Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, main author of the GNU General Public License, and dedicated software freedom activist will be visiting Seton Hall University on April 19, 2:30pm – 4:30pm in the Jubilee Hall Auditorium. Please encourage your students to attend this exciting talk.
Dr. Stallman will be giving a talk entitled “Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks”. The talk is geared towards the general public and anyone interested in free speech, copyright, and related issues should find it very interesting. The talk is open to the public and is sponsored by the Student Government Association (SGA).
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Linux Operating System, which today is used by millions of computers, runs most of the Internet, powers everything from Supercomputers to eReaders and Smartphones, and – best of all – is available for free, including its source code. Richard Stallman played a major role in the evolution of Linux, and without the “GNU General Public License” Wikipedia and other high-profile projects would not be possible.
About the talk: Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright–to promote progress, for the benefit of the public–then we must make changes in the other direction.
About the author: Richard M. Stallman is the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, and holds several honorary doctorates from, among others, the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, the University of Glasgow, UK, the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, Peru, and Lakehead University, Canada. He launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system and has been the project’s lead architect and organizer. He also founded the Free Software Foundation to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. Stallman has written many essays on software freedom and is an outspoken political campaigner for the free software movement.
