NYC LOCAL: Noon Tuesday 29 November 2005 at Cooper Union: Richard Stallman, author of Emacs and Founder of Project GNU, will speak on Copyright vs Community

[secretary]

Richard Stallman will talk on

Copyright vs Community

starting at 

12 noon, on Tuesday 29 November 2005,

in the 

Great Hall of Cooper Union

at 7th Street at 3rd Avenue, on the Island of the Manahattoes,
in the City of New York.

This talk is open to the public and there is no admission fee.

Please reproduce this notice and distribute as widely as you wish!

Blurb from RMS:

 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.

Richard Stallman is the founder of Project GNU, which was announced on
27 September 1983, by a post to the Usenet groups net.unix-wizards and
net.usoft:

 Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
 Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site mit-eddie.UUCP
 From: RMS@MIT-OZ@mit-eddie.UUCP (Richard Stallman)
 Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.usoft
 Subject: new UNIX implementation
 Message-ID: <771@mit-eddie.UUCP>
 Date: Tue, 27-Sep-83 13:35:59 EDT
 Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.771
 Posted: Tue Sep 27 13:35:59 1983
 Date-Received: Thu, 29-Sep-83 07:38:11 EDT
 Organization: MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA
 Lines: 90


 Free Unix!

 Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete
 Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and
 give it away free to everyone who can use it.  Contributions of time,
 money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.

 To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to
 write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker,
 assembler, and a few other things.  After this we will add a text
 formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of
 other things.  We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that
 normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including
 on-line and hardcopy documentation.

 GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical
 to Unix.  We will make all improvements that are convenient, based
 on our experience with other operating systems.  In particular,
 we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof
 file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent
 display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through
 which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen.
 Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages.
 We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol,
 far superior to UUCP.  We may also have something compatible
 with UUCP.


 Who Am I?

 I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS
 editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.  I have worked
 extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the
 Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system.
 I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS.  In addition I
 have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for
 Lisp machines.


 Why I Must Write GNU

 I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
 must share it with other people who like it.  I cannot in good
 conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license
 agreement.

 So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles,
 I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that
 I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.


 How You Can Contribute

 I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money.
 I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.

 One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine.  But
 we could use more.  One consequence you can expect if you donate
 machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date.  The machine had
 better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require
 sophisticated cooling or power.

 Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate
 of some Unix utility and giving it to me.  For most projects, such
 part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the
 independently-written parts would not work together.  But for the
 particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent.  Most
 interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility.  If each
 contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work
 with the rest of GNU.

 If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or
 part time.  The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for
 whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money.  I view
 this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to
 working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.


 For more information, contact me.
 Arpanet mail:
   RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA

 Usenet:
   ...!mit-eddie!RMS@OZ
   ...!mit-vax!RMS@OZ

 US Snail:
   Richard Stallman
   166 Prospect St
   Cambridge, MA 02139

End quote.


If you believe you have a right to own and use a computer in your own
house, free of wiretaps and remote control by intellects small and hot and
unsympathetic, if you use any Microsoft product and know, or do not know,
that there is a better way, if you are an artist and you want to learn how
copyright was meant to work, if you use Emacs, or gcc, or any GNU program,
if you run any GNU/Linux system, if you run any free *BSD, if you know the
Net is ours and we mean to keep it free, if you know little but want to
know more, if you know much and want to know more, then come and join us
and learn from Richard Stallman, who has fought since 1983 for our rights
of privacy and our right to share, rights now at risk.

Most of all, if you want to help, come and join us in the struggle.


Subway stops:

N,R,W lines, the 8th Street NYU stop, this is east of Cooper Union one block.
6 line, the Astor Place stop, this is catty corner from Cooper Union.


For more information:

http://www.fsf.org
http://www.gnu.org
http://www.eff.org
http://www.nyfairuse.org
http://www.freeculturenyu.org
http://www.nycwireless.net
http://www.cfsg.org
http://www.gnubies.org
http://www.lxny.org
http://www.nylug.org
http://www.sixgirls.org
http://www.debian.org
http://www.knoppix.net
http://www.gnu-darwin.org
http://www.squeak.org
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.netbsd.org
http://www.openbsd.org
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd
http://www.apache.org
http://www.mozilla.org
http://www.emacswiki.org
http://www.cliki.net
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric
http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.r-project.org
http://www.perl.com
http://www.python.org
http://www.ruby-lang.org
http://www.xbox-linux.org
http://www.free60.org


Our thanks to Cooper Union and to the Cooper Union Chapter of the
Association for Computing Machinery for arranging this talk.

http://www.cooper.edu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union
http://www.acm.org

Jay Sulzberger <secretary@lxny.org>
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.
http://www.lxny.org