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Williams, Sam

"Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software"

, a Cambridge-area software company.
When Cadmus folded, taking the rights to the book down
with it, Chassell says he attempted to buy the rights
back with no success.
"As far as I know, that book is still sitting on shelf
somewhere, unusable, uncopyable, just taken out of the
system," Chassell says. "It was quite a good
introduction if I may say so myself. It would have
taken maybe three or four months to convert [the book]
into a perfectly usable introduction to GNU/Linux
today. The whole experience, aside from what I have in
my memory, was lost."
Forced to watch his work sink into the mire while his
erstwhile employer struggled through bankruptcy,
Chassell says he felt a hint of the anger that drove
Stallman to fits of apoplexy. "The main clarity, for
me, was the sense that if you want to have a decent
life, you don't want to have bits of it closed off,"
Chassell says. "This whole idea of having the freedom
to go in and to fix something and modify it, whatever
it may be, it really makes a difference.


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