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 .

A constant theme here on Techdirt is that it's not the idea that's crucial, but the execution. Here's someone who seems to agr...

It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creatio...

Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, ...

Last week I wrote about a talk I gave with the title “Innovation inducement prizes as a possible mechanism to unlock the benefits of open in...

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...

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

One of the many arguments against allowing patents for software (alongside the principle argument that software is made up of algorithms, wh...

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 everyone knows, GNU/Linux grew up as a project to create a completely free alternative to Unix. Key parts were written by Richard Stallma...

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...

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I write a lot about software patents. The reason is simple: they represent probably the g...

We all knew that Sir Tim was a total star, choosing to give away the Web rather than try to make oodles of billions from it. Some of us eve...

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

Under the rather, er, dramatic headline "Copenhagen climate change talks must fail, says top scientist", we have the following : I...

Symbolics probably doesn't mean much to you, but it should. It was the main reason that Richard Stallman started the GNU project. You c...