Bringing free software to the masses Ingrid Marson mailroomuk@zdnet.com ZDNet UK April 13, 2006, 13:15 BST

Peter Brown, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, hopes to 'get the message of free software outside the hacker world

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. Read the full interview http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020463,39263218,00.htm

Photos: Inside the Free Software Foundation http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39263220-1,00.htm -- "Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history. `Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn." -- Richard Stallman Me scribbles at http://www.pravi.co.nr