On 2006/6/19, Sue Reed sreed1234@yahoo.com:
I'm sure I could do a google search for Richard Stallman and find out who he is, but as a newer member of the Wikimedia community, I have no clue who he is. The "needs no introduction" assumes that everyone is of a certain level regarding whose who in the world.
According to Wikipedia (first paragraph of a much longer article:
Richard Matthew Stallman (frequently abbreviated to RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation. An acclaimed hacker, his major accomplishments include Emacs (and the later GNU Emacs), the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. He is also the author of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most widely-used free software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft.
I know who Larry Lessig is because of his connection to the John Edwards campaign in 2004, but otherwise I'd be lost as to who he is to.
Again from Wikipedia, but this time a bit deeper in the article: He is founder and chair of the Creative Commons and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And on those organisations: The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share.
The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.
The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when releasing their works on the Web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work that makes it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide a "Founders' Copyright" [1] contract, intended to re-create the effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.
All these efforts, and more, are done to counter the effects of what Creative Commons considers to be, in the words of chairman of the board Lawrence Lessig, a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture, "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past".[2] Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.[3][4]
and: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a non-profit advocacy and legal organization based in the United States with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving free speech rights such as those protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in the context of today's digital age. Its stated main goal is to educate the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology; and to act as a defender of those liberties.