Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman is a free software programmer and founder of a number of notable free software projects since the early 1980s. He started the GNU Project for the GNU operating system (also known as, when combined with the Linux kernel, Linux, much to his dismay), the Free Software Foundation, and the GNU General Public License (the most widely-used free and/or open source software license in existence), and remains a prominent face for the advocacy of user freedom, which highly intersects with the goals of the more recent Pirate movement in the 21st century.

views on the Pirate Party

Stallman spoke to the Pirate Party in Sweden (Torrent file) in 2007, and has vocally supported the Pirate Party movement on principle of opposition to IP. He also participated in a demonstration with the German Pirate Party and Greenpeace against the EPO in April 2009 (story).

While being a strong proponent of the copyleft and share-alike, he wrote a May 2009 editorial on the gnu.org website which took issue with the platform of the Swedish party in light of its recent success at the European Parliament election in Sweden. In the editorial, he specifically took issue with the potentially-adverse effects of the party's quest for abolition of the ongoing regimes of intellectual property, as the GNU GPL (which he co-wrote) and other existing copyleft licenses would also be invalidated by way of the licenses being (by Stallman's own view) "hacks" of the intellectual property regime which still rely upon the bedrock of IP for its relevance and applicability. Stallman proposes a fixed escrow period for software source code, although he also, in the long run, sees IP as anti-human in itself.

In response, Pirate Party UK integrated Stallman's recommendations into its 2010 election manifesto (as mentioned by parliamentary candidate Tim Dobson).

External links

• Stallman's editorial
• Coverage of the article on Slashdot, Ars Technica, clarification to PPUK