technical on a whole minute

Eben Moglen, lawyer with the Free Software Foundation, gave a keynote address at the October 2006 Plone conference in Seattle. The video can be seen at YouTube or downloaded from archive.org. He explains the economic reality and moral justification for free software, and its role in the struggle for human freedom historically and in society at large. His presentation is inspiring; I highly recommend watching it. I have also transcribed the speech below and apologize for any errors. . . .

I just attended a session about microformats at Northern Voice. Following an explanation about what, there were a great deal of questions about why – and I don’t think they found the answers compelling. Let me explain why I am excited about microformats. …

I have heard too many complaints from people who don’t grok XML. XML isn’t just a standard data format: t has turned out to be one of those rare technologies which really does add to the basic platform on which we build much of our software. The key is scripting. . . .

There was a recent discussion on Slashdot about the problem of too many RSS aggregators fetching their feeds on the hour every hour and overloading the server. The common accusation levelled at syndication technology is that it depends on polling – the client checks periodically for new content even when there is none. The obvious solution, Slashdotters felt, was to notify the client when the feed changes. They are dead wrong. RSS is a success precisely because it doesn’t work this way. . . .