[...] I was inspired by the attitude at the MITAI Lab, where the hackers said: ‘We’re not going to let the administrators tell us how to do things; we’re going to work on what they need, but we will decide how; and we won’t let them implement computer security to restrict us with.’ This was a conscious decision of the hackers who had written the time-sharing system, which they’d started a couple of years before I got there. Their attitude was, yes, the administrators could fire us, but we were not going to suck up to them. They weren’t going to stand being treated like ordinary employees. I wouldn’t have had the strength to do this on my own, but as part of a team, I learned it. We were the best, and most of us weren’t getting paid an awful lot—any of us could have got a much better-paying job someplace else if we’d wanted. We were there because we were free to improve the system and do useful things, the way we wanted to, and not be treated like people who had to obey all the time.

[...] when people share a computer, either they do so as a community, where they trust each other and resolve disputes, or it’s run like a police state, where there are a few who are the masters, who exercise total power over everyone else.

Our way of dealing with kids coming in over Arpanet was to socialize them. We all participated in that. For example, there was a command you could type to tell the system to shut down in five minutes. The kids sometimes did that, and when they did we just cancelled the shutdown. They were amazed. They would read about this command and think, surely it’s not going to work, and would type it—and get an immediate notification: ‘The system is shutting down in five minutes because of . . . ’

It sounds like chaos.

Except it wasn’t, you see. There was always a real user, who would just cancel the shutdown and say to that person, ‘Why did you try to shut the machine down? You know we’re here using it. You only do that if there’s a good reason.’ And the thing is, a lot of those people felt outcast by society—they were geeks; their families and their fellow students didn’t understand them; they had nobody. And we welcomed them into the community and invited them to learn and start to do some useful work. It was amazing for them not to be treated as trash.

Many did, but the others basically got worn down, and eventually gave in. Over the period of the seventies, the spirit of resistance got worn down in others, whereas it got strengthened in me.

How do you explain that?

I don’t know. I guess I had found something worth being loyal to, and I basically had nothing else.

The community needs the technology—you can’t have a community in which software-sharing is your way of life unless you’ve got free software to do everything. The point is, the software had the purpose of making the community possible. But part of the idea was that I wanted everyone to be part of this community—the aim was to liberate all computer users. At the same time, I was getting one lesson after another in the injustice of non-free software. MIT had bought a new machine which ran Digital’s time-sharing system, TWENEX, instead of the one we’d been developing; it had security features that allowed a group of users to seize power over the machine and deny it to others. I saw the repressive rules for student computers introduced at Harvard. I suggested they apportion a computer to each group of students living together, and let them all run it; those who were interested would develop the skill of system administration, and they would all learn to live together as a community by resolving their own disputes. Instead I was told: ‘We’ve signed contracts for proprietary software, which say we’re not allowed to let any of the students get at them.’ This was a proprietary operating system that made it possible to have programs that people could run but couldn’t actually read. It taught me that non-free software was a factor in setting up a police state inside the computer—which at the AI Lab was generally understood wisdom; I wasn’t the first to call that ‘fascism’. I was also the victim of a non-disclosure agreement, which taught me about the nature of those agreements—that they are a betrayal of the whole world.

What’s your definition of free software?

Free software is software that respects users’ freedom and community. It’s not about price. It’s libre, not gratis. With any program, there are two possibilities: either the users control the program, or the program controls the users. When the users control the program, that’s free software—they control the things they do with it, and thus it respects their freedom and their community. If they don’t have full control over it, then it’s user-subjugating, non-free proprietary software—the program controls the users, and the program’s owners control the program, so it becomes an instrument of unjust power for the owner over the users. For the users to have control, they need four specific freedoms—the concrete criteria for free software. Freedom Zero is the freedom to run a program however you want, for whatever purpose you have. Freedom One is being able to study the program’s source code and change it so that you can make the program run the way you wish.

What about people who can’t do that—ordinary users who aren’t programmers?

I don’t think that everyone has to learn how to program—not everybody has a talent for it. But they still deserve control over their computing activities. They can only get that through collective control, which implies the right of users to work together to exercise control over what the program does for them. So further freedoms are necessary for collective control. Freedom Two is the freedom to make exact copies of a program and give or sell them to others. Freedom Three is being able to make copies of your modified versions, and give or sell them to others. This makes it possible for users to work together, because one of them can make a modified version of a program and distribute copies to others in the group, and they can make exact copies and pass them on. That’s free software—and all software should be free, because the user’s freedom should always be respected. Every non-free program is an injustice. The fact that it exists is a social and ethical problem for society; and the goal of the free-software movement is to put an end to that.

You’ve argued that this foregrounding of freedom radically differentiates your movement from so-called ‘open source’, which started later.

Open source is an amoral, depoliticized substitute for the free-software movement. It was explicitly started with that intent. It was a reaction campaign, set up in 1998 by Eric Raymond—he’d written ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’—and others, to counter the support we were getting for software freedom. When it started, Eric Raymond called me to tell me about this new term and asked if I wanted to use it. I said, I’ll have to think about it. By the next day I had realized it would be a disaster for us. It meant disconnecting free software from the idea that users deserve freedom. So I rejected it.

It’s one of the ironies of the history of free software that its moment of greatest fame was associated with this term, open source, which you reject.

