Free software positioned itself as
morally righteous. For better or worse we figured it
was more advantageous to align with the open source crowd.
For Stallman, the response to the new "open source"
term was slow in coming. Raymond says Stallman briefly
considered adopting the term, only to discard it. "I
know because I had direct personal conversations about
it," Raymond says.
By the end of 1998, Stallman had formulated a position:
open source, while helpful in communicating the
technical advantages of free software, also encouraged
speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom.
Given this drawback, Stallman would stick with the term
free software.
Summing up his position at the 1999 LinuxWorld
Convention and Expo, an event billed by Torvalds
himself as a "coming out party" for the Linux
community, Stallman implored his fellow hackers to
resist the lure of easy compromise.
"Because we've shown how much we can do, we don't have
to be desperate to work with companies or compromise
our goals," Stallman said during a panel discussion.
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