"This is one of the underlying reasons why I so often insist on not focusing so much on "Linux" as an operating system, but rather an ecosystem from which operating systems can be built in their own right. It isn't merely an alternative OS we are building. It is a brave new world in which intellectual property plays a smaller or ideally no role because it is an incoherent idea, because it gives one the unjust power over the other, because it creates cases where one set of rules is imposed on the other regardless of the existence of prior agreement. The Free Software world isn't completely without this problem, but it's as close as we've gotten to emulating a free society and therefore worth promoting and trying to steer to where I believe it would be most effective in achieving a real free society.
"That said, I'm not really on the side of the Free Software Foundation. I don't consider "four freedoms" devised by Richard Stallman to be any kind of a moral code. I believe that if an individual agrees to terms of use that are more restrictive before he is given a copy, he is someone who exercises his own free choice. However, as the first order of business in relation to Free Software I encourage as little as awareness of its existence and the idea that intellectual property laws and the proprietary software industry that has sprung up as a result are not necessarily an ideal state of affairs and that at least using Free Software we can slowly help augment or replace such an industry with something, shall we say, more "consumer friendly"."
