Eben Moglen leaving Free Software Foundation

Eben Moglen (right) announced on his blog this morning he is leaving the board of the Free Software Foundation.

The decision is evidence that the third draft of the GPL v.3, which he oversaw, has drawn positive reviews, and will likely go through with few edits.

The release of Discussion Draft 3 has been greeted as warmly as I dared hope: all the recorded outrage has been emitted by Microsoft or its surrogates, which is at it should be. We had prepared Discussion Draft 3, after all, with the assumption that it was going to be the Last Call Draft, and I thought, and continue to think, that it would serve beautifully as the final GPLv3. 

Moglen plans to put more time into his day job, as a professor at Columbia University in New York, as well as the Software Freedom Law Center, which provides legal support for FOSS software developers.

If Richard Stallman was the Karl Marx of the free software movement, then Moglen should go down in history as its Engels. (That's meant as a compliment, in that both are historic figures.)

A glance at Moglen's personal Web site demonstrates this, with papers like Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture, The dotCommunist Manifesto, and Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright on his resume.

Given the capitalist nature of the work Stallman and Moglen have engaged in (GPL v.3 is a contract) I'd rather consider them the Jefferson and Adams of the movement.

Or if you insist on a Marxist analogy, Groucho and Chico. (That makes Eric Raymond Harpo, and maybe Jonathan Schwartz Gummo, the agent who made the big money.)