Eben Moglen challenges Tim O’Reilly to “join the conversation”

At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention today, Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O’Reilly founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly. Saying that O’Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O’Reilly name, Moglen invited O’Reilly to stop being “frivolous” and to join the conversation about software freedom.During today’s executive briefing, Moglen was given a half hour to discuss “licensing in the Web 2.0 era” with O’Reilly. Earlier in the session, the exchanges between O’Reilly and other guests had been genial and fairly superficial, focusing on Facebook and Firefox extensions. However, Moglen took O’Reilly to task about promoting open source over free software, and got rather heated at several points during the exchange, telling O’Reilly that his premise that Web 2.0 had rendered software licenses unimportant was faulty.

Instead, Moglen says that the Web 2.0 era is “a bunch of hooey” and the “revolution we’ve been through hasn’t been the centralization of processing capacity, it’s been the distribution of processing capacity.” He invited everyone to “look around the room” and pointed out that there were 150 to 200 computers in the room with “more opportunity to make software than IBM had in 1965.”

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