Linux and the consumer advocate

Watchdog

Article from Issue 181/2015
Author(s):

"maddog" remembers meeting Ralph Nader and explaining the concept of open source software.

The year was 1998, and only four years after I had met Linus and become involved with Linux. It was the spring (May 18th to be exact), but still so cold that Ocean City, Maryland, was welcoming small conferences before the "summer crowd" shuffled in.

The conference that I attended that cold spring was Uniforum, which presented the business side of Unix systems. By this time, Linux (we had not started calling it "GNU/Linux" at that point) had been given a track of its own on the last day of the three-day conference, and I was the program chair for that track.

One of the main speakers that conference was Ralph Nader. For those of you who are perhaps too young or are not part of American politics, Nader is a tort lawyer, most famous for a book written in the mid-1960s called Unsafe At Any Speed about how manufacturers will often ignore safety issues to get products out to market at a lower cost or faster. A tort is a "wrongful act that hurts people" and includes cars, toys, dangerous chemicals, and even monopolistic acts, which is one of the reasons that Nader was at Uniforum, talking about how software monopolies hurt the software industry.

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