Second visit to Taiwan (RMS Blog) [LWN.net]

Richard Stallman writes about a recent trip to Taiwan in a Blog posting. Many interesting culinary delights were sampled. "I took the opportunity presented by the visit to arrange speeches at a few other universities, and meet with hardware companies to ask them to cooperate with free software. We visited the campus of ASUS (which always made me think of Spanish "Jesús" without the J). There one person deigned to meet us, and his attitude was that the free software community was beneath their notice. On discovering this, I told him I was sorry to waste his time, and left. However, the people at VIA, Realtek, RALink and MSI showed an interest in cooperating. Some even offered to provide advance specs for free BIOS support." (Thanks to Keith Howanitz.)

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Second visit to Taiwan (RMS Blog)

Posted Jul 21, 2005 15:28 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

One piece of the blog entry jumped out at me: "I spent the whole visit accompanied by an American expatriate whose personality is much more unusual than mine."

That made me smile... :-)

Second visit to Taiwan (RMS Blog)

Posted Jul 25, 2005 10:00 UTC (Mon) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link]

Stallman makes a great essayist (spelled right?) when he steps out of preaching mode. And by this I'm not implying he should never be in preaching mode, it just doesn't make a good essayist, that's all. "The GNU project" (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html) is also an enjoyable read. The thought of rms naming a kernel after his girlfriend almost makes me shed a tear :-)

Second visit to Taiwan (RMS Blog)

Posted Jul 21, 2005 15:46 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

Consuming insects is one thing.
A quick search of the site revealed 0 hits for 'balut'.
I await a blog from the Philipines. ;)

Ako rin

Posted Jul 21, 2005 16:54 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Hindi pa ako nakakain ng balut, masyadong pangit.

Second visit to Taiwan (RMS Blog)

Posted Jul 21, 2005 16:50 UTC (Thu) by freeio (guest, #9622) [Link]

"However, the people at VIA, Realtek, RALink and MSI showed an interest in cooperating. Some even offered to provide advance specs for free BIOS support. Now we have to arrange to take advantage of the offer."

That is the news that makes the trip most worthwhile, from a community perspective. The development of free software bios replacements is within reach, as is the improvement of direct interaction with the hardware. This has been a difficult issue until now.

Second visit to Taiwan (RMS Blog)

Posted Jul 21, 2005 16:52 UTC (Thu) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

Is this the same ASUS that sells a whole line of linux-inside routers and gadgets? http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS5487571369.html

For shame.

Free Software is beneath our notice.....

Posted Jul 22, 2005 14:17 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

The first time my company went to visit Oracle's sales facility, I offhandedly asked one of their staff about Linux. This was in about 1994. The guy got all red in the face and blustered that Oracle would *never* run on Linux because Linux was a toy.

Free Software is beneath our notice.....

Posted Aug 2, 2005 4:06 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

This was in about 1994. The guy got all red in the face and blustered that Oracle would *never* run on Linux because Linux was a toy.

Well, to be fair, Linux was something of a toy back then. 1.0.9 was the stable release, 1.1.x was in development, and while it was eminently usable as a desktop, I suspect Oracle (the DB) might very well have had requirements that were not met by the kernel and/or the userspace libraries and utilities.

Those were the days, though, you betcha. Livin' on the edge, trying not to blow up too many monitors with X modelines, never sure what hardware would work with both Linux and OS/2, etc. :-)

Greg