some cypherpunks may be interested in this ... ===cut=here=== From: "Theodore C. Belding" <streak@engin.umich.edu> Subject: Richard Stallman to speak at the University of Michigan Date: Fri, 08 Oct 1993 23:55:25 +0100 Sender: streak%nv.engin.umich.edu@srvr4.engin.umich.edu [Please redistribute WIDELY, to anyone who may be interested. Thanks!] Richard Stallman will give a talk entitled "Protecting the Freedom to Write Software: The new software monopolies, and what we can do about them" on Wednesday, November 17, from 7pm to 9pm, in Auditorium 3 of the Modern Languages Building (MLB). The MLB is at the corner of E. Washington St. and Thayer St. on U of M's Central Campus in Ann Arbor. All are welcome to attend, and admission is free. Stallman is one of the founders of the League for Programming Freedom, an organization whose goal is to protect the freedom to write programs. Specifically, the League aims to abolish two recently established legal concepts which it feels restrict programmers' freedom to do their work: interface copyright and software patents. Stallman will speak about how interface copyright and software patents originated and why they hurt both computer users and programmers. In the field of software, Richard Stallman is best known for developing the popular Emacs text editor while working at the MIT Artifical Intelligence lab between 1971 and 1984. Today he is working to develop the free UNIX-compatible software system known as GNU. In 1990, Stallman received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; he also received the 1990 ACM Grace Hopper Award for his work on Emacs. Stallman's talk is being sponsored by the U of M and Ann Arbor chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Wayne State University ACM, the Wayne State University CS Department, and the CSE Divison of the University of Michigan. The Association for Computing Machinery was formed in 1947 as the society for the computing community; its members are students and professionals interested in all aspects of computing. For more information on this or other UMACM activities, contact Ted Belding (Ted.Belding@umich.edu, streak@engin.umich.edu, or (313) 994-9573) or Sarah Granger (sgranger@engin.umich.edu or (313) 741-9318). For information about the Ann Arbor ACM, contact Susan Haynes (haynes@emunix.emich.edu or (313) 487-4446). Ted Belding, UMACM Chair