Richard Stallman, the scourge of the commercial software industry, has been awarded a US$10,000 prize sponsored by two of his greatest foes: Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.
Stallman was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award at last week's Eighth International World Wide Web Conference in Toronto.
The prize is awarded annually by the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation "to an individual who has contributed, through a lifetime of effort, to the care and feeding of the global information infrastructure," according to the foundation's Web site."I'm amused by the irony that they funded an award and it ended up going to me," said Stallman. "The fact that I have some money which was once theirs doesn't bother me."
Stallman said that he learned of the prize money's source only after giving his acceptance speech.
"I think it's OK to accept money from these companies, as long as I can do so without contributing to an activity that is wrong, such as developing proprietary software," he said.
Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation and a longtime agitator for freeing software from the shackles of patents and copyrights. Stallman's GNU project influenced the development of Linux, an open-source version of Unix that competes with Sun's Solaris operating system.
Murray Maloney, an advisor to the foundation who presented the award to Stallman, said that the irony wasn't lost on anyone. "There was quite a chuckle in the crowd," he said.
Biting the hand that on this occasion fed him, Stallman said that he used his acceptance speech to alert conference attendees to the impending introduction of software patents in Europe.
Following the lead of the US and Japan, the European Union will introduce legislation in June that would allow the European Patent Office to begin issuing patents for software, according to the Free Patents work group.
The European legislation would allow companies to patent not only software technologies, but also basic processes such as compressing data or images for transmission over the Web.
Stallman said that the move would protect the interests of companies such as Sun and Microsoft, while harming the free and open-source software movements, as well as small and independent software publishers without the resources to take on big businesses.
"Both Microsoft and Sun generally develop proprietary software and very rarely contribute to the free software community," Stallman said. "And both Microsoft and Sun have software patents that could be threatening to free software."
The late Yuri Rubinsky was the co-founder of SoftQuad and a mover and shaker in getting SGML (standardized general markup language) adopted as an open standard.
Stallman was selected by a panel of previous winners, which included Vint Cerf, who developed some of the Internet's core protocols; Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse; and Ted Nelson, who dreamed up hypertext.
Also funding the award are the Graphic Communication Association and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems.
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