Carlos Guerreiro and Richard Stallman at the Free Software Master

As part of the academic activities at the master on free software that we organize together with URJC and Caixanova, which this year is taking place in the city of Vigo, we try to invite every year key members of the community, so that they can transmit their motivations, knowledge and experience face to face to the students. Back in early April, Carlos Guerreiro, who had a relevant role inside Maemo since the very first moments in the history of the Internet Tablets, came to visit us for the second year in a row. Carlos gave two very interesting lectures to the students, one about the challenges in the complex relationship between big for-profit corporations and the free software community, and the other one about the differences between the status of the free software technologies for creating commercial embedded devices back in 2002, when Nokia started to look into this world, and now, trying to describe the current technology trends and foresee what will happen in the near future. In both talks, a lot of examples and anecdotes of the history of Maemo were used to illustrate Carlos’ theories and opinions, and the result was a great day where we all learned a lot.

And today, after many months trying to find a suitable date in his obviously complicated agenda, we are going to have Richard Stalllman giving two lectures as part of the Master academic activities. He will talk about the history of the movement and about the risks of software patents. The access to the talks is free as in freedom and as in beer, and we expect about 500 people attending, including the students of this year and the past year (first edition of the master). Making optimal use of our invitation to come to our country, Stallman was giving yesterday another two talks in different cities close to Vigo, arranged by local GLUGs. In total, hopefully, about 1000 people will listen the message of one of the key protagonists of the Free Software history. I’d like to thank Obra Social Caixanova for making all this possible.