AtmaWeapon
04-23-2009, 11:02 PM
Tonight EFF Austin hosted Richard Stallman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman). For those of you that don't know him or are too lazy to read the Wikipedia article, he's the creator of the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, the gcc compiler, and Emacs.
He gave a speech about the GPL v3; I thought I might be bored because it's not a topic I'm particularly interested in, but he gave the speech in anecdotal form and focused mainly on philosophy behind the license and the changes between v2 and v3. I think he was a really good speaker. He fielded an hour of questions really well; it was basically an hour of "Oh, I think I see a loophole in the GPL what if I do this?". Stallman's the type of guy that won't answer a question until he understands it (a good thing, too many people give the wrong answer because they don't understand what was asked), so it usually took a few rounds of "Could you explain what you mean by A? Could you give me a concrete scenario?" before the question got answered.
I got a signed copy of his book and accidentally triggered a rant about how people don't carry cash. All in all it was pretty cool!
He gave a speech about the GPL v3; I thought I might be bored because it's not a topic I'm particularly interested in, but he gave the speech in anecdotal form and focused mainly on philosophy behind the license and the changes between v2 and v3. I think he was a really good speaker. He fielded an hour of questions really well; it was basically an hour of "Oh, I think I see a loophole in the GPL what if I do this?". Stallman's the type of guy that won't answer a question until he understands it (a good thing, too many people give the wrong answer because they don't understand what was asked), so it usually took a few rounds of "Could you explain what you mean by A? Could you give me a concrete scenario?" before the question got answered.
I got a signed copy of his book and accidentally triggered a rant about how people don't carry cash. All in all it was pretty cool!