Yes, Microsoft is demanding — and in many cases, receiving royalties — from companies selling devices that run Android, an operating system based on Linux. This shows that its place in the world remains complicated. Though it’s moving to the web, it is still very much a company that makes money selling software — and it still has an interest in protecting this business.

For our January fellowship interview we met Heiki Ojasild. He joined the Free Software Foundation Europe in 2011, undertaking the task of translating fsfe.org into Estonian, his mother tongue. He is currently developing an XChat add-on, as well as a website for free SVG and JavaScript games. In 2010 he took part in the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics.

Schools should foster curiosity and the spirit enquiry in an environment that encourages students to learn. A classroom running proprietary software cannot provide this.

I believe in Synergy. One positive event feeds other positive events. The share of computer users who use Linux, GNU, and other Free Software is growing because people are actually starting to put some marketing muscle behind the concepts. Canonical is one of these companies. Red Hat is another. Google is also fighting the good fight.

Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

« RMS was at the Institut Méditerranéen d'Étude et de Recherche en Informatique et Robotique (IMERIR), in Perpignan, France, on 28 October, 2011, to deliver the graduation speech, "Le logiciel libre : pratique et éthique," to the class of 2011, which was named after him. »

RMS: « The father of free software philosophy spoke to RT on evil developers, spying social networks, the almost-legitimacy of Anonymous hacks and the condition under which he would take a proprietary program and a million dollars. Stallman is the man behind the concept that every computer program must be free for users to study and modify as they want.

In this multi-part interview Linus Torvalds discusses life, the kernel, and everything.