Wednesday’s episode of The Personal Computer Show on WBAI featured Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation. [mp3]

Program description:Our guest was Richard Stallman, the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. He explained how “Linux” is a misnomer, the only part of a Linux computer that technically is Linux is the kernel. A more correct term is GNU/Linux since most of the software is GNU. Stallman uses the term “free” to mean free speech rather than free beer. That is, free software, to him, means the user is free to do anything with the software, including copying it, modifying and even selling it.Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of widely used applications, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. Most of the listener questions were about GNU/Linux.