I went to Asia in August/September for the FOSSAP II meeting in Cambodia. This was organized by APDIP, a part of UNDP that covers the Asia/Pacific region. The other similar regional UNDP organizations for other parts of the world fallen under the dominion of Microsoft, but APDIP continues supporting free software despite constant threats and bullying which Microsoft applies at higher levels in UNDP.

Since I was going to Asia, I decided to visit other countries while I was there. I hoped to visit Indonesia, but nobody invited me there this time. I arranged a visit to Malaysia before FOSSAP, and to Hong Kong and China after.

I gave two speeches in Malaysia, one in Penang and one in Kuala Lumpur. The schedule was only fixed at the last minute; some others wanted speeches in Kuala Lumpur, including MAMPU which is a government agency that promotes "open source". By the time we knew what times were available for other speeches, it was too late to arrange them.

Malaysia has a reputation for repression and a lack of freedom, and on this visit I learned some of the reasons. People of Malay descent are required by law to be Muslims, and Muslims are forbidden by law to stop being Muslims. (I wonder whether Malaysia has signed any treaties that call for religious freedom.) I posed to some friends the idea that an atheist of Malay descent might ask for political asylum in another country, so as to be permitted not to be a Muslim. They were somewhat shocked by the idea of talking about such a question, but did not seem to be truly frightened. They told me that the government had allowed freedom to discuss political views on the internet--but that such freedom would not necessarily apply to actual speech.

On my last full day in Kuala Lumpur I had lunch in a food court in a big shopping mall on the side of the Petronas twin towers, which were for a while the world's tallest buildings. As a sign of globalization, nearly all the stores have names that are familiar from the US and Europe. However, the food court is full of kinds of food one would probably never find in the US or Europe. I had some Malayanised Indian food--the food of people of Indian descent in Malaysia.

We went to the mall because I was looking for books by Indonesian writers. Since Indonesian is almost the same as Malay, it was plausible I would find them there. I was looking for books by a famous Indonesian writer, Mochtar Lubis, because of a recommendation that they were good for people studying Indonesian to read. We went to the largest bookstore in the country, and it was almost completely full of books in English, plus a large Chinese section, but only a small section of books in Malay/Indonesian. It seems that most of the books published in Malay are either religious, or romances for teen-agers. They did not have any Mochtar Lubis, but they did have a couple of books by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a stalwart defender of freedom whose books were banned in Indonesia for a long time. I bought the last book of the Buru Island quartet--named for the prison island where Suharto sent him.

My host turned out to be interested in science fiction, so I offered to go with him to that section and suggest books for him to buy. He got around 12 books in English. Meanwhile, I found a few that I had been seeking for some time, and brought them home.

Afterwards I had tea with Tan King Ing, who works in MAMPU. MAMPU officially promotes "open source", but she is starting to see the virtue of the free software ideals. She and her friend Nor (whose name caused me much amusement) suggested we visit a couple of small bookstores that specialize more in Malay books--perhaps they would have Mochtar Lubis. They didn't, but I did get another book they said I might enjoy. So then they suggested visiting another large bookstore. In this store we finally found a Mochtar Lubis book. It was an English translation, which would not be useful for learning Indonesian. It seems that people in Malaysia who read a lot usually read English.

Then they suggested that I should try to make contact with anyone from Indonesia who was going to the FOSSAP meeting in Cambodia in a few days. Chances are at least one of them would be able to pick up some of these books and bring them to the meeting. This plan did work. However, by that time I had started reading one of the books that I had got in Kuala Lumpur, so I haven't started them yet.

I noticed that antisemitic literature, such as the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and a book by Henry Ford, were prominently displayed in every book store.

With returning a day late from Venezuela, I had just one night in Cambridge before a brief trip to Europe. I had to hurry just to make all the preparations to leave again. The pocket of my computer bag where I keep tickets, photos, and various other important papers was overdue for cleaning out.

My first stop was in a small town near Antequera, Spain. They had told me the event was in Malaga, but I never actually saw that city. The event was to train the people who are going to be installing and supporting GNU/Linux in schools across Andalusia.

When I arrived, it was time for lunch. At that point I discovered that essentially all the beverages, aside from beer which I don't like at all, were from Coca Cola company--even the bottled water. No way that I would drink any of that! Fortunately there were pitchers of tap water, which I drank. The water in Antequera comes from mountain springs and would be worth bottling, but people in Spain find it unthinkable to drink water from the faucet. I tried telling a few others about the Coca Cola boycott, and felt devastated by frustration when they did not want to listen.

