Hi all,

In this interview Stallman addresses the much exaggerated issue of losing jobs due to Free Software.*

Read the full interview at kerneltrap.org http://kerneltrap.org http://kerneltrap.org/node/4484*

*<quote> JA*: What about the programmers...

*Richard Stallman*: What about them? The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job.

*JA*: Such as?

*Richard Stallman*: There are thousands of different jobs people can have in society without developing non-free software. You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software--only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid.

*JA*: What is the distinction there?

*Richard Stallman*: Non-free software is meant to be distributed to the public. Custom software is meant to be used by one client. There's no ethical problem with custom software as long as you're respecting your client's freedom.

The next point is that programmers are a tiny fraction of employment in the computer field. Suppose somebody developed an AI and no programmers were needed anymore. Would this be a disaster? Would all the people who are now programmers be doomed to unemployment for the rest of their lives? Obviously not, but this doesn't stop people from exaggerating the issue.

And what if there aren't any programming jobs in the US anymore?

*JA*: You mean what if all the programming jobs were outsourced to foreign countries?

*Richard Stallman*: Yes, what if they all go? This may actually happen. When you start thinking about things like total levels of employment, you've got think about all the factors that affect it, not blame it all on one factor. The cause of unemployment is not someone or society deciding that software should be free. The cause of the problem is largely economic policies designed to benefit only the rich. Such as driving wages down.

You know, it's no coincidence that we're having all this outsourcing. That was carefully planned. International treaties were designed to make this happen so that people's wages would be reduced.

*JA*: Can you cite specific examples?

*Richard Stallman*: FTAA. The World Trade Organization. NAFTA. These treaties are designed to reduce wages by making it easy for a company to say to various countries, "which of you will let us pay people the least? That's were we're headed." And if any country starts having a somewhat increased standard of living, companies say "oh, this is a bad labor climate here. You're not making a good climate for business. All the business is going to go away. You better make sure that people get paid less. You're following a foolish policy arranging for workers of your country to be paid more. You've got to make sure that your workers are the lowest paid anywhere in the world, then we'll come back. Otherwise we're all going to run away and punish you."

Businesses very often do it, they move operations out of a country to punish that country. And I've recently come to the conclusion that frictionless international trade is inherently a harmful thing, because it makes it too easy for companies to move from one country to another. We have to make that difficult enough that each company can be stuck in some country that can regulate it.

The book *No Logo* explains that the Philippines have laws that protect labor standards, but these laws count for nothing any more. They decided to set up "enterprise zones" - that's the euphemism they used for "sweat shop zones" - where companies are exempt from these rules for the first two years. And as a result, no company lasts for more than two years. When their exemption runs out, the owners shut it down and they start another. *</quote> Read the full interview at kerneltrap.org http://kerneltrap.org http://kerneltrap.org/node/4484 *-- "GNU is the system, and Linux is the kernel." A proud GNU user http://www.gnu.org My Weblog at http://www.pravi.co.nr Rediscover the web ! Get firefox at http://www.getfirefox.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html