richard stallman category archive

Back from Boston

And I’m back from the FSF meeting at M.I.T. in Cambridge. The trip went well, I enjoyed myself, and will have more to say later.

One of the highlights was meeting Richard Stallman in person. I think he is a great man, and history will recognize him as a hugely important and influential person. No matter that he can be difficult and off-putting in various ways. It was an honor to shake his hand and thank him for what he’s done and is doing for software freedom.

But time is short and I’ll work on posting later when I can. In the meantime, you might enjoy this picture of Boston over the Charles River, taken from the Longfellow Bridge to Cambridge.

2816 x 2112

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Does Free Software Taste Great, or is Open Source Less Filling?

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 30 October 2006.

Which do you like best: the satisfying, rich taste of principle in free software? Or do you prefer the less morally filling and pragmatic goodness of open source? Do you wish people would stop endlessly rehashing the whole question of “free” versus “open source?” Or do you enjoy the chance to talk about goals and philosophy? As you might suspect, since I’m bringing it up…

…I like to talk about it. Is it too soon, though, following the lengthy debate stirred up by the recent “What should we call it?” FSM poll? Too dividing? Pointless? Do I …

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”– Walt Whitman
A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then

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