Toronto Star: Freedom's Forgotten Prophet (Richard Stallman)

[ Thanks to Salman Ahmed and Gene Wilburn for this link. ]

"But if [Richard] Stallman is winning the war, he is losing the battle -- for credit...."

"Red Hat's Web site lists the major milestones in 'open source' software, beginning in the 1970s with AT&T's Unix system and jumping to Torvalds' kernel in 1991, completely bypassing Stallman. (Red Hat does, however, provide a link to the GNU Web site, but most people have no idea what it represents.)"

"Stallman failed in a number of ways, says Eric Raymond, a board member of VA Linux Systems (which sells workstations loaded with Red Hat Linux). 'Richard is one of the best programmers to ever walk this earth, (he is) an innovative genius of design, but...his rhetoric didn't work. It turned off business. The term 'free software' is ambiguous. And he didn't produce a kernel.'"

Complete Story

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