I think that Richard is always pushing it too far. But maybe we need that. Anyway, he does raise a fair point -- one that I ponder about more and more often.

I think that Richard is always pushing it too far. But maybe we need that. Anyway, he does raise a fair point -- one that I ponder about more and more often. To me the solution seems to be open source/open standards/open data. In the web world the standards and data being perhaps more important than the server's source itself. If you can run that thing on your own server, if you can communicate with the existing servers and if you can get the data you put there back, it seems to provide the same set of freedoms that you had in the original GNU sense.