We are witnessing the birth of a new kind of internet censorship in the Xinjiang province of Western China: the kind where a web site must be specifically allowed, instead of specifically disallowed.

Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter. Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies.

“You can have freedom without choice.” That someone could even come up with this one is just amazing to me. The ability to choose is a major part of what freedom—or liberty—is. If you cannot make a choice on a matter, then by definition you do not have freedom in the context of that matter.

Linux’s main merit, as a kernel and an ecosystem, is its open source nature. That means the software that runs on it has little choice but to be open source. This doesn’t mean closed-source software is unavailable on Linux—just that it’s got the deck stacked strongly against it.

"...Having originated from the Free Software movement in the 1980s, the digital commons has meanwhile found widespread support in arts, culture, scientific publishing and research. It will neither bring 'cyber-communism' nor is it an alternative version of the public sphere.

OK, up until now I am talking about broad principles and governments. The reason I went off in that direction is to make the point that most reasonable people in free countries do understand, accept and support reasonable limitations on free speech. By the strictest definition of the word these examples are all forms of censorship. Censorship, in and of itself, is not evil.

According to an ongoing debate over the GPL version 3, he does. How can this be, since Linus Torvalds, creator and chief architect of the Linux kernel, knows about software freedom and free software?

Has the terminology finally evolved in the debate over "who's open source?" It would seem so. After years of haggling over the essence of open source, free software or other monikers, Simon Phipps gets right to the point in "A Remarkable Reversal" - his critique of Richard Stallman's joint letter to the EC regarding Oracle and MySQL.