MEDIA NOTE: Stallman will have limited availability to the media on Monday, Oct. 20 and Tuesday, Oct. 21.
What: Controversial free software activist Richard Stallman to speak
When: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 21
Where: University of Minnesota, Willey Hall, 225 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis
Contacts: Ryan Mathre, University News Service, (612) 625-0552, mathre [at] umn [dot] edu
Rhonda Zurn, Institute of Technology, (612) 626-7959, rzurn [at] umn [dot] edu
Pamela Vold, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, (612) 625-0572, vold [at] cs [dot] umn [dot] edu
Controversial software freedom activist to speak at U of M on Oct. 21
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL ( 10/6/2008 ) -- Controversial free software advocate Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, will speak at the University of Minnesota at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 21 in room 175, Willey Hall, 225 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis. The event is free and open to the public.
Stallman pioneered the concept of “copyleft,” the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions. Stallman is the main author of the most widely used free software license, the GNU General Public License. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer have publicly criticized the GNU General Public License and some software companies have likened it to a virus that will “destroy the software industry.”
In Stallman’s talk, “The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System,” he will discuss the Free Software Movement, which campaigns for the freedom of computer users to cooperate and control their own computing activities. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, often erroneously referred to as Linux, specifically to establish these freedoms. Much of the computing infrastructure of the Web is built on GNU software and other software that is released under the General Public License or other "free software" licenses like the Apache license.
Many in the software industry feel strongly that the current system of intellectual property laws, especially patents, is badly broken with respect to software and has the effect of strongly hindering innovation rather than promoting it. Stallman represents one side of this debate. At the same time, the free software movement founded by Stallman has been influential among working developers around the world, and has produced critical tools and systems that are widely used, even by Microsoft.
Stallman’s lecture is sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Software Engineering Center. For more information, visit www.msse.umn.edu/stallman.
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