One night only: Come to a free lecture with Dr. Richard Stallman

If you’re in San Francisco on the evening of May 2, we’ve got a huge treat for you.

We’re hosting a free-as-in-beer get-together with Dr. Richard Stallman. He’ll give a lecture and Q&A on the topic of copyright and sharing.

We really hope you can come! Please mark your calendars and share, share, share this open invitation. Again, it’s free.

We have set up an anonymous registration process so you can reserve your seat. In the meantime, I highly recommend signing up for our Daily Dev newsletter. We’ll keep you informed on the other dev events we’re doing this year, and we’ll also keep you abreast of interesting items you won’t find on Hacker News.

Here are the event details:

DATE: May 2, 2014

TIME: 6 – 9 PM

LOCATION: The Automattic Lounge

132 Hawthorne Street

San Francisco, CA 94107

Public Transportation:

We are a 12 minute walk from Montgomery Street BART
or a 15 minute walk from Powell Street BART
or a 15 minute walk from the Caltrain Station at 4th and King.

If coming via MUNI, you can plan your trip here: http://511.org/. Several bus routes will drop you off on Folsom, as well as Second & Harrison.

Parking:

There are several parking structures around the area. Here are two that we recommend within a 5-minute walk of Hawthorne

California Parking 690 Harrison St.
Archstone Parking 1 Saint Francis Place

SPEAKER: Dr. Richard Stallman

Dr. Richard Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983 and started the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, with or without changes. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several doctorates honoris causa, and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

TOPIC: Copyright v. Community

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright — to promote progress for the benefit of the public — then we must make changes in the other direction.