Recently my local LUG (LILUG) invited Eric S. Raymond (ESR) to come and speak. For those of you who are not familiar with ESR, he is one of the three largest icons of the Open Source/Free Software movement. Needless to say, it was an honor so see him speak. For the most part, his talk was quite tame but one of the points he raised seemed quite controversial.

Eric S Raymond, one of the leaders of the Open Source world and the author of Cathedral in Bazaar has come out to defend Richard M Stallman, the father of Free Software movement who was misquoted by the press.

Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O'Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal "Open Source Paradigm Shift" and other articles.

The egalitarianism of Richard Stallman, the practicality of Eric Raymond, the engineering values of Linus Torvalds. So, too, the stories of Vint Cerf, of Tim Berners-Lee, and of early peering arrangements, in which moving money became secondary to moving bits.

Interview with Richard Stallman about various topics; about the difference between the free software movement and open source, why Stallman rejects the term "intellectual property", the GPLv3 and Torvalds view on it, Microsofts patent claims, and about the Microsoft-Novell deal.

So let's just accept that Linux geeks land on all points of the political spectrum and take a look at the personal politics and styles of the two godfathers of the open source movement: Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.

A recent attack piece against Richard Stallman was written by Linus Torvalds on the eve of Obama’s election.

Black and white by Linus Torvalds

Linus begins with this:

Notorious open source advocate and author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond brings colorful acumen to any open source discussion. Here's how Raymond views the continually evolving open source landscape.

"After a quite interesting month, in which I attended two very interesting lectures (Carlos Guerreiro and Richard Stallman lectures) and a very good fortnight in London I wasn’t sure what to talk about in this post. However, I liked so much an example that Richard Stallman told us talking about software patents that I needed to say some words..."