Happy Independence day to my US readers. This holiday is a celebration of the United States adoption of the Declaration of Independence which declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. I thought it would be a good day to remind everyone what open source is all about…

Freedom.

I have a license plate hanging in my office that I received from one of the last major Linux conventions I attended. The convention was in New York at the Jacob Javitz center. It was huge. The convention was filled to rim with big business. IBM, Oracle, Compaq, Novell - many of the big guns were in attendance. And those big guns were showing off everything they planned on doing with Linux.

Now that license plate in my office is an homage to the New Hampshire motto: “Live free or die.” Open source software has allowed me (and many others) freedoms, on many levels, that I never would enjoy with closed source software.

1) Freedom of financial gain.
2) Freedom from cost-prohibitive licenses.

rest here

Also: Freedom is not Free for Countries nor Computer Users