'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'. |
[UCITA] applies to any sort of computer-readable information. Even if you use only free software, you are likely to read articles on your computer, and access databases. UCITA will allow the publishers to impose the most outrageous restrictions on you. They could change the license retroactively at any time, and force you to delete the material if you don't accept the change. They could even prohibit you from describing what you see as flaws in the material. |
Accusations against innocent people happen with terrible regularity, and the danger of false convictions is immense. |
All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights. |
Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic. |
British book publishers plan to put a microchip into every book to record who owns it - an unprecedented surveillance measure. |
Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult. |
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free. |
designed to prohibit all free software. It covers only code that implements, precisely, the Microsoft formats, which means that a program under this license does not permit modification. |
Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria. |
H.R. 354 would effectively allow facts to become private property, simply through their inclusion in an electronic database. Ominously, many collections of public records, maintained by companies on contracts to governments, would become property of those companies. |
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. |
I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place. |
I found it tremendously humiliating to be there because most of the kids there were brain dead or psychotic. |
I founded the free software movement, a movement for freedom to cooperate. Open source was a reaction against our idealism. We are still here and the open-source people have not wiped us out. |