The programmer Richard Stallman is not a household name, but his work has been instrumental in building the software industry, as has his long-term campaign for free software. He’s also been a huge advocate for privacy in the digital age, and has railed against the rise of cell phones for that reason.
“I don’t have a cell phone. I won’t carry a cell phone. It’s Stalin’s dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I’m not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I’m not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop.”
Who needs phones anyway?
Stallman first disclosed his views on cell phones in an interview with Network World, during a time in which smartphones were exploding in popularity.
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During this interview, Stallman indicated his long-held belief that the portable phones that many millions use would be the perfect tool that authoritarian forces could exploit and use to track the movements of populations.
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He also advocated for free software, which you would expect from the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which he established in 1985. This was backed by the creation of the GNU project – a free software, mass collaboration movement to give users freedom of choice to use and develop software for their devices.
The legacy of free software
Despite his reluctance to ever use a cell phone, one of Stallman’s achievements – which he himself acknowledged in the interview – was the third-party version of the Android mobile OS, from which all proprietary software was stripped out.
He pointed to new systems like Replicant, an alternative version of Android, that can run on certain devices without additional proprietary software. The catch is that this only works with older and outdated handsets, like the Samsung Galaxy S3 or the Galaxy Note 2.
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