As part of a university paper for the People behind informatics exhibition about Free Software and OpenSource I started reading Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams, a book mostly about Richard M. Stallman. The whole exhibition focuses on the social aspects of informatics and esp. on the people behind it, the people who wrote the algorithms, the people who made this all possible. So I thought it would be quite fitting as a start to read a book about RMS.
I’m still not quite sure about what of all the information available on the net about Open Source will find its way into the final paper, but I somehow don’t want to focus on special people but more on the whole community behind it, since there are far too many people involved in FS/OS nowadays. Still: The people who started it, will definitely get a focus ;-)
Anyway, back to the book. The book is available in a print and an online version. Since I currently set my monetary priorities on a Flickr pro account, I took the online version ;-) Today I just had enough time to read chapter one “For Want of a Printer” which I really liked. It is actually enough to bring me back to the site later tonight to read the 2nd chapter ;-) Since sleep is something that I somehow learned not to miss in the last couple of weeks, this shouldn’t be a problem :-)
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