Because it’s not the name of a philosophy—it refers to the software, but not to the users. You’ll find lots of cautious, timid organizations that do things that are useful, but they don’t dare say: users deserve freedom. Like Creative Commons, which does useful, practical work—namely, preparing licences that respect the freedom to share. But Creative Commons doesn’t say that users are entitled to the freedom to share; it doesn’t say that it’s wrong to deny people the freedom to share. It doesn’t actively uphold that principle. Of course, it’s much easier to be a supporter of open source, because it doesn’t commit you to anything. [...]

[...] For instance, the cameras on the street that recognize licence plates, and maybe now faces—we can’t block that by insisting on free software on our computers. The only protection against that kind of surveillance is political. We need to demand, and campaign for parties that will protect our privacy from government oppression.

But you think that the question of surveillance intersects with the issue of free software?

They’re related issues—I don’t know what it means for issues to intersect.

Okay. How is the free-software movement related politically to other issues—does it have any natural allies?

The free-software movement doesn’t require you to have any particular political stand on other issues. And the Free Software Foundation doesn’t take a position on other political issues, except to defend human rights in computing—because the freedom to control your computing must be regarded as a human right. That also includes not surrendering your computing to anybody else’s server, because you can’t control how it’s done by someone else’s computer; those services that offer to do your computing for you are inviting you to give up your freedom. We oppose general surveillance, because that’s a violation of basic human rights. But, for instance, there are right-wingers that support the free-software movement. We welcome them. I don’t agree with them on other things, but I’m happy to have their support in campaigning for free software.

Basically, free software combines capitalist, socialist and anarchist ideas. The capitalist part is: free software is something businesses can use and develop and sell. The socialist part is: we develop this knowledge, which becomes available to everyone and improves life for everyone. And the anarchist part: you can do what you like with it. I’m not an anarchist—we need a state so we can have a welfare state. I’m not a ‘libertarian’ in the usual American sense, and I call them rather ‘antisocialists’ because their main goal is a laissez-faire, laissez-mourir economy. People like me are the true libertarians. I supported Bernie Sanders for President—Clinton was too right-wing for me—and the Green Party.

As I understand the term capitalism, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are quasi-monopolies or oligopolies that politically dominate the world. I do condemn the current system of plutocracy very strongly. When I talk about capitalism, I mean private business. There is a difference between the economic system that the US has now and what it had in 1970. There are two different forms of capitalism, you might say—this one I call extreme capitalism, or plutocracy, in which businesses dominate the state. I’m definitely against plutocracy, but I don’t wish to identify capitalism with plutocracy, because there are other forms of capitalism that I have seen in my life. Basically, businesses shouldn’t decide our laws.

So your political orientation would be to some kind of social democracy with a mixed economy?

Yes. But that’s economic; and my political orientation is democracy and human rights. But to have democracy means the people control the state, which means the businesses don’t. So, in terms of economy, yes, I favour having private businesses. I don’t think state restaurants could have made the meal we just had.

Control and ownership are not the same. Some people propose a capitalist-market solution to data harvesting and surveillance, which is that people should ‘own’ their data and be paid a tiny amount for surrendering it to a company. This is a complete red herring and won’t solve any practical problems. Another approach, adopted by the new European Data Protection Directive, is to require people to give ‘consent’ for their data to be collected. That’ll help against certain things—namely, data collection by systems that you never knew you were using, or never agreed to use. But it’s so easy for them to get formal consent that it’s a worthless barrier. Any site that has a Facebook ‘like’ button, or a Google Analytics tracker, just needs to include in its Terms and Conditions—which nobody reads—a statement saying: ‘I consent to my visit being recorded by various other sites that have an agreement with this one.’ I call this ‘manufacturing consent’. Consent regulations may be useful against Facebook, because it’s been tracking visitors to thousands, if not millions, of websites for many years, and hasn’t even bothered to get this sort of consent—so Facebook is in trouble if it uses any of this data. But in future this will probably just be a formal restriction, and not a matter of substance. We should not allow any collection of data that goes beyond the minimum that is inescapably necessary for the site to do its main job—and then we should develop technology to reduce that minimum-necessary amount.

Free software avoids a particular mechanism of injustice—but it’s not coterminous with all of ethics for computing.

[...] there are various ethical issues in life. If you look at a store, for example, there are different ethical questions that can arise, and you wouldn’t expect that one requirement would fix them all. For instance, the store can mistreat the staff. The solution to that might be to encourage unionization, have strict laws to prevent wage theft. Then there’s discrimination, which is mistreatment of those who aren’t staff but would like to be. There are other issues that affect the customers only—for instance, are the products what they are said to be? A union might ensure the staff get paid, but might not care about cheating the customers. There are multiple ethical issues; and we shouldn’t expect that correcting one kind of injustice automatically corrects the other kinds.

Given that that’s the case, again, are there related political campaigns that you would support?

Putting an end to massive surveillance that endangers human rights. For this, we need to require that all systems be designed to limit the amount of data they can collect. You see, data, once collected, will be misused. The organization that collects them can misuse them; rogue employees of that organization can misuse them; third parties, crackers, can break into the computer system and steal the data and misuse them; and the state can take them and misuse them. Laws restricting the use of the data, if properly enforced, would limit misuse by the organization collecting the data, and maybe to some extent misuse by the government—though not enough, because the state will usually give itself exceptions to do what it wants. It will write the laws so it’s allowed to get those data, and use them to find whistleblowers and dissidents.

What do you think about the idea of creating socialized alternatives to the data-hoarding tech giants—as mooted in these pages by Evgeny Morozov?

I think it makes little difference whether data are collected by governments or by companies, because either way the data menace whistleblowers and dissidents. Whatever data businesses collect, the state can easily get.