November 2005 Archives

If you look very closely, you'll notice I've updated the name of the GNU/Linux category. This came about after I recently went with my friend Eric Sundwall to see Richard Stallman speak about Free Software at Williams College. Actually that was a couple of weeks ago, but the very cool SBS Diva got the meaning of free all wrong in her funny diatribe about the "Religious Wars", and the whole thing stuck me as cosmically comic.

Stallman is actually a bit of a religious figure, as well as being an critical contributor to the tools so many of us (RMS would have us call it GNU/Linux) call simply Linux. And to carry the whole metaphor a bit further, one might bring up the question of whether Stallman is the last of the Cathedral Builders. Levy called him the last Hacker, but as Raymond more specifically describes his historical role in the The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

Indeed, for more than a decade after its founding RMS's Free Software Foundation would largely define the public ideology of the hacker culture, and Stallman himself would be the only credible claimant to leadership of the tribe.

So, when we speak of Free Software we are talking about about ideology, and the word free refers to Freedom, not cost. Stallman defines the four requirements for software to meet the definition of Free Software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

While they may sound a bit idealistic, those freedoms actually grant me much more as a business owner than some more popular and widely deployed software which I cannot look at the code in order to know what it does. As a consultant, I am specifically in the business of helping my neighbor, so freedom 2 is significant to me. Make no mistake, Free Software like the Apache web server does exist and it does play a big part in today's Internetworked world.

People ask me about links to things all the time. In a sense, many of the posts in AdvisorBits are just annotated links. Lately, I have been writing on a less frequent basis about the things that have really caught my eye, and a little less of the quicky posts.

Part of my reason for that has been that I knew I was working on a web directory where I would be able to quickly post links to sites that interested me. A directory is a categorized list, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that MT is easily able to create such a directory. If the actual categories seem arbitrary to you, you should look in a US phone book some time.

Without further ado... here is the new all new less fattening AdvisorBits Web Directory.

The site search has been updated to search both AdvisorBits and the Web Directory, hopefully this will be useful. (At least its no longer broken nor using a template with the default style from MT 3.1x) There's a link on the AdvisorBits About page to submit suggestions for links, and you can ask general questions about the directory in the comments of this post.