[Fsf-friends] Interview Peter Brown, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation

[प्रवीण् ए (Praveen A)]

Bringing free software to the masses
 Ingrid Marson <mailroomuk at zdnet.com>
ZDNet UK
April 13, 2006, 13:15 BST

  Peter Brown, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, hopes
to 'get the message of free software outside the hacker world

You'd think it would be easy to research the right-hand man of a free
software icon, given the mass of information about the free software
movement on the Internet. But a search for "Peter Brown" — the executive
director of the Free Software Foundation — and "free software" produces only
14,000 hits on Google and little information about his past.

So when we visited the Foundation's headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts it
was a surprise to discover a clean-cut, suited English man from Oxford, who
was quite so different from FSF founder Richard Stallman with his impressive
beard and baggy clothes.

Their backgrounds are also totally different. While Stallman is a
programmer, having almost single-handedly developed the original version of
applications such as Emacs and the GNU C Compiler, Brown has a background in
business and finance, and only dabbled with coding when he was in his teens.


But despite these differences, the two men share the same goal — in basic
terms freedom around software, but more specifically to give people the
freedom to run software for any purpose, to study and adapt that software,
passing on the improvements to the public and to freely redistribute copies
of the software.

Both men are responsible for the overall direction of the Free Software
Foundation and seem to offer complementary skills, with Brown coming across
as more of a pragmatist than Stallman, whose idealism and drive to fulfil
his goals has led him to spend his life telling people across the world
about free software.

ZDNet UK met with Brown last week to learn more about some of the
Foundation's upcoming projects, how the FSF is run and funded, and what he
feels makes the organisation so special.
Read the full interview
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020463,39263218,00.htm


Photos: Inside the Free Software Foundation
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39263220-1,00.htm
--
"Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history.
`Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn."
-- Richard Stallman
Me scribbles at http://www.pravi.co.nr