Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman (RMS) was in Mexico at the end of October and the beginning of November, and visited several cities, where he delivered speeches on software freedom.

He started off in Mexico City, where he gave the speech "Should we have more surveillance than the USSR?" at the Escuela Superior de Cómputo (ESCOM), on November 23rd. The speech was organized by the school's cybersecurity club, which works with GNU/Linux distributions to evaluate security, and uses GDB to introduce students to debugging and reverse engineering. "As a club, we are trying to spread the use of free software, sharing knowledge of the use and the structures of the operating system," said Javier González, one of its members, pleased that the talk was able to bolster their efforts to raise awareness of the issues.

(Copyright © 2017 Javier Gonzalez. Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

(Copyright © 2017 ESCOM-IPN. Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

The same day, RMS headed north, to Gómez Palacio, to deliver the keynote speech at the the 19th International Congress of Engineering, Science, and Architecture, on October 24th, at the Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango. He gave his speech "Free software in ethics and in practice" to a diverse audience of about 600 activists (the Laguna GLUG), students, and academics, from various disciplines and various local universities, who had, for the most part, not yet had much exposure to GNU software.

Afterwards, he headed to Puerto Vallarta, to give the keynote speech at Festival de Software Libre (2017-10-27–29) on October 17th, to an audience of about 300 people.

(Copyright © 2017 Festival de Software Libre. Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

After a couple of days in Mexico City, he headed to Tlaxcala, where about 250 people came to hear him give his speech "Copyright vs. Community," at the Universidad Politécnica de Tlaxcala. The director of the IT department can be seen below presenting RMS with a gift, a wooden panel that Tlaxcala artisans had carved for him.

Osvaldo Moreno Hernández, a professor at the school, was very pleased he was able to organize the speech, "because of the students' great interest in learning about the philosophy behind free software, and, most of all, in learning about its impact on our lives." The school offers a degree in information technology, and free software is used in the education process, so he is "considering giving a boost to [using] free software throughout the entire school, and especially in the IT department."

(Copyright © 2017 Osvaldo Moreno Hernández. Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

Back in Mexico City, RMS was at the Fábrica Digital del Centro Cultural y de Visitantes El Rule, a visitor and cultural center, to give his speech "Libre software; Libre hardware designs," on October 31st.

(Copyright © 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

His final stop in Mexico was on November 3rd, in Puebla, where he had spoken also in 2011, 2012, and 2013.

Thank you to everyone who made this trip possible!

Please fill out our contact form, so that we can inform you about future events in and around Mexico City, Gómez Palacio, Puerto Vallarta, Tlaxcala, and Puebla.

Please see www.fsf.org/events for a full list of all of RMS's confirmed engagements, and contact rms-assist@gnu.org if you'd like him to come speak.