Daily Archives: April 17, 2008

Richard Stallman, founder of GNU, speaking in Burlington today and tomorrow

VTdotNetFeed

Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and founder of the GNU Project (http://www.gnu.org/), will be speaking in the Burlington area on April 17 and 18.

 

  o  Thursday, April 17, 4:30 p.m., St. Michael’s College; “Copyright versus Community in the Age of Computer Networks”

 

  o  Friday, April 18, 9:30 a.m., Champlain College; “The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System”

 

GNU is “free software” and a different concept from open source software. Per the GNU Web site…

 

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“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

 

Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

    * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

    * The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

    * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

    * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

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The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today.  Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

 

Help the Case Foundation pick it’s $25,000 community award grant winners!

Purely Personal

FrontPorchForum, a local, very innovative community website that started here in the Burlington area, has made the cut from 5,000 community organizations to be on the shortlist of 20 to possibly win a $25,000 grant from the Case Foundation. Case Foundation will aware these grants to 5 organizations based on public voting.

So you can vote for 5 of the last 20 organizations on the list. I went to the site on behalf of FPF and was happy to see an organization from my home town (Syracuse, NY) on the list and was able to vote for them as well. Even if you don’t find a local organization on the list of 20, there will surely be at least 5 that inspire you. So go help them out and vote!

TechEd – it’s everywhere!

Tech Ed

I’m used to seeing TechEd ads on many of the sites that I go to since they are developer sites. So it took a few minutes for it to register when I saw the ad on the website of our local newspaper, the Burlington Free Press.

I’ve been seeing them frequently for days now. This is a pretty small market and it’s surprising to me that they would be advertising here, but perhaps it’s part of a sweeping media buy and they didn’t explicitly choose Burlington. If I didn’t know better, I’d really wonder if they just weren’t using spyware to detect that I have VIsual Studio on my computer and therefore serving up this perfectly targetted ad. There are also a few other Microsoft ads showing up there, for example, one for MS Online Services.