What do CERN, the ISS, and Stephen Fry have in Common?

You’ll have to read the New Yorker article on Richard M. Stallman and the The GNU Manifesto by Maria Bustillos to find out!

And what’s up with Tim O’Reilly’s comments about the Old Testment vs. New Testament?   That’s an ad hominem attack of the highest order, guaranteed to get the Judeo-Christians even more riled up than computer scientists debating GPL vs. BSD. On the plus side, it did remind me of Dana Fradon’s side-splitting New Yorker cartoon about the God of the Old Testament.

This is all strong evidence that Andrew missed an opportunity by not putting Stallman in the “founders of religions” bracket along with Freud.

I knew we’d hit critical mass with Stan when rms (I hear that’s waht the cool kids call him) wrote to us about the Stan license. I pretty much steamrolled the BSD license to maximize our user base. Allen Riddell, on the other hand, decided to copyleft PyStan. Reasonable people can disagree. Of course, R is GPL-ed, so the combination of RStan and R has to be copylefted, too.

So let’s take a little poll, in the spirt of recent posts by Andrew and all this focus on seminar speakers.

1. Which is tastier, free beer or free speech?

  • [ ] Beer
  • [ ] Speech
  • [ ] It’s political season and I need a drink with my speech.
  • [ ] Beer and speeches are both too bitter.

4 thoughts on “What do CERN, the ISS, and Stephen Fry have in Common?

  1. I agree that the “BSD is a more Christian approach” comment is weird.
    I hope that D. Richard Hipp (SQLite) makes the next bracket in the open source guru conference.

    May you do good and not evil
    May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others
    May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

    It’s not political season yet….soon enough.

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