Stories about: ESR

Microsoft's aim to seek patent royalties from open-source distributors and users may be an attempt to use legal threats to deflect attention from larger questions surrounding its business, including lack of interest in new versions of core products and lackluster profit from new wares.

There are some people who are passionate about the differences between "free software" and "open source." I'm beginning to wonder if the difference matters. The term "free software" came into use at about the same time that Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT, launched the GNU Project, and began writing the software that would eventually become the core of the free software community: emacs, the GNU "C" compile (gcc), the "C" libraries, and a few others.

In an age where Linus Torvalds now regularly makes it into BusinessWeek as Linux's "technical shepherd," can it really be true that Linux still has an image problem? However hard a pill it may be to swallow, that's how it is, according anyway to one recent account of prevailing prejudices at a typical computer science department.

Here is the response in full, posted Monday anonymously at Groklaw.net. The original question had been, " I have been curious about the Free Software movement, GPL and similar movements, licences for some time. I would like to read more about its history, specifically any history or information concerning the conception and drafting of the GPL itself."

The war of words between The SCO Group and the Linux community escalated this week in a flurry of open letters, the latest from Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Just days after The SCO Group escalated its legal battle with IBM over alleged violations of the two companies' Unix source code contract, open source advocate Eric Raymond has responded, saying that he possesses evidence that could undermine some of SCO's legal arguments in the case.

Not long after the second part of the most recent Perens interview went online, we got email from Larry McVoy. He said there were some factual errors in the Perens piece and asked what our policy was on corrections. We assured him that we always tried to make corrections when they were needed and asked what the errors had been. He pointed out two: Perens' claims that BitMover (McVoy's company, which produces BitKeeper,) had trouble making payroll and that McVoy was constantly threatening to sue him.

Should we treat "average users" like the morons they are, or coddle them so they don't hurt themselves? Surely there is a third alternative... especially considering the in-road Linux is making into the consumer orientated popular operating system market. After all, the present success of Linux owes much to the fact that your "average user" was interested.