“What would happen if arithmetic hadn’t been in the public sphere?” he asks. “What if, before doing something that involved arithmetic, you had to stop at the arithmetic store? Over time, the arithmetic owners would get very rich, but there would be a noticeable gap in the production of arithmetic, which would get more expensive without getting better.”

"...The modernization of our Public Administration imperative and because this modernization will only come to be if we can control our own information system, the need for a resolute and informed policy on the use of Free Software within Quebec’s public administration is long overdue..... "

To GPL or not to GPL: What Would Dostoevsky Do?

"Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom."

Things have been going pretty well for open source and open standards recently... But elsewhere, other open movements are still in the early stages of the struggle against forces pushing closed, proprietary standards.

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher suggested in his article, WGA failure highlights major flaw in Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy, that Microsoft needs a new "anti-piracy" strategy. I not only agree that they need a new strategy, I'll even go so far as to help them craft it.

In the wake of the Windows Update fiasco, LinuxInsider quoted Stephen O'Grady's explanation of why users trust GNU/Linux more than Windows where the auto-update features are concerned. His explanation really hits the nail on the head - it all comes down to trust.

The purpose of open-source and the ideal which it follows is not to let people steal eachother's work, but to improve upon previous designs.