Richard Stallman gives a talk at Microsoft

On September 4, 2019, Microsoft invited Stallman to give one of its talks at the Microsoft Research campus… and Stallman agreed, as he normally charges companies. What was the talk about?

According to one of them, Stallman’s talk was the same as always: he talked about the importance of free software, the GPL v3, GNU and Linux… and added «a list of small demands» for the company, including that they promote «the hygiene of licenses in GitHub, that they put pressure on hardware manufacturers to publish their specifications and that they facilitate the implementation of secure booting with UEFI (for non-Windows systems, of course)».

There is another quote from Stallman: «Satya’s book [referring to Hit Refresh] made me realize that Microsoft is a great company […] if you ignore what they are doing to the freedom of users […] unfortunately this is very important.

Richard Stallman is giving a talk at Microsoft campus.

If the world ends today, you know why. pic.twitter.com/7RtELarcUM

— Ale(ssandro) Segala (@ItalyPaleAle) September 4, 2019