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Richard Stallman in Costa Rica

The best known GNU/Linux hacker Richard Stallman was in Costa Rica since October 12th until October 13th, 2007. He spoke about the “free software”, the GNU project and the work of the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman made two shows. The first of them was developed in the “Latin American Conference on Informatics” and the second was performed in the University of Costa Rica when speaking in the conference: “Free Software in both: Ethics and Practice”.

Stallman spoke about the origin and development of the GNU project, the importance of the “free” software to the users and to the enterprises, the ethics in the everyday development of the fee software and the problems that the “closed” software generates to the users.

We must take attention to our freedom in everyday aspect of the life including the Informatics; then the “free software” is the one that respect the freedom of the user.

–Richard Stallman
October 13th, 2007.
University of Costa Rica.

“There’s a difference among the free software and Linux. The last, was conceived by an engineer (Linus Torvalds) and he doesn’t shares the goals of the free software. It is important and necessary that the user has enough freedom to create and freely distribute the software.”; Stallman criticed.

Moreover, the founder of the GNU project spoke about the problems that the CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) causes to Costa Rica in the patents area, Computer Science development and social quality of life. On his red shirt he wore a “pin” of “NO TLC”.

Stallman received a lot of aplauses for his talk-show of the free software and critics against the TLC (CAFTA, in English).

It happened a very funny situation when Stallman announced a “hack” made of the signals: “STOP” and “DOWN”… He expected to see the “STOP” on the top of bar and the signal “DOWN” at the botton; however, the signal was made only by “DOWN”. Stallman requested an immediate fixing of this. Finally, it was solved by a picture taken by “GatoLinux” and a group of people of the “Costa Rican Network of Free Software (CRNFS)” who organized this talk-show, sponsored by the TEC of San Carlos. You can look at this picture on the below slideshow.

During the development of the conference, Stallman was in the company of Marcelo Magallon, Costa Rican Physicist and Debian software contributor. One girl of the CRNFS was in the main table with them, too.

On the time of ending his conference, Stallman received tons of aplauses and left quickly the conference room on the way to the finished his conference and left quickly on the way to the Juan Santamaria International Airport.

Posted on November 2008 in News

One Response to “Richard Stallman in Costa Rica”

1. Boycott Novell » Links 13/11/2008: Cuba on Route to GNU/Linux, KDE 4.2 Raves Says:
   November 13th, 2008 at 9:54 am

   [...] Richard Stallman in Costa Rica [...]

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