Its an attempt to define freedom in a general way and why freedom is very essential. Visit:- http://ithinkless.blogspot.com/2008/07/when-do-we-actually-define-freedom.html

A recent attack piece against Richard Stallman was written by Linus Torvalds on the eve of Obama’s election.

Black and white by Linus Torvalds

Linus begins with this:

So I’m pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 and use it as the license for all my projects that I care about.

How unfortunate to write negatively of Stallman in the very first sentence.

I was surprised and delighted to find this video presentation by one of my favorite performers, Stephen Fry, called “Happy Birthday to GNU”, on the GNU project homepage.

Posted on September 1st, in honor of GNU’s 25th anniversary, it turns out to be only the latest in a series of entries on Mr. Fry’s official blog site praising the virtues of free software.

Richard Stallman wants to popularise the term GNU/Linux instead of using the currently popular term Linux. He correctly states that the term Linux, besides being thoroughly inaccurate, totally fails to introduce new users to the legal and philosophical concepts that underlie the basis of the GNU/Linux OS; but is it feasible to make such a change at this late stage?

Some weeks ago, trolling through prospective articles for Free Software Daily, I encountered a blog, describing the evolution of “Linux”. It was aimed at Newbies. The blog correctly described Linus Torvalds as the creator of the Linux kernel and a few more recent developments, but that was it. No mention was made that Richard Stallman actually created much of what is now called “Linux”, no mention of the GPL, or how it works, no mention of the copyleft legal concept and no mention of other responsibilities placed on users and developers.

All of Richard Stallman’s worst fears confirmed in one blog.

I recently re-read the article how to hate free software in 3 easy steps by Steven Goodwin. I’m no programmer, but then I’ve also installed a few distributions myself. And frankly, I have trouble relating to that post.

Several points were made in the article’s comments, some being that non-programmers don’t compile from source anyway, compiling from source requires you to be a programmer, and other operating systems don’t crash when you tinker with their partitions.

Excuse me?

I’m sure everyone reading this has heard the debate over whether that top dog free operating system should be called “Linux” or “GNU/Linux”, but how big a contribution is GNU or Linux to that operating system?

Which do you like best: the satisfying, rich taste of principle in free software? Or do you prefer the less morally filling and pragmatic goodness of open source? Do you wish people would stop endlessly rehashing the whole question of “free” versus “open source?” Or do you enjoy the chance to talk about goals and philosophy? As you might suspect, since I’m bringing it up…

With the draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) have come many interesting comments, although not all of which I have found positive. While I understand proprietary vendors have offered complaints against a license they do not even use, I was surprised that Linus Torvalds had taken some issues which I thought were in any case misguided criticisms.

With the introduction of the GNU GPLv3, the GNU Lesser General Public License (L-GPL) has seen much less attention. This has changed with the recent GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, and I think it has changed for the better.