40. The Beginning Why I Must Write GNU “ I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, make each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.” The Gnu Manifesto Richard Stallman, Founder of the Free Software Foundation, 1985 http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
41. Standards and control “ The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it. ” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Creator of the World Wide Web, 1998 http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
42. The birth of Linux To: comp.os.minix “ Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones....” Linus Torvalds, August 25, 1991
Richard Matthew Stallman, known to many people as RMS. Founder of th eFree Software Foundation, primary author of the GPL GNU General Public License. At MIT, got new laserprinters, didn't work, asked for sourcecode. Sorry, not possible, NDA you know. RMS started thinking. Result Free Software
Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, invented the HTTP Protocol. Which in turn defined the commercial Interneta s we know it nowadays. Anyone remember Gopher? ;-) One principle: keep it free, what if HTTP was patented? The W3C has a strict royalty free patent policy.
Linus Torvalds at the time he wrote the first kernel. More an exercise in programming th efeatures of the 386. Remember how Jon “maddog” Hall organised the money for his 386 machine ;-) Linus is a pragmatic hacker in the real sense of the word.