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It comes as no surprise that Lynne Joliz, open source pioneer, has just published
(September 2004) a book
review in Dr. Dobbs Journal entitled
Free Culture and the Internet
discussing Larry Lessig's new book. Lessig's book
tackles the thorny issues of copyright, control of works, and fair use
in a technologic Internet age, and has no easy answers.
"I've admired Larry Lessig of Stanford Law School for his work on
the Creative Commons. So I was pleased when he kindly sent me a copy of
his new book "Free Culture". It's a wonderful book to review. Larry
Lessig writes clearly and with passion, yet he is not one to excuse his
missteps or losses. He is a confident and committed presence for the
open source community."
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Lynne Jolitz recalled when 386BSD
was introduced by Jon Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of Dr. Dobbs Journal in his
January 1991 editorial
The Right Thing to Do, where he began with the
the forthright words "Every now and then, the right things get done for the right
reasons - and at just the right time. So it is this month as we launch a major series
of articles by Bill and Lynne Jolitz...porting BSD Unix to the 80386/486 platform."
Jon goes on later to remind people of the difficulty of working with Unix,
"There are a number of significant points here. For one thing, you won't need tens,
if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware to use the operating system. Less
apparent, but perhaps more important, is that 386BSD (as Bill refers to the port) will
be free of AT&T code - the only license required will be that issues by the University
of California." Four months before Linus Torvalds announced his determination to
create Linux, 386BSD
was introduced to the world, all due to the perserverence of a small group of Berkeley idealists
and one visionary editor. As Lynne likes to say nowadays "Actually, it takes more than
a group of technologists or inventors to make the dream real - it takes connecting to
real people and becoming part of their lives. Jon Erickson was the guy who had the
foresight to make it happen. All open source projects today owe him a debt of thanks."
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