Thanks Heidi for reminding us all about RMS; I first saw him at a conference on GNU/free software in my home town around 15 years ago, and he made a lasting impression.

He & Linus are pretty much the reason why I've been using Linux since 1994, when I used some free radio astronomy software (called AIPS & AIPS++) to analyse incoming solar flare data from a radio interferometer that was picking up solar flare radio waves.

Back then, installing Linux on an HP machine (I used an early version of Slackware) was a massive learning curve which took best part of a week, as there were a lot of hardware compatibility issues...

...it was that at time that I began to see that hardware vendors have exclusivity contracts with Microsoft that prevented them from allowing other operating systems from talking to their firmware, and so I made a commitment back then never to run any Microsoft products at home.

Richard's talk was all about how some day, giant monopolies would swallow up books into digital form, and make it illegal to share through DRM.

And here we are.

But - the free software movement is running in parallel to the draconian monopolies, giving those who choose to discover, the choice about how they use the hardware & tools they use.

Interesting times.