Do you love Microsoft? Dr. Roy Schestowitz doesn’t. He also led a “Boycott Novell” movement back when there was a Novell to boycott, and he has crusaded against other tech companies, especially regarding software patents. It is, as they say, “Clean indoor work, but somebody has to do it.” And Roy is that somebody.
The FOSS Force Video Interview
Roy Schestowitz (actually, Dr. Roy) has been a strong Linux and free software booster for over a decade. He’s also been one of the world’s louder anti-software-patent activists. Techrights is his primary platform, but his byline has appeared on many other sites, too. Not everyone loves him. He has strong views and doesn’t mince words any more than a certain U.S. Republican presidential candidate. One group that especially dislikes him is the European Patent Office management, which doesn’t bother him because he doesn’t like them either.
And then there’s Richard M. Stallman. Schestowitz says he won’t say a word against RMS, even though there are points on which they have disagreed. Red Hat? I’m not going to say anything here. Toward the end of the interview, he talks about a Red Hat-NSA connection. Should we quake in our sneakers about this? I don’t know. As a popular cable news network likes to say: “We report. You decide.”
Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.
Schestowitz is the worst kind of free software advocate, a zealot!
@fred
That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
He’s right about a lot of stuff.