The Phantom of the Open-Source Opera [telecom]

New York Magazine has been running a series called "The Internet Apologizes," featuring interviews with some of the those who were present at the creation of the digital world.

I just read the interview with Richard Stallman, and I was transported back to the day I first met him, while he was holding a handmade sign on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on which he had written "Software Should Be Free." He will forever be known by the famous label "rms," which is all anyone needs to say to prove an argument or make a serious point about open-source software.

RMS got burned: many times, and sometimes badly, by opposing the commercialization of both software and the Internet. He remains the one clear and steady voice opposing short-term software thinking and money-grubbing software designs in all their forms. He wrote emacs, which Neal Stephenson called "A Nuclear-Powered Word Procesor," and created the Free Software Foundation, */The/* place where the best and brightest of the open-source movement have a virtual home.

I always wished I could be like him when I was younger, but now I know that his is a singular intellect, and his priceless capacity to tell the truth, in blunt and understandable terms, will always cause me to think "if only."

Bill

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'No Company Is So Important Its Existence Justifies Setting Up a Police State'

A conversation with legendary programmer Richard Stallman on the real meaning of "privacy rights" and why he only ever uses cash.

By Noah Kulwin

NYMAG: Thank you so much for agreeing to a call. I apologize that I'm calling late, I've just had a jam-packed morning.

RMS: Please. Stop apologizing. It doesn't matter when you call me if I can talk to you. I never cared about that. In other words, you're being excessively polite. Catering to an imaginary desire that I never had in my life. I'm happy if people call me at any time if the conversation is a useful one.

Of course sometimes I can't talk or they can't reach me, which is unfortunate. But it's not gonna make me unhappy.

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Noted author Walter Isaacson wrote a book, "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution is an overview of the history of computer science and the Digital Revolution" published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster.

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In reading the book, I found myself in disagreement with many of the thoughts of the Internet and personal computer pioneers.

and their deliberately designed "open" systems left themselves far too vulnerable to malicious exploitation.

How much are we forced to spend today for virus and malware protection, and to fix our systems after a breach? How much does identity theft protection and recovery cost us?

As an aside, lately I've been getting robo-calls where the caller ID is fake. IMHO, as mentioned before, that should be blatantly illegal and easy to report; and the carriers should be able (and willing) to track it down.

***** Moderator's Note *****

When I was in high school, I knew a ham operator who worked at the Artificial Intelligence lab at M.I.T., and I met many of the men and women he worked with there. He taught me a bit of lisp, and a little bit about the net, but a lot about the hacker culture and those who were in it.

scientists who were working on a deadline with objectives to meet and bosses to please. They were building a reliable network out of unreliable links - and, for those who never had to use modems or deal with Mother Bell, the data links of that time /were/ unreliable - and they wanted to make it the best they could and put it to work.

But - and I am now old enough to say this - they weren't able to think about security. Obviously, there were passwords and lots of things that only they would know about how to access their systems - but "security," as we think of it today, was not something that they were charged with coding. They had a job to do, and thought nothing of working 18-hour days to get it done, but nobody in their leadership was telling them to anticipate that at some future date, some unknown evil-doer would break the rules for commercial gain.

Bill Horne Moderator