"a new initiative promoted by the italian association for free software for the next italian political elections (provided that they will actually take place…). the initiative consists in asking the candidates to sign a letter where they engage themselves, in case they will be elected, to promote the use of free software through their political activity.

"The free software movement is a new social movement which aims to protect the rights of users to access and modify software. Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture, Richard Stallman is widely credited with launching the movement in 1983 by founding the GNU Project..."

Groklaw's Pamela Jones is all too familiar with the concept of free speech and anonymity online. Jones enjoyed a brief period of anonymity when she started Groklaw, writing as “PJ” on the site, but soon her identity became a topic of speculation and controversy within the open source community. In this article, Jones answers questions about anonymity, free speech, and the Internet.

Last night, I watched the film The Matrix again. It is about nine years ago when I was a middle school student that I watched it for the first time. I did not quite understand what it's talking about then, especially What is The Matrix, the question confused Neo before he back to the Real. But yesterday night, when I watched it for the second time, I quite understand.

RMS: "...Isn't it sad to see the "idealistic" Olympic officials who believe (or at least say) that sport should be kept pure of distractions such as human rights? They reminds me of the "open source" supporters that think technology should be kept pure of distractions such as human rights."

As anyone who has anything to do with [non-Windows] software development knows, GNU’s definition of “free” is “free as in freedom and free as in beer.” But what dictionary did the GPL author(s) use when looking up a definition for “freedom”?

"We freedomware advocates think that switching to a Freedom-respectful operating system (usually GNU/Linux) is the most important step when switching to freedomware, and therefore we focus on promoting these systems (myself included). However, I’ve found out that it does not matter that much.

it-and-ethics