I see nothing unethical in the job it does. Why shouldn't you send a copy of some music to a friend? - Richard Stallman

GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.

You see, some people have a talent for programming. At ten to thirteen years old, typically, they're fascinated, and if they use a program, they want to know: “How does it do this?” But when they ask the teacher, if it's proprietary, the teacher has to say: “I'm sorry, it's a secret, we can't find out.” Which means education is forbidden. A proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education. It's knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school, even though there may be plenty of people in the school who don't care about programming, don't want to learn this. Still, because it's the enemy of the spirit of education, it shouldn't be there in the school.
But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows, and then give out copies of the source code, saying: “Read it and you'll understand everything.” And those who are really fascinated, they will read it! And this gives them an opportunity to start to learn how to be good programmers.
To learn to be a good programmer, you'll need to recognize that certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they are correct, they're not good because other people will have trouble understanding them. Good code is clear code that others will have an easy time working on when they need to make further changes.
How do you learn to write good clear code? You do it by reading lots of code, and writing lots of code. Well, only free software offers the chance to read the code of large programs that we really use. And then you have to write lots of code, which means you have to write changes in large programs.
How do you learn to write good code for the large programs? You have to start small, which does not mean small program, oh no! The challenges of the code for large programs don't even begin to appear in small programs. So the way you start small at writing code for large programs is by writing small changes in large programs. And only free software gives you the chance to do that.

Dubya has nominated another caveman for a federal appeals court. Refreshingly, the Democratic Party is organizing opposition. The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally — but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness. Some rules might be called for when these acts directly affect other people's interests. For incest, contraception could be mandatory to avoid risk of inbreeding. For prostitution, a license should be required to ensure prostitutes get regular medical check-ups, and they should have training and support in insisting on use of condoms. This will be an advance in public health, compared with the situation today. For necrophilia, it might be necessary to ask the next of kin for permission if the decedent's will did not authorize it. Necrophilia would be my second choice for what should be done with my corpse, the first being scientific or medical use. Once my dead body is no longer of any use to me, it may as well be of some use to someone. Besides, I often enjoy rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants).