Free Software, Free Society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman. 2nd edition.

You can use these replies verbatim if you like, or you can personalize them or write your own. By all means construct a reply that fits your ideas and your personality—if the replies are personal and not all alike, that will make the campaign more effective.

These replies are meant for individuals who send Word files. When you encounter an organization that imposes use of Word format, that calls for a different sort of reply; there you can raise issues of fairness that would not apply to an individual’s actions.

Some recruiters ask for resumes in Word format. Ludicrously, some recruiters do this even when looking for someone for a free software job. (Anyone using those recruiters for free software jobs is not likely to get a competent employee.) To help change this practice, you can put a link to http://gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html into your resume, next to links to other formats of the resume. Anyone hunting for a Word version of the resume will probably read the page.

This essay talks about Word attachments, since they are by far the most common case. However, the same issues apply with other proprietary formats, such as PowerPoint and Excel. Please feel free to adapt the replies to cover those as well.

With our numbers, simply by asking, we can make a difference.

Copyright c 2002, 2007, 2010 Richard Stallman

This essay was originally published on http://gnu.org, in 2002. This version is part of Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd ed. (Boston: GNU Press, 2010).

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire chapter are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Chapter 39. Thank You, Larry McVoy

For the first time in my life, I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his nonfree software. Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program, and no longer spread the message that nonfree software is a good thing if it’s convenient.

My gratitude is limited, since it was McVoy that created the problem in the first place. But I still appreciate his decision to clear it up.

There are thousands of nonfree programs, and most merit no special attention, other than developing a free replacement. What made this program, BitKeeper, infamous and dangerous was its marketing approach: inviting high-profile free software projects to use it, so as to attract other paying users.

McVoy made the program available gratis to free software developers. This did not mean it was free software for them: they were privileged not to part with their money, but they still had to part with their freedom. They gave up the fundamental freedoms that define free software: freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose, freedom to study and change the source code as you wish, freedom to make and redistribute copies, and freedom to publish modified versions.

The free software movement has said, “Think of ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer’ ” since 1990. McVoy said the opposite; he invited developers to focus on the lack of monetary price, instead of on freedom. A free software activist would dismiss this suggestion, but those in our community who value technical advantage above freedom and community were susceptible to it.

McVoy’s great triumph was the adoption of this program for Linux development. No free software project is more visible than Linux. It is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, an essential component, and users often mistake it for the entire system. As McVoy surely planned, the use of his program in Linux development was powerful publicity for it.

It was also, whether intentionally or not, a powerful political PR campaign, telling the free software community that freedom-denying software is acceptable as long as it’s convenient. If we had taken that attitude towards Unix in 1984, where would we be today? Nowhere. If we had accepted using Unix, instead of setting out to replace it, nothing like the GNU/Linux system would exist.

Of course, the Linux developers had practical reasons for what they did. I won’t argue with those reasons; they surely know what’s convenient for them. But they did not count, or did not value, how this would affect their freedom—or the rest of the community’s efforts.