Stallman Inside

I bought a new Netgear wifi router for the house today, to replace a crappy old D-Link that didn’t really work with either my MacBook Pro or my new iPod touch.

A business-card-sized slip of paper fell out of the box when I opened it. It was a little GPL/LGPL notice, with a URL for downloading source. Digging further through the included paper I also found a three-panel insert with six-point type that has the full GPL text on one side and the full LGPL text on the other.

People who buy more hardware than I do may be more blase about this, but I’m not used to seeing the open source and consumer worlds overlap with such tangible manifestations. In the end I’d say I’m more of a MIT/BSD guy than a GPL guy, but as an open source advocate in general I was glad to see it. I half expected to see a little Richard Stallman action figure in there too.

Steve commented :

As a Free Software Advocate I have to say I am pleased, but a little Stallman action figure would be cool :)