The meeting was held in an institution for meetings of youths from Spain and Latin America, operated by an arm of the Spanish government. It was the government that had made an exclusive contract with Coca Cola. The organizers of the meeting could not do anything.

The next day was a spare day. I always plan to arrive at least 24 hours before my speech, on long trips, in case a flight is canceled. (On the few occasions when I made a mistake in planning this cushion, I was a day late and missed everything.) Aside from working, I visited a site of amazing beauty-- El Torcal, large area of karst on the top of a mountain. We were there shortly before dusk, and wild goats were beginning to come out to browse. We walked towards one, which continued eating, showing no fear of us, until we were about 20 feet away.

Then I felt an urge to play some music and see how the goat would react. I pulled my recorder from my pocket and played just a few notes. The goat snorted and walked slowly away. What a horrible failure--music despised even by goats! We all laughed.

The next morning I gave my speech, and was immediately whisked away by car to Sevilla, which was the only nearby airport that had a flight that would get me to my next destination that same day. It was Valencia, where I visited my friends, and spoke in a book store in Castellon to sell copies of Software Libre para una Sociedad Libre.

The following day I was off to Frankfurt for the Wikimania conference. On arriving in Valencia airport I discovered that my flight to Frankfurt had a paper ticket--and I could not find it. I searched the ticket pocket over and over. What had I done? Had I lost that ticket? Never received it? Left it home? Air France has carefully designed policies which ensure that they can't possibly help a person in that situation They will not issue a replacement ticket unless they can contact the travel agency that issued the ticket. Since the flight departed at 1pm, which in Boston was 7am, there was no chance of doing this before the flight. But they also arbitrarily refuse to issue a replacement ticket after the flight has departed (which could have been changed to a later flight).

During all this, I was trying to call my contact in the Wikimania conference to find if they would cover the cost of a new ticket. He had said he'd be reachable through his cellular phone while there in Frankfurt, but I only got voice mail. It turns out he was talking about someone else's cell phone and I didn't know the number.

I had no way of finding out whether I would be able to get my money back for the lost tickets. All I could do was get the the cheapest available ticket to Frankfurt. I arrived there late in the evening and not at the hour I was expected. Fortunately nothing went wrong.

The next day I spoke about Copyright vs Community. This is a talk that I often give, in which I state the views I have reached as a result of generalizing the ideas of free software to other kinds of written works. I reached these conclusions in several steps--first, in the 80s, concluding that software manuals have to be free because they ought to be included with the software; then, in the late 90s, concluding that reference works and educational works in general ought to be free. In 1999 I began to write an article proposing The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource, which I believe had some influence in the development of Wikipedia. At the same time I extended some of the same ideas to other kinds of works, and that is what Copyright vs Community is mainly about.

I spent the final 11 days of July on a visit to Venezuela which I have been unable to write about until now, because the succession of failures was too painful. I needed to wait for the pain to fade.

A few weeks before the trip, my former sweetheart Tania wrote to me saying that she really, really wanted to see me. I suggested she could come to Venezuela, and I got tickets for her. So much, so good.

The failures began before I actually arrived: there was a delay on the way to Miami, and I was stuck there overnight. Fortunately that delay caused no particular problem. On arriving in Maracaibo, I found out that Juan Carlos Gentile, a friend and free software activist who is helping the state oil company switch to free software, was stuck in Italy, waiting for a visa to reenter Venezuela. When I had last seen him, a few months before in Italy, he had absent-mindedly left with my Bulgarian CD in his computer. On discovering it there, he said he'd return it in Venezuela, but this proved impossible.

Tania was not there, either. She had had a visa problem too--the people arranging an event in Venezuela which invited her to speak had not provided the necessary letter of invitation.

Aside from this, there were no particular problems in Maracaibo except the heat, which I found intolerable. I stayed where it was air-conditioned. I spoke with Tania by email and by phone with the people in Caracas, trying to solve the problem. At the Venezuelan embassy in Bogota they told her that the invitation letter had to come through the Colombian embassy in Caracas; but when people in Caracas tried to drop off the letter, that embassy told them this was the wrong procedure and that they had to send the letter directly to Tania. They said they would try both fax and overnight mail.

On Friday I went to Caracas. That evening I read mail which Tania had sent that morning, saying that she had still been unable to get her visa and begging me to ask someone to go back to the Colombian embassy. Of course, in the evening that was impossible. All I could do was ask for more information--for instance, if the faxed copy had reached her. She later responded that it had, and she had brought it to the Venezuelan embassy, but they had rejected it, insisting that it had to arrive from the Colombian embassy in Caracas in order to be valid.

