I met Richard Stallman :)

So, Richard Stallman came in Italy to do a series of talks about the threats to freedom in a digital society.
I must admit that when I saw the advert I was excited like a 12 year old girl who just got a ticket for a Justin Bieber concert, but I must also say that I'm not really a die hard fan of Richard.
Being the first time I attend such an event, I didn't know what to expect, but my expectations were about to be exceeded by a long measure as soon as he stepped into the room: he dropped his bag on the floor, sat on a chair in front of the audience and took off his shoes, as if he was at home alone, and started working on his computer while a couple of journalists introduced him (as if we didn't know who Richard Stallman is, bloody idiots).
After a brief introduction by the guys who invited him there, Stallman started his speech with his ritual "Raise your hand if you cannot hear me", and started listing a series of dangers, of threats to our freedom, in the digital society: he spoke for over 2 hours about computer science, freedom, politics and even philosphy. He is a really good talker, and the thing that most amazed me is how after saying something serious, he could always find some witty comment to say that would make the audience laugh. That's incredible: he's a philosopher, politician, programmer (should I say hacker?) and comedian at the same time.
Obviously he discussed free software, non-free software dangers, dangers of cloud coputing (SaaSS actually), dangers of cell phones, dangers of social networks, the war on sharing, copyright laws, DRM, the big brother, the NSA scandal and much more, and was able to mantain a very high attention from the entire audience: it was over 2 hours of speech, but it seemed like 10 minutes to me.
But now I should also talk about a few negative things:
I've already mentioned that the guys who invited him are fucking idiots (or at least that's what they looked like to me), but I haven't mentioned that they had the balls to have Richard do the talk in some kind of basement with not enough chairs for the over 200 people who came there and the worst ventilation system ever concieved by the human kind: the area near Stallman was so hot he had to ask them to open the windows, while the place where I was was so cold that I had to attend the entire speech with my padded jacket on. Unexcusable, really, have a bit of fucking respect!
The second thing I have to say is a warning: while I think Richard is a genius, and share most of his ideals, he's an extremist, and extremism is always wrong: he came out with stuff like "proprietary software should not exist, it should be illegal"; now that's a bit excessive, don't you think? I can understand saying that some critical parts of the system like the BIOS, the OS, the device drivers and all the basic applications like the web browser should be free software, but others, like video games, who cares if they're non-free software: sure it's better if they are, because we can study, modify, etc them, but really, when I play Dragon Age Origins, the last thing that comes to my mind is "I'm not gonna play this because it's non-free software". So, to put it shortly, take what he says cum grano salis, because he's an extremist.
Finally, I think Richard should be a little more professional if he wants to be taken seriously (just look him up on Youtube and see what kind of reputation he has, he deserves better than that).
Anyway, at the end of the speech, Richard picked up that plush gnu that you can see in the picture on the left and auctioned it to gather money for the Free Software Foundation: I really wanted it but didn't have enough cash with me :( If only I knew...
After that, he did a quick Q&A (where some moron again said open source instead of free software), and then we all gathered around him for getting autographs and taking pictures. I got my laptop signed by him :) now it's like the holy grail. On the right you can see a picture of the laptop with "Happy Hacking, Richard Stallman" written on it, and below is a video of him signing it. By Stallman's request, the video is in WebM format (Stallman-approved) -and MP4 (not Stallman-approved) because Internet Fucking Explorer doesn't support WebM- and is played by the HTML5 video player.
By the way, when talking about Microsoft Windows he came up with a combo of insults like "Non-free, freedom-restricting, user-subjugating, proprietary malware known as Microsoft Windows", and referred to the users of Facebook, Google, Instagram and many others as "used", because they're not using the service, they're being used by it (I agree with that, but come on, used?).
Watch the video of the entire speech here (if their shitty server lets you).

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