Hungarian Microsoft Office Creator in Space - Again!

Temporarily based in Hungary as I am - been here in Budapest for a couple of months - anything Hungarian in the news gets my attention.

Right now its mostly how the Hungarian economy is in meltdown - the PM quit on Saturday - but every now and again there is a bit of good news. A lot of that happens when I find another famous person who turns out to be Hungarian.

There are loads of them from obvious ones such as George Soros to Tony Curtis and Jerry Seinfeld.

But the most newsworthy at the moment is Charles Simonyi who has just blasted into space for the second time on a Russian Soyuz space mission - with a bit of help from the US. While a lot of Hungarians might be justifiable proud of Simonyi - swathes of the open source community might not be as well disposed to the creator of Microsoft Office. Wikipedia has all the skinny. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi

Interestingly from an open source perspective - I saw free software campaigner and GNU Founder Richard Stallman speak in Budapest recently. Stallman was on fine form as usual criticising everything from EU adoption of open source to the links between green and free software - but he missed the chance to berate the Hungarians for Simonyi's Office development. But then again Simonyi did all his work in the US so guess Hungarians can just take the credit for the good stuff ;-)

You can read the Stallman interview here: http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/interview/richard-stallman--free-software-costs-the-environment-less-404