to be crazy to believe such things--or would he?
• When police say "No witnesses", one must suspect they are up to some kind of dirty work that they don't want to admit to the public. An encounter in a Paris airport.
• Human Rights in the US, and in China. The Chinese government has released a report detailing human rights violations in the US. The abuses include torture of detainees by police, sometimes resulting in death. All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights; from Bolivia to Spain, from the US to China, no government should escape.
• Someone to watch over me. Nowadays, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you aren't really under surveillance.
• Stopping terrorists before they start. Making sure that the CIA does not create new enemies to attack us tomorrow surely deserves high priority in any sincere "War on Terrorism".
• Bush has proposed a large increase in military spending, including pay raises for soldiers, reserves to cover the expenses of possible combat, unmanned vehicles, and ballistic missile defense. Some of these make sense, more or less -- but ballistic missile defense? It's clear what is happening here: Bush is at his old tricks.
• The Injustice of Military Courts. Bush has a plan to try alleged terrorists in military courts---courts where the prosecutor, the defense lawyer, and the judges all work for Bush. If we could only be sure that the accused are really guilty, shoddy trials would not matter--we wouldn't need trials at all. But accusations against innocent people happen with terrible regularity, and the danger of false convictions is immense.
• Police State Minus One Day And Counting. In late October Congress signed an anti-terrorism bill that undermined basic protections against police intrusion. It also attacks freedom of assembly. This article was originally published on Newsforge the day before the bill (S.1510) was passed. The only proposed provision that Congress rejected was that for indefinite detention of noncitizens without trial; Bush then proposed military trials as a way to get the same job done.
• Who watches the watchmen? Whenever police ask to be allowed to bypass search warrants, we must be on guard. First published on Newsforge.
• If we are not careful, the deadly attacks on New York and Washington will lead to far worse secondary damage, if the U.S. Congress adopts "preventive measures" that take away the freedom that America stands for. Thousands are dead -- but millions could be deprived of civil liberties. First published on Newsforge.
• While traveling from South Africa to Sweden in June, I became a victim of the War on Drugs. First published on Newsforge.
• Science must "push copyright aside." Written for a debate about electronic access to scientific literature. First published 8 June 2001.
• The antidemocratic suppression of public protest is now a standard part of the effort to impose antidemocratic trade treaties.
• Waiting for the Knock, an article about Britain's plans for secret police raids to seize decryption keys. First published in the Guardian (London), 25 November 1999.

  Sad to say, this law was adopted in Britain in July 2000. Residents of the UK must now start using steganography to protect themselves from secret raids.

Political notes

"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an associate, 1849

Some of the notes have links to articles from The Independent or the Belfast Telegraph. It now appears that many of their past articles are available only for a fee (and not accessible anonymously at all). I would like to replace all those non-functional links with new accessible links--either links to the same article on another site, or links to other articles that provide the same information to substantiate the point of the note. Please help me find replacements for them.

Here are notes about various issues I care about, usually with links to more information. The first file is the current one; go there to see the latest notes.

[ Current (2005 March - June) | 2004 November - 2005 February | 2004 July - October | 2004 May - August | 2004 March - June | 2004 January - April | 2003 November - February | 2003 September - December | 2003 May - August | 2003 January - April | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 ]

Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being archived on their own page

Curiosities

Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Travel experiences

Photos from OSCON
More Photos

Photos from my visit to Switzerland in May 2003.

Photos from some of my trips are here.

Some pictures from Vaasa, where I slipped on icy ground in the airport, broke my elbow, and gave my speech by telephone from the hospital bed.

My visit to Machu Picchu.

Stories about visits to Tikal and Greece.

Photos from my trip to Greece.

In Singapore in March 2001, a lovely parrot (50k jpeg) became enamored of me, while others enjoyed my recorder playing (91k jpeg).

There are photos of my visit to China in May/June 2000. I also visited Tibet unawares, because nobody told me that JiuZhaiGou was part of Tibetan territory annexed by China since the conquest.

There are photos of my visit to Brazil: some from Rio de Janeiro, and some from Porto Alegre where the Software Livre 2000 event was held.

There are other photos available from my trip to Slovenia.

Airlines

Don't fly Air France if you can help it. This is not a boycott, just a suggestion. Air France is unbelievable.

The Transportation Security Administration is tyrannizing airline passengers in the name of security.

For future trips, I think I will print copies of that article so I can hand them out while waiting in the line at the checkpoint.

Go to China or else! (12 April 2003)

Distinguishing real, useful air security measures from snake oil.

a Serious Bio

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free software operating system GNU. The name ``GNU'' is a recursive acronym for ``GNU's Not Unix''.

GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. Non-free software keeps users divided and helpless, forbidden to share it and unable to change it. A free operating system is essential for people to be able to use computers in freedom.

Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are in widespread use. There are estimated to be some 20 million users of GNU/Linux systems today.

Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU Compiler Collection, a portable optimizing compiler which was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages.

Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.

Stallman received the Grace Hopper award for 1991 from the Association for Computing Machinery, for his development of the first Emacs editor. In 1990 he was awarded a Macarthur foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski award. In 2001 he received a second honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow, and shared the Takeda award for social/economic betterment with Torvalds and Ken Sakamura. In 2002 he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, and in 2003 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 he was named an honorary professor of the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria in Peru, and received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels. In 2004 he received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Salta, in Argentina.

Richard Stallman's 1983 biography

(this biography was published in the first edition of "The Hacker's Dictionary".)

I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically get paid for doing the last one. About a year ago i split up with the PDP-10 computer to which i was married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world is taking us in different directions. For the moment I still live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our old memories. "Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me "rms".

(jpeg 2k) (jpeg 64k) There is a black-and-white photograph of me as a 5820K Encapsulated Postscript file, a 3762K JPEG file, and a 5815K TIFF file.

Here is a color photo in JPEG format.

Links

• http://www.911visibility.org/ is an organization dedicated to bringing about a full, unbiased, and unimpeded investigation about what really happened in the attacks on 9/11/2001.
• Verified Voting pushes to make sure voting machines in the US are not vulnerable to massive centralized computerized fraud.
• WDM's campaigns tackle the root causes of poverty--the policies of governments and business that keep people poor.
• Information on DNA profiling and the risk of false matches.
• Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
• Patriotic Posters.
• MoveOn, with over a million US members, works to defend world peace, human rights, democracy and the environment from the man who stole the US presidency.
• Advice for consumers on how to resist being influenced by advertising.
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State respect the right of all people to practice religion as they please without government interference.
• http://d.webring.com/hub?ring=stop_abuse: a webring for sites presenting tangible facts about human rights abuse, lack of enforcement, selective enforcement, abuse of power by executive or judicial branches, abuse of power by religious authorities, waste of natural resources, pollution, disinformation, discrimination, covering-up fraud or dangerous experiments, government corruption and sites proposing practical ways to improve the situation.
• http://www.mpp.org/: the Marijuana Policy Project focuses on "removing criminal penalties for marijuana use, with a particular emphasis on making marijuana medically available to seriously ill people."
• FAIR - the media watch group uses painstaking and careful statistics to document the bias of the mainstream media.
• ClearChannelSucks.org: This site reports on the danger posed by the power of Clear Channel's control over large parts of the media.
• WhiteHouseForSale.org tracks Dubya's fund-raising.

Thanks

I would like to thank Positive Internet for sponsoring this web site, Ken Kennedy for doing research for it, and Scott MacCallum and Nick Matteo for installing new text.

Please send comments on these web pages to rms at stallman period org.

copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.