It was theoretically possible that she could apply for the visa on Monday, get it on Tuesday, and come to Venezuela on Wednesday. But that way we would only have 3 days together. We gave up. I can't get money back for those tickets, but maybe she can use them another time.

The meetings of the Telesur advisory board began on Saturday. They included being on stage on Sunday for the official launch of the station, which now has four hours of programming daily. The official launch appeared too self-interested and tendentious, and I thought it might not be very interesting for viewers. It had been scheduled for Bolivar's birthday for symbolic reasons, even though the station's offices and staffing were still incomplete. A couple of people I know wrote to me saying they had watched it.

Most of the people in the advisory board are intellectuals who want attention to be paid to additional social issues or criteria that they consider important. I agree that these causes are important, but the aggregate is far more than Telesur can do. I tried to orient my suggestions toward attracting a large enough audience to be effective as a counterweight to the propaganda of Faux News and CNN.

Fortunately I was not alone: Tariq Ali, a journalist with far more knowledge of the issue, was there too, and presented his advice very clearly. One point he made was that the station, to be credible, had to be independent of the government--and that having the minister of information as its president was the exact opposite of what they ought to do. It looks like people took his advice to heart, because a few days later I heard that Minister Izarra had stepped down as minister and remained as president of Telesur only. That struck me as an unusual thing to do, so I asked my friends to explain. They told me he had been a TV journalist, not particularly a Chavez supporter, but during the coup he quit his TV job rather than tell lies as his bosses wanted. After the coup was defeated, Chavez appointed him a minister. That shows a refreshing attitude of integrity on all sides.

On Sunday during the meetings, I discussed with Izarra and others what we had read in a newspaper. It said that Chavez was talking of jamming the radio transmissions that Congressman Connie Mack had proposed to send to Venezuela to "give Venezuela precise, objective and complete news". (I have only seen those words in Spanish translation, and I have translated them back to English here.)

When I read about Commie Mack's amendment, passed by the House of Representatives, I laughed. The Venezuelan opposition press, which includes nearly all the TV stations, says everything that would warm his heart; having it come directly from Washington would only reveal its true origin. To jam these signals would be foolish--as well as wrong. The way to respond to bad speech is not with censorship, but through correcting the errors with other speech. I suggested that Venezuela should send radio transmissions in English to the US to give Americans objective and complete news.

We all thought this was an important thing for me to say to President Chavez at lunch the next day. The difficulty was that I was supposed to go to Merida on an early morning flight, to speak there at 11:30. The Telesur people agreed to cover half of the costs as compensation for my missing that speech, and we changed the flight. The lunch was supposed to start at noon, giving me plenty of time to attend and then make it to my flight at 3:40.

The next morning, we were told that the lunch was delayed till 1pm. No problem, I could stay until 2pm.

We arrived at 1pm at the Miraflores Palace, sat down in the room where the lunch would be, but the president was not there. I pulled out my computer and began to work. We waited and waited. He arrived at 1:50, and began moving around the table, exchanging some words with each person.

When he got to me, I said it would be a mistake to jam the transmissions. He agreed--he had already recognized the same thing. I'm glad he didn't need me to tell him that the jamming was a mistake, but at the same time, I wondered if I had been a fool to suppose for a moment that it was necessary. And I felt it was a waste to have missed a speech to achieve so little.

I quickly suggested that Telesur broadcast radio in English to the US, and he moved on.

I arrived in Merida without further problems, but 20 minutes into my speech that evening, the electricity failed for the whole university. While waiting for power to come back, I switched to distributing the FSF materials. When that was done, power was still off, so I finished the speech in the dark, using candles so people could see my hands and face. We decided to postpone the questions and answers to the next evening.

The following day, my hosts and I ascended the nearby mountain, using a series of four cable car lifts (with three intermediate stations) that take you to the icy altitude of 4800 meters. The views were spectacular, but it appeared my camera had malfunctioned on the way down--three spots of light appeared in the same place in every photo. I eventually discovered they were in my computer screen, not in the photos, which were actually fine.

I learned that I was not the only speaker missing at the previous day's event. Another activist from Colombia had been unable to come, due to visa problems. I suggested that Telesur investigate the series of visa problems, which might perhaps be part of some larger systemic problem.

