«...Control has replaced Free Speech in Stallman’s the rhetoric. This is one of the most noticeable things I took away from today, that there has been a cultural shift from the way proponents of Free Software talk and communicate about the ideas and rationalities of Free Software principles.

"Once software users freedoms are protected the methodology that we know as Open Source becomes possible and its advantages become apparent. But without the guiding principles of Free Software the neccessity and direction of Open Source cannot be accounted for. Open Source has no history or trajectory, it cannot account for itself or suggest which tasks are neccessary or important.

OK, up until now I am talking about broad principles and governments. The reason I went off in that direction is to make the point that most reasonable people in free countries do understand, accept and support reasonable limitations on free speech. By the strictest definition of the word these examples are all forms of censorship. Censorship, in and of itself, is not evil.

"...The project was presented during the Software Freedom Day 09 event organized by the Free Software Foundation. Briefly introduced by Walter Bender, founder of SugarLabs, our Sugar+Trisquel solution provides a way to run this excelent educational software in a fully free system. Trisquel 3.0 was also featured in the FSF event, running on the computers available for the public on site..."

"I am a fervent believer in the principles of Free Software, and the principles of Freedom in general, but I don't necessarily support everything Stallman says or does. I am not Richard Stallman, I have my own opinions, and in my opinion Stallman's support of Microsoft technology via DotGNU is profoundly wrong..." -- NB: IMHO, RMS and FSF's voice are not necessarily the same!

"When we speak of Free Software (FS), we are speaking about the freedom it gives users, as all supporters of the FS movement understand (or, at least, are expected to know). And freedom of software cannot exist in isolation. It depends on other freedoms, such as freedom of speech..."

"Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipdia talks about how Wikipedia aims to give people access to the sum of human knowledge. He describes how Wikipedia is very popular across the globe. Hundreds of thousands of articles in numbers of languages. He notes how Wikipedia is a charitable organization with only 12 employees. Yet, look at the affect they have on the world. Spent $1,000,000 in 2006 - supported by small donations from people around the world. (Also gets donations of caching servers around the world.) Wales goes on to define, what he means by free access to the sum of human knowledge. “Free as in speech, not as in beer.” The Wikipedia’s license allows you the: Freedom to copy, Freedom to modify, Freedom to redistribute, Freedom to redistribute modified versions ..."

"If those underlying principles exist, then it should be possible to identify them. It should also be possible to extrapolate concrete expressions of those principles in new contexts… such as hardware, not software..."

This blog post covers the main presentation from our ODF workshop that took place in Redmond last week: Peter Amstein’s explanation of the guiding principles behind our support of ODF in Office 2007 SP2. I’ve added explanations of some of the details that were covered verbally in the workshop, but if anything’s not clear here, please let me know.