Claire's Alternate Version of Reality
Blogged by Claire Giordano

20050131 Monday January 31, 2005

Open Source and Winston Churchill Sitting in Stanford Memorial Chapel last week for a memorial service, I was reminded of a famous Winston Churchill quote. Strangely enough, it was exactly 40 years from the date of Churchill's own passing.  The quote stayed with me all day, and all week, and for those of you who haven't thought of the connection between open source and Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, well, here it is:

"We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give."
Sir Winston Churchill
British politician (1874 - 1965)

Of course, I didn't remember the exact quote when I returned to work later that day (and I wasn't in a position to write it down at the chapel), so I turned to the trusty google search engine, which took me to both the Quotations page (which recently had its 10 year anniversary) and to the WikiQuote page where I quickly found what I hope is the exact quote.  I didn't have such good luck finding the context for the quote, but I'm pretty sure he was not talking about open source at the time.  Still, it is a good fit for the philosophy behind open source and the benefits of giving to a community...

(2005-01-31 00:47:30.0) Permalink Comments [1]


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