Independence From Monopolies
"They were ethnically GAFAM anyway..."
HAVING just mentioned Taiwan [1, 2], we've also found this article from almost 20 years ago about Dr. Stallman's visit to the National Taiwan University in Taipei. The article is now owned by a Chinese (IDG) site and will one day be offline, so let's reproduce some key bits:
Richard Stallman, one of the main forces behind the GNU/Linux operating system and the free software movement, is in Taiwan fighting on a new front -- to get the island's PC makers to provide the specifications necessary for developers to write free drivers for their hardware."We just need the information about what their drivers have to do," Stallman said during a speech at the National Taiwan University in Taipei on Wednesday. Then GNU software writers can create code for open source systems, he said.
[...]
The GNU community will promote hardware from companies that offer free driver information, he said.
Aside from some company visits, Stallman is scheduled to speak at several universities and research centers in Taiwan.
That article was authored by Dan Nystedt when the site was still truly active. His last article there was 13 years ago. Journalism has more or less died since then.
That was a few years before EEE PC came out from Taiwan, preloaded with GNU/Linux (which was rare at the time). █
