• He rubs lotion on his feet during Q&A.

• He looks pretty good in tie-dye.

• As of today, he knows about Allegro.

I went to a thing (mentioned here) and listened to RMS speak for about 2.5 hours. 99% of this time felt like a live version of videos I'd already seen. However, I am glad I went and grateful for the hosting university for making the event free to the public.

If a video goes up, you all might be able to see me being scolded while holding two Allegator stickers... I hope they didn't cut that part out.

Well, Allegro 5 changed the license to a zlib style license and I think it is much better now (it is the same I used). Anyway, Stallman is a bit "extremist" sometimes...

FSF is explicitly copyleft, meaning you cannot take GPL software and make it non-libre. That's the whole point of the licenses and movement. They wanted to make it impossible for somebody like Microsoft to embrace, extend, and extinguish(tm) (among other things).

Nothing stops a proprietary company from taking Allegro, making changes to it and making it extra awesome, waiting until copies of the original Allegro are rare or the features in the new Allegrawesome are so important that we can't live without them, and then making it proprietary again. If they did so strategically we might find ourselves in a position where Allegro is effectively stolen, or at best we'd have to throw away x years of progress and start over.

It's an extreme hypothetical, and one that isn't likely to happen with this particular project in its current state of relative insignificance, but many other projects that we all use and love and rely on could be susceptible.

Append:

Also Gideon I'm extremely jealous that you got to experience a talk and meet him! I look forward to seeing this video if it is ever found. Make sure you spread it around.

You are all correct. Stallman emphasized the difference between Free software and mere "open source" software numerous times throughout his talk. He did, however, provide another distinction for software that performs a "job" and software that is "art." The latter not need be completely Free, as it is subjective work, unable to be "improved" through collaboration. I have long held the same belief and was pleasantly surprised to hear the head of the Free software movement dictate it.

I did not mention that Allegro used a zlib-like license, though I did mention "Low-Level Game Routines" as part of its name, upon which Stallman nodded with seeming interest. Nevertheless (as part of a personal policy to not sign stickers) he refused to sign the Allegro sticker I presented.

MPL is better (in that example) if you want to force a private entity to give back to the community. Only modifications to files under the MPL must be made available.

I rather like the MPL, in honesty. It's a good compromise between the BSD-style licenses and the GPL. Private entities can still use code under the MPL within their propriety software and any improvements to the code make their way back to the original project.

Knowledge-as-a-product is a terrible and largely outdated concept. I think copyrights and trademarks are both completely immoral in a larger sense, but I would still be fine if patents and copyrights were less draconion.

I disagree in forcing such ideology on people (i.e., GPL). But Mickey Mouse will still be copyrighted in a hundred years at this rate.

Copyrights should not apply, in any twisted form, to non-creative thought (numbers, etc). Copyright for the creator lasting 10-20 years upon some metric (first public release, or whatever) would be fine. The creator benefits for a quarter-or-so of his or her life and then the world benefits thereafter. The DMCA and its spawn need to be dissolved and its signors need to be smacked.

Patents seeing a complete overhaul is necessary. Only patents on physical concepts. Patents should require "good faith" to bring into a product, based on the scope of the patent and the ability of the owners. The buffer for idea-to-product is incredibly tiny now compared to when the patent system was created, and the ability to first launch something revolutionary is more than enough. Patents currently allow good ideas to rot and enable bloated, lethargic corporate behemoths and their extremist, troll brethren to prevent progress.

Personally, the Microsoft patent for Loop-Blinn curve rendering is the bane of my existence. The clear-cut patent violation and possible legal fallout essentially flat-lined any progress in a vector graphics library I was working on...

(I accidentally posted this while I was still writing it. Should be good now.)