Free software brings a number of huge advantages to the problem of spanning the educational and technology gap between rich and poor nations. So we can teach someone to use Linux and OpenOffice, and then they can take that software home and teach someone else, who can copy the software and take it to their business where they can teach someone else... so we see very rapid transfer of skills with software libre...

"...There’s nothing wrong with charging money for the redistribution of this code either. Noone says anybody should provide stuff for free, just because it is GPL’ed “free” software. What the freedom in “free software” means is that anyone who obtains the code also remains at liberty to redistribute the GPL’ed code and charge for it too, if he or she wishes to do so..."

Okay so I think we can all agree that proprietary software shouldn't be promoted by the FOSS community. It also seems to be acceptable to promote the use of free software applications on proprietary OSes. So why is there a problem with promoting the use of proprietary applications on free OSes?

RMS: «The EFF is fighting an attempt to twist copyright law to give the software developer total power over execution of the program. Victory in this case will not eliminate the practice of restricting how users run proprietary programs. It will only limit the developers to using contracts as the means. This will not make users free.

Analysis of some of Canonical's recent moves, which give rise to Novell's Mono and proprietary software (at the expense of Free software)

I have Attended Free Software and Free Society (FSFS) International Conference to day
I was shocked to find many speakers running Windows Vista and power point presentations. I thought the guys running the show were hard core GNU fanatics.( Ricard Stallman was present on the opening day of the conference.).

Teach yourself free software with Windows XP in 21 days

"...This method involves a lot of hard work that, historically, few have demonstrated they are interested in doing: teach people the values of software freedom, teach the philosophy behind why the free software movement exists..."

A powerful US lobby group is trying to have pro-open source countries listed as being "anti-capitalism". Open source software is anti-capitalism and undermines intellectual property.

Or rather, it is all about preparing for inevitable failures, and they are legion. Hardware failures, power failures, and most of all, storage media failures. Ever notice how fragile digital storage media are? Are we ever going to get digital storage media that can match plain old paper, and other analog media, for reliability and longevity?