Linux and the consumer advocate
Watchdog

"maddog" remembers meeting Ralph Nader and explaining the concept of open source software.
The year was 1998, and only four years after I had met Linus and become involved with Linux. It was the spring (May 18th to be exact), but still so cold that Ocean City, Maryland, was welcoming small conferences before the "summer crowd" shuffled in.
The conference that I attended that cold spring was Uniforum, which presented the business side of Unix systems. By this time, Linux (we had not started calling it "GNU/Linux" at that point) had been given a track of its own on the last day of the three-day conference, and I was the program chair for that track.
One of the main speakers that conference was Ralph Nader. For those of you who are perhaps too young or are not part of American politics, Nader is a tort lawyer, most famous for a book written in the mid-1960s called Unsafe At Any Speed about how manufacturers will often ignore safety issues to get products out to market at a lower cost or faster. A tort is a "wrongful act that hurts people" and includes cars, toys, dangerous chemicals, and even monopolistic acts, which is one of the reasons that Nader was at Uniforum, talking about how software monopolies hurt the software industry.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
-
RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.
-
Happy Birthday, Linux
On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
-
VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.
-
A New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle, a Linux AI assistant, works with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.