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Archive for the ‘web2.0’ Category

If we’d been worrying about principle instead of open source

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

It seems that it’s not hot just in Milano but also in Portland. At least the debate between Eben Moglen and Tim O’Reilly at the OSCon seems to have heated up.  While giving a speech there, Moglen invited O’Reilly to join the conversation about freedom that he has been avoiding.  From what I read, Eben used his direct (warning: euphemism) style and Tim interpreted it as an attack.  But, all things considered, Eben is right: it’s time to grow up and face the real issues.

Moglen took O’Reilly to task over supporting "open source" rather than free software. "If we’d been worrying about principle instead of open source … You guys were wasting time talking about open source…. We still have serious problems to correct in public policies made by people propping up business models that were dying and wasting time promoting commercial products." 

I couldn’t find the recordings of the speech: are there any?