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RMS receives US$10K from Microsoft & Sun (Wins Award)
Daniel M. German writes "Reporting, live, from the
WWW8 Conference
in Toronto. RMS has been announced as the recipient
of the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award,
(which this year is mainly founded by Microsoft and Sun). Previous recipients of the Award are
Vint Cerf --inventor or TCP/IP--, Doug
Doug Englebart --inventor of the mouse, amongst
many other things-- and Ted Nelson --who coined
the term Hypertext.
"
During his speech --broadcasted from the US--
he talked mainly about patents and their threat
to Free Software.
The Award is an important recognition from the WWW Community to GNU and the Open Source movement in general.
I will write a complete report for Slashdot tomorrow.
Reporting, for Slashdot, from the Toronto Convention Centre.
The more free software there is, and the higher the quality of that software, the more likely other people are to do RMS's evangelization for him...
We in the Slashdot community extend to you our warmest and most heartfelt congratulations for the honor you have received. As I enter this message, I know that it is being processed by software that was run through your compiler, GCC, the crown jewel of free software. Without GCC free software would be only a coolie's pipe dream. God bless you, Richard. May you have a long and happy life. You are the first hero of the next century.
Most readers will not know who this award is named
l
after. Yuri deserves to remembered. At one point he was one of the principles founder of Canada's marginally famous "Coach house press." They were famous for giving young writers a chance.
Then he wanted to get into computer stuff. He started a company called SoftQuad to get into document processing software. He discovered the SGML standard and was one of the earliest participants in the movement towards structured markup.
Some may not know this but there is an element of the SGML community committed not to SGML because it is a useful tool but rather because rather as a social force for preserving and communicating humanity's greatest resource: its knowledge.
Yuri was one of these. He fought in particular to use SGML as a means of increasing the accessibility of documents to blind people. He was a tireless advocate for accessibility.
Yuri called his work with Charles Goldfarb and many others a "Quiet Revolution". XML is the realization of their revolutionary ideas and it is tragic that Yuri did not live to see and guide it:
Here's what Tim Berners-Lee had to say:
"I learned of Yuri Rubinski's death with great sadness. If one thing distinguished Yuri it was untiring work toward what he thought was right. One of his recent and characteristic acts was to organize, and from his company financially support, an award for Doug Engelbart at the last
WWW conference. Yuri worked hard to find what might really make a difference to Doug, to find his writings and have them quietly printed as a small book. Doug knew nothing about the award until he received it. Yuri just felt that this was the right thing to do, just as when he championed SGML, or disabled access to online information. Yuri had an irrepressible genial, almost mischievous, excitement about him which was always a great delight.
Tim Berners-Lee
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/yuriMemColl.htm
About the foundation:
http://www.yuri.org
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Microsoft didn't give money to RMS. They (and Sun) gave money to an award. The award was given to RMS.
Why not get the facts before patronizing us all?
RMS is not an 'off the wall' type of person, at least my communications with him have not given me that impression.
He is thoughtful, precise, and very stubborn in sticking to his beliefs, but I, for one, consider that a good quality: he is the standard bearer for what free software represents.
If anyone is off the wall it's those who fail to embrace any kind of consistency in their beliefs.
In Liberty, Rene
Sometimes I feel like a leech, I use all this opensource stuff and don't really give anything back.
Well, while you may not have given back anything yet. Users are part of the Open source process as well, even the ones that don't write any code. If you were to run into a bug, would you just sit there and pout. Certainly not, you would go on the net and see if anyone else had seen it. Being an intelligent user you would give a detailed description of your system, OS config, and what you were doing. Then, a couple things might happen. The bug has been seen before, and there is a fix out or on its way. The bug hasn't been seen, but a programmer type or five see your problem and work with you on isolating, fixing and/or working around the bug. Or, improbably, no one is interested in fixing it, but you decide you need it fixed so with the advice of some of these net people you fix the problem yourself. Either way you have contributed to the open source process, though not necessarily as a programmer, but as a tester and QA person.
I'm not absolutely positive that Awards Committee was responsible for RMS receiving this award (but duh, I hope so). However, it should be pointed out that the chair of the Awards Committee is Simon Phipps. The good Mr Phipps works for, hehehe, IBM. I leave it up you to interpret this.:)
Nonetheless, congrats to RMS!
First, the obligatory congratulations: Way to go RMS! You deserve every award you get. I'm sure the money will go a long way towards helping you and the FSF out.
Now to speak up on what's obviously on everybody's minds - why would microsoft...? I would encourage you not to read too deeply into this. I'm abit suprised (shocked) that Microsoft would give any money to somebody working for "the competition". Let's try to hold off on speculation though until the "official" report comes out tomorrow. I'm anxious to read it, I'm sure you are too. But please - let's avoid the "Microsoft is evil!" and the like until we have more details. This is really an unfinished story.. treat it as such.
