Trinity should be ashamed of itself

                  “Trinity should be ashamed of itself”.

These are not my words. These are the words of Richard Stallman, the famous and most vocal person advocating the need of free software in the world. Why did such a person of international fame, who played a critical role in the development of GNU/Linux (do not simply say Linux, he’ll come after you) say such unkind or rather strong abusive words towards the reverent and the most unwired campus, Trinity University? His arrogance is definitely a good candidate to be blamed on. Please take note that he said this phrase not once, not twice, but for a total of maybe five times or possibly more. The source of his wrath in this case was neither Microsoft nor George W. Bush (for whom he had special distaste), it was our ITS.

It is no secret that ITS (Information Technology Services) of Trinity University maintains a log of the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses each Trinity student uses while surfing the web. (I am not sure if ITS maintains a record of even the websites that each student visits.) Richard Stallman fiercely debated against this policy of Trinity University to keep a record of each and every student whenever they surf the internet and rendered it as acting against the spirit of an educational institution. Richard Stallman stated flatly that by doing so, Trinity University indirectly hands over those students over to the RIAA (if such thing exists, he said). He further said that Trinity University is not obliged to keep any record about the students’ web behavior. Trinity University should be ashamed of itself since it prevents the rightful share of information since software should be free. He said that peer-to-peer sharing of information is good since sharing information acts for the welfare of humanity. By preventing this, Trinity University is not doing a rightful thing.

His arguments do carry some weight since many of us would agree that sharing of information is not bad and also that software should be free instead of making us pay ridiculous amounts of money. Richard Stallman rightly also pointed out a very critical point that every institution should consider about the use of proprietary software that are provided at a subsidized rate to the institutions. He aptly linked this to the case where drug dealers first give out drugs for free but once the drug-in-takers become dependent, they start charging high amounts of money. The main motive of proprietary software developers is to make students dependent so that once these students enter labor market, the same software can be sold to fetch high prices. Those professionals who gained familiarity with only that particular software as a student would have no alternative but to buy it through their company paying exorbitant prices. These ideas must have struck some minds earlier too; he acted to remind us of that gloomy possibility.

Richard Stallman presented himself as a staunch supporter of free software and his commitment to this can be seen from the fact that he did not hesitate to humiliate Trinity University in its own ‘home ground’. His arrogance and despise for monopolies like Microsoft and Apple emanated from his every sentence, explicitly or implicitly. But I was rather surprised that he discouraged us from using Google’s free word processing software, Google Doc. He was too hard bent on GNU/Linux but he was very passionate about free software ethics nonetheless. It was very sad to see that man of his stature auctioning GNU mascot, starting from a bid of 40 dollars which no one wanted to buy even for 40 dollars. With his talent, his few programming lines would be worth few hundred dollars in the least, so why would he spend time selling $2/$3 stickers, $20 mascots or bidding $40 mascots which no one wants to buy?