Code4lib 2007 - First day
An excellent day in an excellent venue In Athens, GA full of 140 committed Library technofiles.
The only problem being networking. This personally meant that I was unable to get on to the #code4lib IRC channel which was a major disappointment.
Rob Styles has posted about some of today’s sessions over on his blog, I hope to be doing the same tomorrow.
Karen Schneider [The Free Range Librarian] from Florida State University, in her opening Keynote stirred up major passion in parts of the audience by asserting There is no such thing as free software. A sentiment I totally agree with, but obviously many proponents of Open Source solutions do not.
The slides of my presentation from today are now available here.
March 1st, 2007 at 6:32 am
As I wasnt there, and don’t know exactly what was said, I can only go from your statement. Which due to the limitations of the english language can be true or false.
There is no such thing as free as in cost software. There is such a thing as free as in free speech software.
I vote we put Karen and Richard Stallman in a room together and let them fight it out.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Richard has been saying for at least 20 years that he means “Free as in speech”, and not “Free as in beer”, which Karen well knows, judging from her “beer vs kittens” slide. The issue is that Richard works with developers, who are always able to hack away, and Karen works with (and is) a software user, who wants support, and Richard’s theory that a third-party support ecology would grow around the free software movement has not, unfortunately, been as successful as the software he wrote.
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Hmmm, free as in kittens is still talking about cost.