[ Thanks to Daniel
Memenode for this link. ]
“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”.”