View this post on Hive: Richard Stallman debates animal rights activist at Penn
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On April 14, 2017, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania. I was lucky to get a front row seat and record some great footage of the luminary behind GNU and the inventor of copyleft.
One of the most interesting exchanges happened during the Q&A portion, where an animal rights activist pushed Dr. Stallman to extend his focus on freedom to animals. Both the activist and Stallman convincingly articulated their viewpoints.
As per Stallman's request, I released the video under a CC BY-ND License and made the clip downloadable in the WebM format (a libre royalty-free media file format).
Stallman's lecture focussed on free software as an ethical issue, for both user freedom and privacy. A memorable quote was "either you control the software, or the software controls you." I'm a strong proponent of open science to accelerate the pace of discovery. Stallman's lecture convinced me that there's also a strong ethical imperative to refuse to participate in closed science.