Media that spy on and data-mine the public are capable of destroying humanity's most precious freedom: freedom of thought. Ensuring that media remain structured to support rather than suppress individual freedom and civic virtue requires us to achieve specific free technology and free culture goals.

"... «I ask you to please always call it Free Software because that way you will encourage other people to pay attention to the question of freedom. The term Open Source was formulated by people who did not want to talk about freedom and that is the stupidest thing any people can do.

"...We saw how Free Software has come to stay in Kerala. The natural question this raises is, “Why Kerala?” There is no other state in the country where Free Software has made an impact that is anywhere near that in Kerala. This itself could be the subject for an entire thesis, and this is certainly not the place to enter into a serious analysis of the question.

The stories of Echelon, Wikileaks, Snowden and the NSA scandal lead the information society to question the notions of information privacy, transparency, common sense, and the use of personal data for commercial purposes. To be “free”, is it simply the freedom to enjoy without restraint? Freedom of speech? Freedom of opinion or free will? Freedom to use gratis everything we find on the Net?

I have been pondering the meaning of “free” in association with Free Open Source Software (FOSS) in general and GNU/Linux in particular. If one asks a FOSS advocate what free means in regard to these one might hear the reply, “Free as in beer!” and/or “Free as in 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.

In my last post about Freedomware I tried to define it without relying on the copyright law since I no longer believe in it.

«...On this subject, I had an interesting email conversation with Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, who differentiated for me the difference between "open source" and "free software," ...» -- Free Software, Free Society: Why Barack Obama should support the Free Software Movement

Totally ignoring the fact that this type of news is becoming the new norm everywhere but in the US, it does present a very serious question - how does Microsoft compete with free?