No longer will the Free Software Foundation be the target of advertisements for novelty condoms, Ibiza package holidays and extreme sports gear. It’s leaving the 16-24 yoof demographic behind.

Today the GNU project celebrates its quarter-century. It was on 27 September 1983 that MIT slacker Richard M Stallman made his announcement that he intended to create a complete Unix-like system that would be completely open and hackable, giving anyone the right to modify and distribute the work. The Free Software Foundation is getting its celebration in early.

The innovation of the GPL software licence only followed some years later, but it was driven by GNU’s needs, and it was to have profound consequences for the computer industry.

25 years ago, Stallman saw the project as a way of continuing the community ethic of shared code, something he felt was in danger of being eclipsed by the arrival of new, commercial software companies, seeking to capitalize on work in the labs. It’s not so strange if you look at it through Stallman’s eyes: software was a tool that had always been open, hackable and redistributable, and now mediocre people in ill-fitting suits were trying to steal that freedom… by making a quick buck with dodgy products, and putting very little back.
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Spare a thought for anyone on the Environment beat at the Guardian newspaper. It must be like working for Pravda during the Breznhev era. There, as the economy became ever more dysfunctional, reporters were obliged to pump out ever more absurd stories saluting record productivity and efficiency records. The triumph over capitalism was imminent!

A different time and a different place: but at the Graun, the ideology is “Climate Change” – and the number of narratives permissible is similarly narrow, and rigidly defined from the top. For as regular readers of the paper will know, the climate can only change in one direction: for the worse. Apocalypse is imminent!

It’s in this context you should spare a thought for David Adam, the newspaper’s environment correspondent. He certainly has our sympathies. With hurricane Gustav set to devastate New Orleans, Adam was tasked with the job of showing how it’s all down to Global Warming.
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