Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams, O’Reilly, $22.95, ISBN 0596002874
IN 1990, Richard Stallman won a $240,000 MacArthur award for being very bright indeed. One of his brightest ideas is free software: not free as in zero-cost, but free as in open for modification.
Stallman’s belief that it is morally wrong to fence off software and stop it being adapted by its users sets him squarely against today’s tightening patent and copyright regimes. To counter what he sees as the business world’s evil demands he set up the GNU project in 1984 to create a full suite of free software. Later it became the…
