"The University of Pavia, in Italy, recently awarded Richard Stallman with an honorary degree. Stallman gave a short speech, his "lectio doctoralis", on the ethical imperative to use free software, focussing on individuals and schools. The speech has been transcribed by Alessandro Rubini, with checking by Dora Scillipoti and Luca Andreucci.

"...There is no compatibility between education and proprietary software, not at the ethical level. The source code and the methods of Free Software are part of human knowledge. The mission of every school is to disseminate human knowledge. Proprietary software is not part of human knowledge. It's secret, restricted knowledge, which schools are not allowed to disseminate.

Today is the 2nd day of FOSS.my 2009, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference organized and suported by grassroot communities in Malaysia, and the high tide being Richard Stallman's keynote speech about free software movement of more than 2 hours, right before the delayed lunch.

"On April/4/2008, Richard Stallman came to UAB to give a conference about GNU. You can view the WHOLE conference in Spanish at the end of this post (and some pictures as well). I strongly recommend you to view the video as it’s quite interesting..."

Richard Mathew Stallman or “RMS”, his famous initials of the hacker community at Harvard where he graduated magna cum laude in Physics in 1974, is the most prominent American Free Software Advocate alive today.

"Richard Stallman's tour of New Zealand has covered issues of copyright and the free software movement. He is fervently against restrictions on sharing, saying such restrictions are an attack on society.

In this must-hear speech on copyright, Stallman introduces the foundation principles of the Free Software movement and then discusses the origins, uses and abuses of the laws of copyright..."

"Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide. This speech will be accessible to all audiences and the public is encouraged to attend..."

"Finding an email in my inbox from Richard Stallman is not the way I start most mornings, but on a recent morning, there it was.

«...Control has replaced Free Speech in Stallman’s the rhetoric. This is one of the most noticeable things I took away from today, that there has been a cultural shift from the way proponents of Free Software talk and communicate about the ideas and rationalities of Free Software principles.