Happy hacking day 2014 was held 11.2 at Haaga-Helia universitys campus in Pasila. Event gathered lots of IT-people under the same roof. It offered high class information technology to explore such as 3d printing stuff and lots of professionals lectures.
Highlight of the day was Mr. Richard Stallmans lecture about free softwares and GNU license. The Organizers of the event ranked Mr. Stallman as one of the biggest heroes of Internet. His number one piece of work is definitely GNU General Public License and GNU project.
There was 80 minutes slot reseved for Mr. Stallmans speech. Time really ran out fast. In my opinion his speech is one of the best IT-speeches ever.
The Internet Hall of Fame hero Dr. Richard Stallman
Mr. Stallman entered the room with huge applauses. It was the moment which everyone has waited the most. He started by requesting from everyone who were taking photos to not upload them into facebook. After social media criticism he required every video taken during his speech must be published in free video format such as .ogg.
Topic of the speech was fully focused on introducing GNU license and history of open source and free software. For me the Mr. Stallmans speech teached a lot. I realised that I am totally misunderstood the whole thing. I was thinking that open source and free software are kinda same thing. But they definitely are not. Open source programs source code can be free to explore, but if you like to make changes and use the customized version of software you can not do it. With free softwares you can do anything you like, not just explore the code of it.
Some examples:
Open source softwares
- Android
- Ubuntu
Free softwares
- Mozilla firefox
- VLC Mediaplayer
- WordPress
- gNewSense, a GNU/Linux
Nearly at the end of speech Mr. Stallman auctioned stuffed animal. It was funny moment but might not pass all finnish laws. He reserved some thime for questions and one question was “How do I suppose to pay my bills if I am not allowed to code anything else than free softwares?”. Mr. Stallman answered like this: “In my opinion nobody should code anything not free for money, go and get day job and do coding on your free time at home.”
Big brother of the world, does it exist?
Mr. Stallman heavily underlined: If you are using free software you can be more sure that there is no rootkit or malware included in software. But if you are using software like Windows or Ubuntu you can be damn sure that somebody is watching you. I totally agree.
Videos of the speech here.