Blogs: Richard Stallman

It's 2010 and some people still think the Linux desktop is a non-starter. Please. Buy a clue; you're all Linux desktop users now.

Not everyone appreciates computing in the cloud. Some fear it. Some even hate it.

My two recent columns about Asperger's syndrome didn't sit well with many of our readers. Those who posted comments on our Web site generally dismissed my premise, and found it to be somewhat arrogant.

I received an interesting e-mail a couple of days ago from Katie Graunke Stone, who handles public relations for Stone Design, a Mac OS application development company founded by her husband Andrew Stone in 1984. Katie related a story about an encounter she and her husband had with free software pioneer Richard Stallman 15 years ago that left this impression: "Even though he was the strangest person I'd ever met until that point in my life, he was likely the most brilliant."

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches Richard M. Stallman worry about how the cloud computing fad is just another privacy-infringing, proprietary lock-in. Not to mention TV title mashups...

In February of last year, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, spoke at the International Conference on Communication and Technologies in Havana about what he strongly believes are the merits of non-proprietary software. I recently learned directly from Stallman what that experience was like.

We interrupt the regularly-scheduled Microhoo update to bring you the story of an obscure software vendor that seems to be proving that open-source and Windows are not like oil and water after all.