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RMS, M$ and Sun



Award from an Unlikely Source by Leander Kahney

3:00 a.m.  18.May.99.PDT Richard Stallman, the scourge of the
commercial software industry, has been awarded a US$10,000 prize
sponsored by two of his greatest foes: Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

Stallman was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award at last week's
Eighth International World Wide Web Conference in Toronto.

The prize is awarded annually by the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation
"to an individual who has contributed, through a lifetime of effort,
to the care and feeding of the global information infrastructure,"
according to the foundation's Web site.


"I'm amused by the irony that they funded an award and it ended up
going to me," said Stallman. "The fact that I have some money which
was once theirs doesn't bother me."

Stallman said that he learned of the prize money's source only after
giving his acceptance speech.

"I think it's OK to accept money from these companies, as long as I
can do so without contributing to an activity that is wrong, such as
developing proprietary software," he said.

Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation and a longtime
agitator for freeing software from the shackles of patents and
copyrights.  Stallman's GNU project influenced the development of
Linux, an open-source version of Unix that competes with Sun's Solaris
operating system.

Murray Maloney, an advisor to the foundation who presented the award
to Stallman, said that the irony wasn't lost on anyone. "There was
quite a chuckle in the crowd," he said.

Biting the hand that on this occasion fed him, Stallman said that he
used his acceptance speech to alert conference attendees to the
impending introduction of software patents in Europe.

Following the lead of the US and Japan, the European Union will
introduce legislation in June that would allow the European Patent
Office to begin issuing patents for software, according to the Free
Patents work group.

The European legislation would allow companies to patent not only
software technologies, but also basic processes such as compressing
data or images for transmission over the Web.

Stallman said that the move would protect the interests of companies
such as Sun and Microsoft, while harming the free and open-source
software movements, as well as small and independent software
publishers without the resources to take on big businesses.

"Both Microsoft and Sun generally develop proprietary software and
very rarely contribute to the free software community," Stallman
said. "And both Microsoft and Sun have software patents that could be
threatening to free software."

The late Yuri Rubinsky was the co-founder of SoftQuad and a mover and
shaker in getting SGML (standardized general markup language) adopted
as an open standard.

Stallman was selected by a panel of previous winners, which included
Vint Cerf, who developed some of the Internet's core protocols; Doug
Englebart, inventor of the mouse; and Ted Nelson, who dreamed up
hypertext.

Also funding the award are the Graphic Communication Association and
the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Systems.

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