OStatic

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project by Richard M. Stallman. GNU is one of the oldest and best-known organizations in the free and open-source world, providing not only high-quality software, but also a well-known license (the GNU General Public License), and a philosophy that continues to influence many activists and programmers. The exact anniversary of Stallman's announcement is September 27th, 1983, when he called upon programmers to join him in creating free Unix.

The situation at One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the organization behind the $100 laptop, looks like it's going from bad to worse. As we've reported before, key personnel have recently walked out on the project.

At the center of the conflict appears to be the issue of how deep the laptop's open source roots should be.

eWeek recently took at look at the top 15 open source business influencers, which includes the usual suspects like Linus Torvalds and Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin. It also named some people that typically get overlooked, like Bank of America's Tim Golden who worked exclusively with Linux and open-source software in several multimillion-dollar enterprise initiatives. While there's no way a list of only 15 people can be all-inclusive, a few readers were bothered that some big names were left off the list entirely, prompting Ziff Davis Enterprise's Editor at Large Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols to explain why.