Software Patents: "A Greedy Scam"
Truly great quote from Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, during an interview with News.com:
| Q: Various people have accused the free software movement of being anti-capitalist, including Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. What's your response? A: The idea that we are anti-capitalist is a stupid idea. Free software is not anti-capitalist. Capitalism now makes a great deal of money out of free software, and it voluntarily pays us money to make, improve and lawyer for it. Some people decided to make knowledge into property. That wasn't capitalism speaking; that was a greedy scam. There wasn't anything normatively acceptable about it. It contravened the freedom of speech and ideas. We didn't engage in it because it was excluding people from ideas. |
News.com: Free software's white knight
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