Jay Sulzberger writes:
There is an oddly named conference coming up that will meet at
the Fashion Institute of Technology next Thursday, 21 January 1999.
There will be several good panels and addresses and sessions at
this “Software Summit”.
The best panel has been put together by Bob Ponce, President of
WWWAC. I shall be the moderator of this panel.
To get in to see the panel costs money. We may be able to
arrange a discount for LXNY members, but the terms have not been
set yet. As soon as we have more information it will be posted on
the LXNY web site.
Software Summit Panel 11:15 am to 12:30 pm Thursday 21 January
1999:
The Free Software Movement, Open Source, and the Coming Free
Market in OSes.
Moderator:
Jay Sulzberger, who has only free software on his machine,
except for Netscape, and that will go when Mozilla arrives.
The Panel:
Jesse Erlbaum, hacker and strong free software man
Elliotte Rusty Harold, hacker and expert in XML
Jim Russell, once a hacker, and now a herder of serious cats at
IBM
Dave Shields, hacker and IBM point hacker on free software
Richard M. Stallman, hacker, head of Project GNU, and the
world’s most effective defender of software copyright
The words “open source” were invented about a year ago to mean
what is of old called “free software”. “free” here means that
everybody is free to look at the source, to hack the source, and to
freely redistribute the source. The several people who invented and
trademarked “open source” did so because they found that some
business folk were dismayed at the prospect of a free market in
software. Fifteen years ago Richard Stallman explained that,
really, there is nothing to be afraid of, and even if there were,
why we’d take over the world anyway, and even if we did not, we
could run just exactly what we pleased on our own hardware, if we
all pitched in and built our own free operating system. RMS and the
Weapon Shops of Sta^W^W^W^WFree Software Foundation then proceeded
to build the factories and weapons needed and distribute them all
over the world. Project GNU reached release 1.0 some time in the
last four years, with the provision of the Linux kernel, written by
Linus Torvalds, with the help of about two hundred designers and
coders and thousands of bug reporters. Today about twelve million
users are part of and do their part for the Free Software Movement.
Within the year IBM style peecees will be sold in CompUSA much as
they are today, except that the OS will be entirely unbundled from
the hardware, and many buyers will choose a free OS, because for
them it is the better OS. And Apple’s hardware will also be
available with a choice of OSes, both source secret and free. And
most of the non-IBM-style and non-Apple computers will also run a
free OS.
The panel will explain how all this has happened and is going to
happen.
Bob Ponce is chief organizer of this panel, and it is a joint
effort of NYSIA, http://www.nysia.org, and WWWAC,
http://www.wwwac.org.
To find out more about New York Free Software Events: