OK, I'm conflicted. Last Saturday at the Software Freedom Day event in Boston, Richard Stallman called Miguel de Icaza “a traitor to the Free Software community" because of de Icaza's involvement with Microsoft-based technologies like Mono and Moonlight.

Strong words from the revered founder of the Free Software Foundation and more Microsoft/Mono news

Novell's VP carries on spinning to discredit the father of Free(dom) software

In one of my earliest blog posts here I called Richard Stallman, a father of the open source movement and almost immediately got a personal nastygram. From Richard Stallman. I appreciated it and have sought to be more careful. Stallman believes in free software, which he calls Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). (It’s also called Free Open Source Software (FOSS).)

Jason Perlow has written an article about Richard Stallman, Watch Out for That Meteor, Stallman. There are some factual errors in the article, so let me step up to the plate and fix them.

A couple of weeks ago (Dec 12, 2009 to be exact) Miguel di Icaza made a bold move and pulled all GPL code out of MonoDevelop, replacing it with LGPL Of course the open source community had a lot to say about this.

Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman recently brought Microsoft's newly instituted CodePlex Foundation to task in his blog. The CodePlex Foundation's Miguel de Icaza, also mentioned in the blog, has since mounted a defense.

"In February of last year, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, spoke at the International Conference on Communication and Technologies in Havana about what he strongly believes are the merits of non-proprietary software. I recently learned directly from Stallman what that experience was like.

"Two whirlwinds blew into Buenos Aires this week: the hundreds of Wikipedia supporters, editors and administrators here for their annual Wikimania conference, and the free-software activist Richard Stallman, who was in town as part of his never-ending tour of the globe to promote his cause..."