“In 1983, when I launched the free software movement, malware were so rare that each case was shocking and outrageous. Today it has become the norm. ” Richard Matthew Stallman has a sharp tongue, but ultimately not surprising coming from one who for over 30 years is on a crusade against the world of proprietary software.
But in his article published on the Guardian website, Stallman does not criticizes the entire ecosystem owner: according to him “in the 1980s, software developers owners still had a certain ethic: they really tried to develop programs to serve users, even if users do not have control over these programs. “
According to the founder of the GNU project, a turning point came since that time. “Today, developers mistreat users: when they are caught, they claim that the GCU make this ethics (although this only makes this legal practice, which is not the same).”
Among castigated software, Stallman distinguishes first the OS of Apple and Microsoft, recalling that the practices of those marks are similar to espionage and censor the publication of applications on their OS mobile. But Richard Stallman also has harsh words against developers who have been spying users behavior of their real business model, and toil to pass “malicious features for services. “
A well-known evil in the world of computing, but today is not the only one affected: Stallman evokes the deployment of proprietary software in the car models, preventing users to repair themselves for problems, or backdoors and espionage features introduced by Amazon on its Kindle reading light.
The tribune Stallman arrives in an interesting context in a world where the boundaries between commercial software and malware seem increasingly blurred. Lenovo has thus recently pin for the Superfish preinstalled software on some of its laptops, adware which presented a significant security issue for users, while the revelations of Edward Snowden regularly remind us of the close links between the NSA and the world of Silicon Valley.
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