No katanas, but beard and halo present: RMS speaks at ANU

Richard Stallman didn't wield any katanas, or slay Microsoft lackeys, but he did put on a robe and halo as his alter ego Saint IGNUcius at a speech on free software for the Australian Computer Society held at ANU.





Stallman spoke well, and made a good case for free software - a movement he founded in 1983 that has since been taken up all over the world. I agreed with him that society would be better off with more FOSS, particularly in schools and government.

For schools I imagine parents would welcome not having to spend hundreds of dollars on Windows and MS Office for their home computers. But at the same time they may not be happy their kids haven't learned Windows and MS Office, which they are likely to need in the workforce (at least until FOSS is adopted there too).

I appreciated Stallman's history lesson of how GNU and Linux fit together, but he is fighting a losing battle to get people to call it GNU/Linux, even though GNU deserves at least half, and probably more, of the credit for modern Linux distros. Similar to hacker/cracker, I think we need to let this one go.

Good talk. And sorry Richard, I'm in the vi camp.