Last year, I interviewed the team behind Neoscopio, then just a Free/Open Source Software business concept. Now, just a scant 3 months into their official business venture, they are well ahead of where they thought they would be right now. I asked Gustavo Mendez to bring us up to speed on where the fledgling company currently stands...

"Freedom matters, whether it be the file formats or the software itself. It is software freedom that allows all these devices to exist and to be sold so cheaply, and software freedom that causes Linux and other Free Software to create and expand into an ecosystem that simply wouldn't exist if proprietary software were all that was available"

RMS: « ... I sympathize fully with appreciation of convenient software. What I refuse to sympathize with is the failure to appreciate freedom even more... »

Whether you are online or offline, freedom matters. Like good health you never think about it or miss it until it is under threat or actually gone. If you love freedom, you probably love free software and it has given us some terrific tools with which to defend freedom.

"...RMS also spend some time on elaborating why people shouldn't just talk about 'Linux' when they discuss those distributions they run on their computers, but instead should call it GNU/Linux [...] GNU's philosophy and motivation is the freedom of users, while Linux does not represent those values at all.

«...That statement packages several questionable assumptions:

1. That the only motive for developing free software is ideological.

2. That innovation in software requires a lot of funding.

3. That the only way to fund software research is through proprietary software.

4. That innovation is more important than freedom.

"Miro is open like the internet." [and Free as in Freedom!] "Joost works like a cable company with DRM. Which vison of web video do you want to see prevail, proprietary or open?" [or Free as in Freedom!] "Do you want corporations to decide what you watch?"

I find Dell's half-hearted commitment to Linux as frustrating as everyone else. It took me forever to find the actual link on Dell's site to their Ubuntu offerings (hint: they look exactly like Google AdSense sponsored links and it just says "open-source PCs"). Once you find it (or even if you use the direct link), you are greeted with a warning page about Ubuntu.

In the proprietary production world, what matters about a copyright is who owns it. In the free production world, however, who owns a copyright is relatively unimportant. What matters is what license it is offered under. There is a very simple rule of thumb about the best license to use: use a 'free,copyleft license'