Today I’m covering the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing where Eben Moglen and Tim O’Reilly just finished their “Licensing in the Web 2.0 Era” interview. Unfortunately the interview veered off topic quickly when Eben started berating Tim O’Reilly for wasting 10 years with “Open Source”. Eben believes that everyone should be thinking in terms of “Free Software” and not “Open Source”, but we already knew that.

What we didn’t know was that all of Tim’s efforts, ranging from books and conferences to motivating legions of open source hackers have been frittered away while only the FSF fights the good fight. Eben was slinging careless insults left and right — other choice quotes include:

“I would tear down this Open Source sign and put Free Software up there.”
“Web 2.0 is mostly hooey.”
“Google is just heat noise.”
“Web 2.0 will crash in a mess of XSS (cross site scripting) attacks like active X controls.”

I am really disturbed by Eben’s words. I’ve been working on open source nearly 10 years myself and listening to Eben, it seems that I haven’t accomplished anything. At least by his measure.

I thought that Eben was lacking general courtesy and respect for his host — I don’t think its acceptable to insult your host on stage. Especially if the host is Tim O’Reilly who has gone to great lengths to foster community and has given open source developers countless chances to collaborate. Sweeping all of Tim’s accomplishments under the table and berating the audience for having wasted 10 years time is plain rude.

I appreciate Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen’s efforts in “Free Software”. I appreciate the GPL v2.0, gcc and all the other tools that Stallman has coded. But I do not appreciate being insulted by both of them — either in person or on stage. If the FSF wishes to cling on to hopes of remaining relevant today I would suggest that you change your tune and respect the legions of people who have been turning your dreams into a reality.

But, if you must cling to your rigid ideals and insist to shape the world in your views, please do exhibit common courtesy and respect your host.