open...

Earlier this week I posted Richard Stallman's recollections of the AI Lab at MIT, where he first encountered and came to love the h...

Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what Richard St...

Exactly 30 years ago, a hacker posted an unusual message to the net.unix-wizards newsgroup: On Open Enterprise blog .

The idea of bringing in a unitary EU patent system has been rolling around Brussels so long most people have assumed it will never happen....

In the 2005 "Grokster" decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that file sharing networks could be held liable for copyr...

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) was launched just over seven years ago: May 24th 2004: The Open Knowledge Foundation was launched today ...

One key property of printed books is that it is very hard to modify them. Digital books, by contrast, are trivially easy to re-write - prov...

Time magazine has one of those tiresome list thingies: "10 Ideas That Will Change the World" (pretentious, moi?). To its credit, ...

A remarkable continuity underlies free software, going all the way back to Richard Stallman's first programs for his new GNU project. An...

Last week I published a short correspondence I had with Richard Stallman on the subject of the GNU GPL and copyright. As I mentioned, that w...

A couple of days ago, I was writing about how Richard Stallman's GNU GPL uses copyright as a way of ensuring that licensees share code t...

As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman's great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use cop...

Free software began as a political movement: its central aim was – and remains – the propagation of freedom. Later, it became a development...

I received a review copy of Steven Levy's seminal book Hackers back in the 1980s, but never read it. I did, though, keep it, because i...

Richard Stallman is sometimes presented as a kind of Old Testament prophet, hurling anathemas hither and thither (indeed, I've been guil...

What was Richard Stallman's greatest achievement? Some might say it's Emacs, one of the most powerful and adaptable pieces of softwa...

It's easy to focus on the dramatic bad news - like the OOXML shenanigans - and overlook the quiet success stories. Like the announcemen...

No good deed goes unpunished, they say. A year ago, I wrote the following about the Open Source Jahrbuch series: All-in-all, I'd go s...

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of wicked trolls. And then one day, they became good. That, in a nutshell, is the free software story...

Someone at Microsoft has a sense of humour : Developers are puzzling over recent clues blogged by a few Microsoft employees regarding a new ...