The next failure occurred when I arrived in Caracas: the person who had said he would meet me at the airport wasn't there. (He later said he had not been told when I would arrive.) I tried contacting various other people I knew, and could only reach one person. He came there to meet me, while I waited an hour. Fortunately I was able to work during the time, so it didn't cause a practical problem, only some worries. But then came a real big problem: the meeting we were supposed to have that evening with a legislator about the proposed free software law was canceled, because he had to leave town in a hurry to campaign for his party. (Elections were due shortly after the end of my visit.) There was no possible time to reschedule it.

I gave two speeches in Caracas. One was mainly for government people, organized by Sergeant-Major Torres, who converted the Venezuelan Army's servers to GNU/Linux. People from the Ministry of Science and Technology attended, and I hope this will encourage them to support free software more in the future.

There was a bookstore downstairs in the same building; I went there and found an interesting book to buy, and at that point I learned something shocking and disappointing about Venezuelan law. Every purchase--even food--requires the purchaser to present his national ID card, and his ID number is recorded to report it to the government. The bookseller was very angry about it, and I share his feelings. It is like my worst nightmares about surveillance, come true. Supposedly the purpose is for tax collection, but no one was able to give me a clear story of how it would solve a problem or why it was necessary. Other countries have been able to collect taxes in other ways.

In my second Caracas speech, I raised this issue, and urged people to organize to change it. If I someday have another chance to speak with President Chavez, this is what I will discuss.

At that point, all that remained was for me to return home. My friend had an unrealistic idea of how long it would take to get to get a cab, to get to the airport, and to check in, and as a result I missed the flight. This almost meant missing the visiting relatives who were making a rare visit to Boston the next day. But I managed to get a morning flight the next day, and arrived in Boston around 5pm. At this point I was able to contact them by phone, and brought them to a nice Chinese restaurant.

The Saturday speech was a bit difficult since it started at 8:30am, but I managed to be there, and suggested to the audience that we all sleep together. I focused on the need for free educational materials as well as free software, since they could probably contribute to it.

A question session followed, and when it was done, I asked a few of the attendees to go with me to lunch. I led them to an Indonesian restaurant that I had liked on a previous visit. Getting there was somewhat difficult because there was a parade that day. When we arrived at the address, we discovered that the restaurant had moved. There was no other restaurant nearby that seemed appealing, so we decided to go to its new address. When we finally got there, we discovered it was closed for lunch on weekends.

We were in a neighborhood with lots of restaurants--almost all closed, except for a few that were completely full. Eventually we found a place where we could have a not particularly exciting lunch.

The university event on Sunday led to fireworks. In my speech, I explained my views on copyright law, including the position that the minimum freedom that everyone should always have is the freedom to share, noncommercially, any published work.

After the speech, there was a panel discussion which included me and a Canadian lawyer representing Creative Commons. I used to support Creative Commons, but then it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom, and now I can no longer endorse it as an activity. (I agree with Mako Hill that they are taking the wrong approach by not insisting on any specific freedoms for the public--see http://mako.cc/writing/toward_a_standard_of_freedom.html--but I go a little further: I don't think that licenses which deny that minimum freedom are legitimate at all.) Since people tend to treat Creative Commons as a unit, disregarding the details like which one of their licenses is being used, it is not feasible to support just part of Creative Commons--so I can't support it at all now. I asked the leaders of Creative Commons privately to change their policies, but they declined, so we had to part ways.

I explained this briefly, in words were no harsher than the ones above. So I was rather shocked by how the lawyer from Creative Commons responded. After leading the audience in a simplistic game, designed for them to choose his position over a single other option, he then accused me of acting like a fascist ruler, claiming that I was trying to command the audience to agree with me. I responded calmly, explaining the difference between stating a political position and forcing people to agree, and quite pleasantly did not even get angry. The audience, aware I had done nothing to interfere with their freedom of thought or speech, was not very sympathetic to him.

Immediately after the panel ended, he did the strangest thing: he came up to shake my hand. I did so, not noticing who it was, and then I felt put upon once I realized who. For me, such attacks are not compatible with friendship, or with a handshake. But I've noticed on other occasions that lawyers who had said extremely hostile things, either hostile to me or hostile to the cause I work for, wanted to shake my hand after, as if to say I should responsible for what they had said and done. Perhaps for them it is just a game, or just a job, but I take it seriously.

I later saw a posting by Larry Lessig which said that Creative Commons had taken a step towards not leading the public to treat all Creative Commons licenses as a lump--that they would ask people to specify, in web buttons, the particular license being used. It is a step in the right direction, but even if a good fraction of users do convert their buttons, I doubt it will greatly change the result much.