--
Richard accepted the award, talked about evil ..."
multinational companies (that's how Bob Metcalfe
summarized his remarks) for a while, the presenter
mentioned who had made the award possible, and
Richard said something like, "I appreciate the
recognition, but it's more important that corporations
like Microsoft not receive the patents that
contribute to their power to
I disagree. Monetary awards like this are often funded by private industry. The idealogy that the company follows and the idealogy that the award represents are not necessarily connected. For exapmle: Lots of people despise Exxon for the whole Valdez thing. So if Exxon donates money to say, Amnesty International, and they in turn give a cash award to someone who is being persecuted by their govt for their efforts to protect the environment from polluting corporations, does that make the recipient a sellout? I don't think so. If the recipient recieved money directly from Exxon, then you've got a case. Otherwise it's just coincidence really.
If the awarding org was the Exxon foundation, then that makes sense also, but the fact is that corporations frequently make donations to charitable organizations, or even just industry related organizations. What the _independent_ organization does with the money ought not have anything to do with the corporations overall agenda. but that's just my $.02
-earl
It looks like there might be a good chance of this award becoming the ideological equivalent of the Nobel Prize, but for computers/internet work.
"In fact, it would be insane to suggest that anyone would."
Jean-Paul Sartre (1964 Nobel Prize for Lit) and Le Duc Tho (1973 Nobel Prize for Peace) did, for ideologically sound reasons thou.
Sartre's reason. Searching around at www.nobel.se will show a few other who didn't want to get, or were forced to refuse, the prize.
"I think, arguably, his development efforts have had as much an influence on free and open software as his public relations efforts through the FSF."
Arguably? No. Definitely. I'm one of Stallman's detractors mind you-- I think he's out of touch with reality and the GNU/Linux thing just gets on my last nerve-- but the whole software world owes him a debt that we'll never be able to measure.
-- "You live and learn. Or you don't live long." -Heinlein
Two books, printed back-to-back so that either could be considered the front. It was reprinted some years later in slightly smaller format.
Yes, and he had a system (Xanadu) based on the hypertext concept (which, AFAIK, is still a struggling project - they want to incorporate the idea of tiny royalties being paid the author for every click on a link leading to something the author wrote). This before the WWW or Hypercard.
To give an idea of the timeframe, the idea of "computer lib" was publicly accessible dumb terminals linked to minicomputers...
-- Alastair
Has RMS ever indicated that he would have a problem taking money from an institution he has some fundamental problems with?
Richard Stallman is not recieving this award for shooting his mouth off as an industry pundit, despite many readers beliefs. He is recieving this award as recognition for his work on GCC, GDB, Emacs and other programs that continue to be key to the internet being as successful as it is.
Look at the history of the award. The inventor of TCP/IP, the inventor of the mouse, the person who tokened 'hypertext'. While Richard Stallman's continued involvment in internet culture probably helped him win this award, people should recognize that most of what he is being awarded for is his efforts to make a universal compiler available to internet hosts, allowing everyone to compile Apache (among other things) to their platform of choice.
Congratulations to Richard Stallman, one of the more influential programmers of our time and author of a number of great utilities. I think, arguably, his development efforts have had as much an influence on free and open software as his public relations efforts through the FSF.
- Cysgod
I'm glad to hear this. It's a shame that RMS is such an off the wall type of person. I think he would get a lot more respect if he coud "play the game" a little better. But then again... maybe it that *bizzare* gene that drives people like RMS to greatness.
Sometimes I feel like a leech, I use all this opensource stuff and don't really give anything back. Sure I've plunked down money for the last couple versions of RedHat, but most of that went to the retailer.
Anyways...I see people like RMS who donate some great stuf that I use daily (emacs, gcc) and even though I don't like everything he says, I am gratefull.
We have a quaint little custome here in Chicago when the opposing team hits a homerun into the bleachers and a Cubs fan catches it.
"throw... it... back!"
Should he take it? Should he throw it back in their faces?
--
First, I don't see how anyone (and it doesn't look like many have, but still) could view this as RMS "selling out" or "throwing his ideals out the window for money." It was an award. Recognition of the work he's already done. It's not as if Microsoft paid him $10K for consulting work. What the hell would he do for them, anyway? Evangelize about NT? Even more people would ignore him and dismiss him as a crackpot than do now.
To those who are tired of his "ranting" about GNU/Linux and think it's based solely on his personal jealousy of Linus' popularity while people still say "RMS? Who's that?" and those who say "If only he knew how to play the game a little better, he might be more accepted" -- by his actions he is totally selfless. He is willing to sacrifice his dignity / self-respect in order to educate people. Which is definitely putting the good of the many above the good of one.
And at least a few people out there do respect him for it. So in our eyes, he hasn't sacrificed anything but mass market appeal -- and that only because he wants to educate people, make sure they don't forget where all this great FREE, OPEN software comes from, and keep people contributing to it.
[And don't take the subject too seriously, although I'm sure plenty of people will do so.]
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?