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Bringing free software to the masses

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 13 Apr 2006 13:15 BST

You'd think it would be easy to research the right-hand man of a free software icon, given the mass of information about the free software movement on the Internet. But a search for "Peter Brown" — the executive director of the Free Software Foundation — and "free software" produces only 14,000 hits on Google and little information about his past.

So when we visited the Foundation's headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts it was a surprise to discover a clean-cut, suited English man from Oxford, who was quite so different from FSF founder Richard Stallman with his impressive beard and baggy clothes.

Their backgrounds are also totally different. While Stallman is a programmer, having almost single-handedly developed the original version of applications such as Emacs and the GNU C Compiler, Brown has a background in business and finance, and only dabbled with coding when he was in his teens.

But despite these differences, the two men share the same goal — in basic terms freedom around software, but more specifically to give people the freedom to run software for any purpose, to study and adapt that software, passing on the improvements to the public and to freely redistribute copies of the software.

Both men are responsible for the overall direction of the Free Software Foundation and seem to offer complementary skills, with Brown coming across as more of a pragmatist than Stallman, whose idealism and drive to fulfil his goals has led him to spend his life telling people across the world about free software.

ZDNet UK met with Brown last week to learn more about some of the Foundation's upcoming projects, how the FSF is run and funded, and what he feels makes the organisation so special.

Tell me a bit about how you came to be the executive director of the FSF. Do you have a technical background?
I'm not a programmer and I'm not a hacker. The last time I programmed was when I was 14 years old.

When I was a kid, I had a Sinclair ZX-81, with 1KB of memory. At the time — back in 1984 or 85 — if you wanted to play a game you couldn't buy a CD, so you had to buy one of the listing magazines, like Sinclair Programs. You had to look at the listing of computer code and type it into your machine. The keyboard was terrible — it was simply a flat piece of plastic. At the end you would try to run the program, and if it didn't run you would have to correct any syntax errors.

See ZDNet UK's photos of the inside of the FSF offices.

Over time, I slowly worked out why errors occurred and started to learn how to program in Basic. At one point, I sent a game I had written to Sinclair Programs, and they accepted it for publication and sent me a cheque for £25. As soon as I sent off the first game, I started writing the next one.

So, the magazine arrived and my game was inside and they'd drawn a nice big cartoon for it. Unfortunately, when I flicked to the editorial for magazine it said, 'this is the last ever edition of the magazine.' It was basically saying that in the future people will not share source code and won't type code into computers — they'll buy games on physical media instead.

What was funny was that this was the September 1985 edition of the magazine, which was a month before the Free Software Foundation was created, in response to the fact that people were taking [open] computer code and turning it into proprietary code.

Looking back at it now, overnight my world was destroyed, because the listing magazine was destroyed. It just became about playing code, rather than writing code. That was the last time I ever did any programming.

What jobs were you doing before you came to work for the FSF? How did you end up in Boston, working as their executive director?
I've always been in management or finance. I have mainly worked for non-profits, including Oxford City Council, the BBC and New Internationalist magazine. I was at New Internationalist for several years, then my wife, who worked for Oxford University on a genotyping facility, saw a position offered here [in Boston].

We weren't looking to move as we were pretty settled in Oxford, but decided to come over here in January 2001 so she could take on the job. I took a seven month sabbatical before looking for a job. At...

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