I had one more full day in Montreal, so I suggested to my host that we go visit Quebec City, where I had never been. He hadn't been there for many years either, so we decided to go. Quebec turned out to be moderately interesting but much too touristy. You can see the photos in stallman.org/photos/canada/quebec. I made friends with a street musician who was playing rather dancy music on a harp, and since there was nobody else around at the time, he invited me to play a tune for him on the recorder. Nowadays I only play a few Bulgarian dances I still remember, and I don't practice enough, but he had fun, and so did I.

On leaving Taiwan, at the end of May, I went to Brussels for another event in the European Parliament to oppose software patents. The event had few attendees, because the part of the conservative bloc that supports software patents organized a counter-event at the same time. The people from FFII mostly went to their event, to point out the falsehoods in what the pro-patent people were saying. By holding their counter-event, they pissed off the rest of their party, which could have been good for us.

After this I had a nice lunch with MEP Carl Schlytter, in which we talked about various common political goals and how to push the European Parliament itself towards use of free software. Then we went to the place that a protest was scheduled. We had to walk about 15 minutes to get there, and I was exhausted when I arrived. There were 100 or 200 people, and I was surprised by its location--in a place that few people would see it.

Then I found out the reason for that location--they were planning to march back along the path I had just walked. I told them I was too tired for a march, and wished them good luck.

In Brussels I had a chance for the first time to try Marcolini's chocolates. They were both creative and delicious. Imagine a chocolate whose center is a liquid with the flavor of violets--or Earl Grey tea. I liked them so much that I decided to return the next morning, taking a bus and rushing back before flying out, to get more that I could share with the people I would see in subsequent visits.

My next stop was Barcelona, where I gave a couple of speeches. The first place I planned to stay was with a friend. His air conditioner's compressor was broken, so I desperately contacted the conference organizers to put me in a hotel instead. But on the second day I found a person in the conference that I could stay with. The hotel was comfortable enough, but I'd rather stay with people than in a hotel.

Although I had been there four times before, this time I began to get a feel for the layout of the city and how to get around in it. I walked for a while in Montjuic park. I also discovered a marvelous new restaurant, Restauran Toc.

Also in Barcelona I had a chance to realize a plan I have had in mind for more than a year, but could not get the necessary material: I made an ephemeral sculpture out of a lily. One of the flower shops in the Rambla had the right kind of lily, red and not opening too wide. The sculpture's title is "De-lirio", which in Spanish means both "delirium" and "(made) of lily". See http://stallman.org/photos/hacks/de-lirio.

Then I left for a lightning tour to Leon, Madrid and Valencia, then and back to Barcelona. From Leon we went to Asturias to visit a cave and the moutains (see http://stallman.org/photos/espana/leon).

In Madrid I arranged to have dinner with two free software activists and friends, Pablo Machon and Jose Marchesi, in El Cenador del Prado, a restaurant that had been very fine in the past. The food didn't seem to be quite as good, this time, as I remembered it--I wonder if they lost their chef. After Pablo and I arrived in central Madrid from the airport, we first went in search of a replacement for one of the records that was stolen in March, Las Seis Tentaciones by La Musgaña. (This group plays traditional music from Castille, which has little resemblance to what most people think of as Spanish music, and this record always makes me want to dance.) The first department store told us it was backordered, which was extremely frustrating since it suggested I would probably have to wait months or a year for another chance to get it. But we found one copy in another department store.

Walking to the restaurant, we passed the parking lot on the way. I was already tired, so I asked Pablo to go down and get the bag with the Marcolini chocolates. I had saved 1/3 of them for this occasion, to share with them. He retrieved it, and then we walked to the restaurant and waited for Jose. After dinner, I told them how great the chocolate was, and opened the bag. It was the wrong bag.

By the time we got back to the car and found the right bag in the trunk of the car, they had all melted together and were totally ruined. We threw them away; there was nothing else to do with them.

The next day it was on to Valencia, where I saw my friends who live there. The next morning I was supposed to do an internet radio program at the university in Castellon, with a few people present to hear it. They turned out to be a room full of students, and it turned out to be a normal speech.

I spent one night in Barcelona so I could fly out of there the next day. Although it only takes two hours by train from Castellon to Barcelona, with the various connections and delays I'd have had to leave at 7:30 to get there in time for my flight, and that would have been especially painful before heading six timezones west.

Instead of going home, I went to New York. I put this in the plan hoping to do an FSF fund-raiser dinner there. (Have you donated to the FSF lately?) But this was canceled because we didn't get suggestions for potential donors that were not already donating. The visit was the occasion to discover that the two Ceylon restaurants and my favorite Burmese restaurant had all closed.