[ Thanks to Daniel
Memenode for this link. ]
“I used to be what is sometimes called a “Free Software
purist”. “Free” here refers to “free as in freedom” according to
Richard Stallman’s Free Software Philosophy. As such I was opposed
to all proprietary software licensing. If a program doesn’t come
with a license that allows you those “four freedoms” (to run,
modify and share both unmodified and modified versions of the
program as you wish) then using it meant you don’t care for your
freedom and are choosing to be a “slave” to the developer. In turn
I largely tended to agree that such developers are immoral to offer
software under such licenses.“Needless to say that put me against the likes of Microsoft and
Apple and even to some extent against certain Linux based offerings
because they included certain bits of proprietary software in it. I
joined in the fight against DRM which we called “Digital
Restrictions Management” rather than “Digital Rights Management”
which is its official name. I wrote articles in support of GNU
General Public License which I saw as the best way to guarantee
these four freedoms and protect them from being taken away. I
chastised Linus Torvalds for choosing not to relicense the Linux
kernel under GPLv2.”