Today’s Boston Globe has a history of the Open Source movement by Laurence Schorsch that’s quite positive, citing it as a threat “peering over the horizon … that just might topple Microsoft.” Appropriately, it begins with Richard Stallman’s contribution. Yet, although Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond are interviewed, local-boy Stallman isn’t. The second to last paragraph explains why:

(Stallman declined to be interviewed for this article unless we promised to call the operating system “GNU/Linux” instead of the more common “Linux.”)

Every time Stallman interrupts a conversation to insist that people change the way they speak, the damage he does to the social values GNU was created to support are mitigated only by the impression that he’s nuts.

Language: The ultimate open source project.

Categories: Uncategorized dw