On Mono, Miguel, Stallman and Fusion with Microsoft

Jason Perlow has written an article about Richard Stallman, Watch Out for That Meteor, Stallman. There are some factual errors in the article, so let me step up to the plate and fix them. Here’s Perlow’s theme in a nutshell, as published in an extended caption under a disrespectful cartoon of Stallman: “Richard M. Stallman (RMS) the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has labeled prominent Open Source software developer Miguel De Icaza a “Traitor” for joining the Board of Directors of Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation as well as for his creation of the Microsoft .NET-compatible Mono software development framework. While RMS’s hatred of all things proprietary has fueled the FSF’s and GNU’s mission to create Free software alternatives for what seems like eons, the overwhelming desire for interoperability between open and proprietary systems makes this narrow-minded Cretaceous world view ripe for extinction.” I have some news for you. The GPL ensures that Free Software will never be extinct. Thank you, Mr. Stallman, for inventing it. For that alone, he will go down in history. Perlow will not. And Miguel will not. You and I will not. But Stallman will. Do you know why? Because with just his brain, he changed the world for the better.

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