Cool, as long as they don't harm me in the process.

RMS doesn't use that word, "open" a lot.
Doesn't use "greed" a lot.
Those are probably your preconceptions of what he says.

RMS usually talks about freedom, as in not giving away your freedom.
DRM requires you to give some other entity control over your devices, more than what you have. That means giving away freedom, and that's why he is against it. I agree with him, also.

I didn't say in my comment that it shouldn't be an insult, I was just exemplifying why I don't believe there is a left wing in the US. In Europe, and Latin America, many ruling parties call themselves socialist, so that's a particularly US thing.

I didn't mean conservative as a derogatory term, sorry if I did, English is not my native language. I mean that school of thought that believes that believes strongly in the power of a small state, low taxes, free enterprise, and letting the wealth drip from the top to the bottom, instead of messing with it with taxes or strong intervention. I don't mean the economy specifically, but it can't be seen apart. A person with a hundred million dollars of course can exercise more civil rights than someone who doesn't have them. Without income redistribution, you can't be left wing. You can call yourself "center", but we all know there's no such a thing. I don't mean it as a bad thing, I was just commenting the article, that it's false to say that people change from left to right.

In the US there are no left wing parties. As an example, "socialist" can be used as an insult there. From the outside, all US politicians are right wing (meaning that they are not for wealth redistribution or any other left wing concept). It's not that hard to change from strongly conservative to not that strongly conservative.

You are right. Free software is good, but needs a community. Android is probably better. I was thinking more in the line of a full scale government initiative. Here, we have Plan Ceibal, which uses OLPC hardware, and has a lot of government backing. Ceibal was one of the reasons the state owned telco now reaches the whole country with broadband. If large enough, an effort to just drop technology in the hands of kids can help everybody understand the need of basic infrastructure.

An ideological answer is a practical answer that takes the medium term future into account. Open source, is not a philosophy/ideology, just a software development thing. Free software is a philosphy/ideology. And it does take third world people into account. It's very hard to predict the result of teaching Office for kids. Of course, teaching Excel may land them jobs in multinationals, to feed their families. But also, it could entrench the influence of foreign companies in their government IT, with large expenses in licenses, that leae the country. If you teach free software, people can also learn valuable skills for the short term, but also develop a more sustainable IT insfrastructure, which could be one of the basis of future development. I live in Uruguay, more or less the same situation as Peru with copyrights, but free software is very popular. And most of our software industry (which is growing very fast) is based on free software.

Well, then I suppose I could have soup while driving in Alberta. It's not a meal, after all.

To be fair, all socialism is post-capitalistic.
The whole idea of socialism (like what Marx wrote) is that capitalism would succeed against scarcity (for exaple: "the end of money"), so a new model would be necessary that didn't rely on it, but on cooperation.
Of course, not all ideas can be implemented nicely, or even at all, but that doesn't mean that socialism is not prepared for "plenty". Penty is onw of its preconditions.

Well, that's your point of view.
What I see is that the GPL is one of the most used software licenses in the world, and it represents exacly his idea.
RMS has had great, awesome partial successes. His philosophy is shared by a lot of people, in practice, and his work has been key to us having real, viable, modern, free software platforms today. Without his work particularly and him been so "political", I don't think we could have gone this far.

I believe there is a false dichotomy here. You are making my point.
My point was that, for this case, markets _could_ solve it. Remember, the first option was: buy locally.
What I wanted to say was that markets do work, but some times you don't want the people to get exactly what they ask for, or what they pay for, you want to force them to choose the Right Thing (TM).
If you leave it to the markets, people will buy stuff with shit if it's cheaper, that is their choice, so they will force retailers to sell it. Traceability is possible, you can put an RFID in a living cow, and trace their whole lives, until they are BBQed, but markets won't pay for that. People will buy the cheapest, no matter what. I see that as markets working to give people what they want.

Consumers do have a way of knowing.
The can buy locally, and see whether fish are fed shit. