Free as in Freedom

[dougo]

I just ran across FAIFzilla, the "no-frills online version" of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software, an unauthorized biography. I started to read it, then started to think I'd rather read it in a more convenient book form, then followed the link to Amazon.com. But, well, it just felt wrong to buy a book about RMS from Amazon.com, even though FSF ended their boycott. I wonder if the author, Sam Williams, realizes the irony of that link.

Update: I forgot to mention that I found out about the book from an essay by Eric S. Raymond which has some criticism about the book.

Comments

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

Raymond is a two-faced charlatan, hack, and a philistine. He recently wrote a book on unix programming so embarassingly awful it's a huge step backward for Addison-Wesley's otherwise good unix series (already it took a step back with "The Practice of Programming," which still remains a good, but not great book). The sad part is, I'm sure had I read Art of Unix as a teenager I would have thought it was actual scholarship... his lame-ass "anthropology" essays also completely show his total lack of understanding of "gift cultures."

I'm not sure why Raymond ticks me off so much. I suppose because he's just gathering fame by stealing other people's work. (Personal annecdote: I know someone who contributed to fetchmail whose work was not even credited, and moreover to add insult to injury his code was completely restyled (I'm not talking naming conventions and formatting here) to remove any trace. That's why he's two faced, because in his essays he talks about how giving credit is good.)

Oh yes, and since I make a large claim about his stealing others work, you need look no further than the Hacker's Dictionary, something written by Guy Steele, but to those not in the know it looks like it was Raymond's own work.