Bruce Perens defends Free Software and Richard Stallman

Direct link

Also see part 2 and part 3.

Bruce Perens at the launch event of GPLv3

My colleague Bruce Byfield made some good points in his recent blog entry "Conspiracy theorists and free software." In it, he outlines his concerns that there is a vocal faction in the free software community that is too obsessed with a certain proprietary company, and that their rants and raves amount to so much rabble-rousing, which ultimately hurts the community at large.

FSDaily is a community driven site. Without submissions from the community there is no news for the FSDaily community. When you read a great free software related article you can share it with the rest of the free software community by submitting it to FSDaily yourself. An easy way to do this is using FSDaily Bookmarklets.

Bruce Byfield has an interesting list of rebuttals for GNU-Linux myths. So here's a few thoughts to add to the points raised...

You want software to perform some task. You can buy it off the shelf or build it yourself, even from scratch. In this 10 old article, the author of cgiemail Bruce Lewis describes the pros and cons of both and offers practical advice and explains how the existence of free software makes a difference.

"...What means promoting Free Software through Free Culture? It means we need to start advertising the collaboration tools in our software. We have to enable and encourage artists to share their work with other artists and with the world - just as our programmers do..."

Frederic Muller, president of Software Freedom International, was flaunting two things at the Gnome Asia Summit in Bangalore -- his passion for free software, and his newly acquired beard. We try to capture both in this interview. Frederic has lots of hands-on experience of promoting free software in education and offers wonderful advice for others who want to do the same.

Regular visitors of my blog know that nothing outrages me more than people who apply these guerrilla tactics. Whether it is Ian Ferguson who said that "the flaming Linux bigots should take a backseat", Mohit Joshi, who equaled GNU to communism or the more recently Bruce Byfield, who obviously couldn't take the heat anymore and decided to proclaim unilaterally that all bloggers who don't agree with him are automatically "conspiracy theorists".

Bruce Perens explains what he has seen Microsoft doing inside governments in order to marginalise Free software, mostly through hired guns like CompTIA and ACT