Stallman – free not open

I was fortunate enough to see Richard Stallman’s (rms) talk at Oxford Uni today titled ‘For A Free Digital Society’.

In trying to describe who rms is to a friend I came up with the following:

The future may look back on Stallman, and consider him to be more important than Jobs and Gates… but that future would need to be one in which the value of material wealth has decreased considerably.

I tend towards a more balanced perspective on some of the things he talked about today, but I love his dedication to an ideal that he so clearly believes in ‘soup to nuts’.

Note to self:

It’s not Linux, it is GNU plus Linux,

It’s free not open (rms uses ‘gratis’ to mean $0 pricetag, free to mean you can view, edit, distribute the source)

Whatever you don’t put that picture you took of him on Facebook!