> I respect and admire Stallman personally. Likewise, I respect and admire his contribution to the world. The problem he set out to tackle was and is very real.

> I respect and admire Stallman personally. Likewise, I respect and admire his contribution to the world. The problem he set out to tackle was and is very real. > I question whether it remains a primary issue in regard to the future impact of computing on the world. There are more threats to freedom now than ever. Look at UEFI on new laptops, graphics cards or wifi hardware that only work with closed-source drivers, and the whole world of smartphones that do not run without closed-source binary blobs. A proprietary BIOS has always been a thorn of contention, but with UEFI you can't boot your own OS at all unless it is blessed by Microsoft. In the "olden days" things moved a lot slower, and some companies - like Intel - even released drivers under the GPL. Now when a new phone comes out, its SoC is 99% powered by closed source binary blobs. The Nexus 4 is a disaster - look at this list of proprietary blobs https://android.googlesource.com/device/lge/mako/+/77f8e6b51a8f26ea9288a9186179511a92c07df0/proprietary-blobs.txt https://android.googlesource.com/device/lge/mako/+/77f8e6b51... - how can you say there's no issue here? Almost all the interesting stuff this phone can do is powered by non-free software. In addition most phones ship with proprietary bootloaders that don't let you change the operating system. I'd say that freedom-wise, today is much worse than the situation with computers from 5-6 years ago, especially if you expand computers to include phones and tablets.