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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.
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
"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
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