As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software.

Standing at the headwaters of the ecosystem that is Linux is the Linux Foundation and its executive director Jim Zemlin. The Linux Foundation was forged out of the merger of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group in 2007 as a new group with a new mandate for Linux.

No, this is not a day when you free yourself of all your software addictions. Rather, Software Freedom Day is an annual grass roots effort to educate the public on the virtues of free and open source software.

I’m home in Portland (arguably the open source software conference capital of the world) for the third annual GOSCON get-together. Linux Foundation Executive Director and keynote speaker Jim Zemlin says he may have been mistaken in thinking that attendees were fairly well-versed in Linux and open source.

June 21, 2011: The GNOME Foundation today announced that it has appointed Karen Sandler as Executive Director. Sandler’s dedication to software freedom, her non-profits experience and her involvement in a wide range of free and open source software communities distinguish her as the logical choice for GNOME.

The methodologies of Open Source are not owned or guided by any one person. The closest thing we have are the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The OSI certifies what qualifies as an open source license.

In our earlier article, "Facts and Friction on Open Source and Free Software" we have explained where "Open Source" is coming from and what is its relation to Free Software and the Free Software Foundation that represents it.

" The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users’ freedom.

“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --