In the beginning, free software was an activity conducted on the margins - using spare time on a university's computers, or the result of lonely bedroom hacking.

"December 26th 2008: Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. This speech will be part of the Freedom in Computer Technology 2008 conference..."

"On Wednesday the 7th, EFF will be celebrating our 18th year of defending digital rights with our biggest bash yet! ..."

I believe that it is making a fundamental mistake by choosing to play by the rules laid down by the two biggest proprietary computing companies - Microsoft and Apple. In doing so, it throws away all its natural advantages - notably its differentness - and attempts to compete on its enemies' terms

"Perl 5's source code is no longer locked into the odious proprietary Perforce repository where it's been hosted for years. It's now hosted in the git distributed version control system. This is a huge win..."

Sugar Labs, a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, is joining the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board. Sugar Labs creates software for young children used on platforms like the One Laptop Per Child's XO. Sugar is based on the GNOME platform and relies on technologies like GTK+ and Telepathy.

Here’s a minor thought dump of the moment: no hard numbers, just some general observations over the past year or two.

"Or, how I spent my Christmas vacation. Here are texinfo and info versions of Project Gutenberg's Complete Works of Shakespeare, suitable for use in emacs or with the texinfo program..." -- via texinfo edition of the complete works of Shakespeare