Richard M Stallman in Taiwan

Life Technology
1

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Richard M. Stallman (often just called RMS), but he’s one of the people who has made free software (ie Linux and BSD) possible. He was instrumental in creating the GNU operating system, big chunks of which have been combined with the Linux kernel, which is why you often hear of “GNU/Linux”. And RMS wrote the GPL (General Public License), also known a “copyleft”, which is the license under which Linux is released. He also wrote the GCC compiler, which is used to compile both Linux and BSD. And last but not least, he wrote Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors (which I use daily). You can find out more about his organization here: gnu.org/

Nowadays, he devotes himself to the free software movement full time. He does a lot of traveling, advocating free software, warning governments about software patents and other dirty Microsoft tricks, etc. Anyway, he is coming to Taiwan. I certainly plan to go hear him speak. This website has details of his visit:

wiki.tossug.org/StallmanAtTaiwan2005

I have heard it said that RMS has a volatile personality. Don’t know if it’s true, but it will be interesting to find out.

cheers,
DB

2

I’d be interested in attending one of his speeches.

3

Sounds, great, I will try to catch his presentation in Hsinchu. I was planning to go to the NCHPC anyway one of these days. And the topic sounds like one of the more interesting to me. Although, the speech on tuesday also sounds interesting.

4

where in hsinchu, and when?

5

It is about 1 hours south-east of Taipei. The times you can find on the tossug website given by the original poster.

6

I met RichardM in Alleycat’s, he’s nice enough, but not worth going to Xinzhu to see him, all he did was eat pizza.

7

I’m giving a lecture on Wednesday at the Tavern on how to steal stuff.