Richard Stallman, Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project and Founder of the Free Software Foundation, will visit the lab on 16.6.2026 and give a public talk on “Free Software vs Malware, and the need for reverse engineering”.
The talk will take place in lecture hall H11, Felix-Klein-Gebäude der Technischen Fakultät, Cauerstraße 11, 91058 Erlangen.
The talk is open to the public and attendance is free. Registration is not required. As usual, the event will have around an hour of presentation followed by around an hour of Q&A.
Please also do not occupy the lecture hall before 15:45 in order to not disturb the previous (university) lecture.
Topic of talk
Title: Free Software vs Malware, and the need for reverse engineering
Presenting the moral issues of free vs nonfree software, why your freedom demands freeing yourself from nonfree software, and how reverse engineering is crucial for freeing our computers.
About the speaker
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 as the kernel, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award and the ACM Software and Systems Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as many doctorates honoris causa, and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.