“As you probably know, Jon “maddog” Hall is one of the most
prominent (and popular) Linux “officials.” Hall appears at many
important Linux community events and is known for his impressive
talks and strong promotion of Linux. Hall is also the executive
director of Linux International (LI). In this interview he explains
his version of what a Linux “evangelist” does and makes some
predictions about Linux’s future.”
“You are Director of Linux Evangelism in VA Linux Systems. It
must be a great thing to get money for being an evangelist. Could
you tell us what the term “Linux evangelism” means to you?
“maddog: Linux evangelism means going out and promoting the
Linux operating system. This is different from promoting open
source or even free software. While I am a fan of both of those
myself, I do not agree that all applications have to be open
source, nor do I agree that all applications have to be freely
available. I do feel very strongly that all platform code necessary
for an application to run (including compilers and even some
debugging tools) should be both freely available and open
source.”
“Note that the above does not disallow things like commercial
binary-only X server packages (as long as XFree86 still exists),
nor does it disallow binary-only commercial compilers (as long as
the GNU compilers exist). While I might encourage these people to
go open source, I feel no pressing need for them to do it as long
as there is an equivalent, freely available, open source
replacement.”