Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention today, Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O’Reilly founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly. Saying that O’Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O’Reilly name, Moglen invited O’Reilly to stop being “frivolous” and to join the conversation about software freedom.

However, Moglen took O’Reilly to task about promoting open source over free software, and got rather heated at several points during the exchange, telling O’Reilly that his premise that Web 2.0 had rendered software licenses unimportant was faulty.
At the close of the session, just before the midday break, Moglen told O’Reilly to “use this 10 years” for less frivolous purposes, and that he’d “just bought you enough time with GPLv3 to address this [free software] like a grownup.” When O’Reilly suggested that Moglen had made a personal attack, Moglen replied, “I invited you to a conversation you’d been avoiding.”

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