Despite his
grievances, Stallman has to admit that the last few
years have been quite good, both to himself and to his
organization. Relegated to the periphery by the
unforeseen success of GNU/Linux, Stallman has
nonetheless successfully recaptured the initiative. His
speaking schedule between January 2000 and December
2001 included stops on six continents and visits to
countries where the notion of software freedom carries
heavy overtones-China and India, for example.
Outside the bully pulpit, Stallman has also learned how
to leverage his power as costeward of the GNU General
Public License (GPL). During the summer of 2000, while
the air was rapidly leaking out of the 1999 Linux IPO
bubble, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation
scored two major victories. In July, 2000, Troll Tech,
a Norwegian software company and developer of Qt, a
valuable suite of graphics tools for the GNU/Linux
operating system, announced it was licensing its
software under the GPL. A few weeks later, Sun
Microsystems, a company that, until then, had been
warily trying to ride the open source bandwagon without
giving up total control of its software properties,
finally relented and announced that it, too, was dual
licensing its new OpenOffice application suite under
the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) and the Sun
Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).
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