Founder of free software foundation, writer of GPL license and a world renovened speaker Richard Matthews Stallman is currently in Sri Lanka as invitee from ICTA, Sri Lanka. I was there at SLIIT auditorium to witness his usual lecture on free software. Also as sub topics he discussed job opportunities with free software/business model and free software at education.
RMS as always was very critical about non free software and also emphasized the importants of freedom in the software referring to his 4 freedoms. Also as always he complain Linux systems clouding the work of GNU project by not mentioning it as GNU/Linux system.
New things that I learned from this speech is how the GNU name came into play. As he said at the time of the naming there was a trend for recursive acronyms. Specially with Emacs where there were lot of acronyms like EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). Since the new operating system he's trying to make is similar to unix but Not Unix, the last two letters of the acronym was fixed with _NU. All what he did was replace letters starting from A to G.. ANU, BNU, CNU, DNU, ENU, HNU and Finally GNU. GNU is both funny and catchy was selected!
Also he said that Open source and Free Software different from the fundamental concepts. OSS believe in reliable working software where are FS believes in freedom of the software.
