
Most of you probably don't develop software, but I think that many of you cook. If you cook, you probably have had the experience of sharing, exchanging, recipes with your friends who cook. And you have probably had the experience of changing a recipe, too, putting in somewhat different ingredients, or other changes. And maybe, if you changed a recipe and you cooked it for your friends and they liked it, maybe they asked you: "Could I have the recipe?" And maybe you wrote down your version of the recipe so that you could provide it to your friends. That's normal. That's what people do with recipes. So imagine a world where you couldn't change your recipe; it was impossible; it was somehow locked against you; you couldn't even tell what ingredients it was using. Imagine a world where if you share the recipe with your friends, the authorities would call you a "pirate" and put you in prison. Nobody is threatening to do that to cooks for sharing recipes, but the world of most software users is exactly like that. That is the world of proprietary software. It means that people are prohibited from cooperating with each other. The other alternative is free software. "Free" refers to freedom: in Japanese it should always be translated "jiyu-na." It has nothing to do with price; price is not the question. The question is what you are allowed to do, what freedom you have in your life in using the software. Free software is like the recipes that you share and change today. Proprietary software is like that imaginary world where you would be terrorized by the organizations trying to stop you from sharing with other people. Now, why did I notice this issue? I didn't notice it on my own. I had good fortune. In the 1970's I was part of a community of programmers; sharing software was our way of life. In this community, if you wrote a program, you would share it. We lived that way. Most of the people didn't make it a political issue; they just liked living that way. I had a tendency to connect this way of life with the ideals of freedom that I have learned, the ideals that the United States used to be based on. And so, when this community was threatened, when our way of life started to come apart, I saw this in political terms. Free software had existed since the beginning of computers. I started a free software movement when my community was destroyed. When my community was destroyed in a rather gruesome fashion in the early 1980's, I was suddenly left in an ugly position. I was an operating system developer--but all of the operating systems for modern computers were proprietary. Even to get the binaries, you were supposed to sign anon-disclosure agreement. I felt this was wrong, morally wrong. Just imagine if you want to get help from your neighbors, but your neighbors have signed a promise that they will not help you; that's what a non-disclosure agreement is, a promise not to help anybody. I felt that the only important and useful thing I could do with my skill was to change this situation, to somehow build again a community where people were permitted to cooperate with each other. And the way that this could be done, fortunately for me, was by writing software. You see writing software is the thing I knew how to do. It meant that I had a chance of accomplishing this [social change]. The existing software was proprietary. There was no way I could change that. I and the few people who agreed with me, we were just a handful. We had no political power; we couldn't convince the companies that control this software to change their policies; we couldn't convince governments to change their laws. But there was something we could do. We could say to all that software: we won't use it--we will write more software. We will write free software and we will use that. And then we will have freedom. Like the people who moved to the United States hoping to be free, moving away from countries that may have been repressive regimes, we moved to another continent in Cyberspace. But we built the continent. Fortunately, there were no American Indians we had to steal it from. Because it was new, there was nobody else living there.