Professor Eben Moglen Recovering From Open Heart Surgery
From his public pages (this is not secret):
Months earlier:
Two decades ago Free software had already leapfrogged Microsoft. Glyn Moody quoted or paraphrased Eben Moglen (who is still active but near retirement age): "At least 10% more programming effort is being poured into software released under the General Public Licence (GPL) - the legal underpinning of three-quarters of all free software such as the Linux operating system - than the combined output of all the programmers in Microsoft."
Dr. Moody explained that "Moglen has had an unusual career. At 16, he helped write the first networked email system. He later worked on designing programming languages at IBM, but left the company in 1984, increasingly disillusioned after an epiphanic encounter with the Apple Lisa - a precursor of the Macintosh - and by the shift to what he calls "the cave-man interface: you point and you grunt". He did a history degree and then a law degree, and ended up teaching and writing about the roots of intellectual [sic] property [sic] law."
He left the FSF a year after that article.
He's still active online, not just in court, but there is "downtime" due to health problems. Like his longtime ally, Richard Stallman, these are lingering issues that won't go away too easily or fast. Dr. Stallman and Bruce Perens both report issues with cancer. ESR, who had cofounded the OSI with Perens, also had struggles with cancer and obesity in recent years.
It's important that they all remain alive; the people who encircle them like vulture - hoping to replace them - don't have good intentions in mind. █
Photo source: Old academic page (2000)
More recent (Mishi Choudhary & Eben Moglen in TOI): Maths & science aren’t ‘closed’, neither should be software | Beware of OpenAI behind closed doors