Yesterday, I got the opportunity to meet rms. He was scheduled to give a speech here. Thanks to the organizer.

He brought a small black netbook with him. I immediately guessed that it must be the portable dragon. I sneaked to confirm it while he was busy doing photos. This hardware is going to be the first complete 100% free software compatible (yes, that includes the bios). There is a heavy effort to port gnewsense into that machine. I wonder if he got next release of gnewsense on that.

His talked about the free software movement, its history and so on. Most software enthusiasts already know this stuff via this page but still can get a few new things from it. The beginning of GNU project, recursive acronyms, Swindle (LOL, he mentioned 1984 too) and open source practical approach are part of his talk about software freedom.

Funnily, that’s not what he supposed to talk about. It supposed to be “copyright vs community”. Well, in my opinion, this is a difficult topic to cover. Most Indonesians confuse the copyright (hak cipta), patent, and maybe even trademark (merk dagang), all thanks to the term ‘kekayaan intelektual’. Yes, that term helps us to combine those mumbo jumbo into one single word. But just like removing GNU from GNU/linux, people won’t get to know that ‘kekayaan intelektual’ consists of many totally different things. rms apologized for talking about the wrong topic and took some extra minutes to talk about copyright issue (mainly how copyright nowadays tends to prevent inventions).

He talked about copyright in the middle of QA session. I got my questions answered too. I asked about pirate parties (I actually understood his stance and solution on this, but forgot LOL) and AGPL. I asked about the AGPL question cause his unending hatred towards ’software as service’. I didnt really get his answer, but I think despite AGPL or whatever license, ’software as services’ makes him uncomfortable (ethically not right). I would love to hear his answer again (video from the organizer?). Pak Ibam also ask some interesting questions (after having a few words in Bahasa Indonesia with rms. ‘tidak boleh’ LOL), one of them is why Linus refuse GPL3.

Just before QA session, he transformed himself for a moment into his alter ego, St Ignucius form the church of emacs. Too bad, not much of emacs user in this country. One thing I forgot, rms speaks a little Bahasa Indonesia. He’s pretty good at it and without his american tongue (it’s really clear, most foreigners have difficulties with pronunciation). His fluency in our language is really great, the crowd really liked when he used any local words, or even talked in it for some sentences. After QA, there was a photo session and everyone went home happy.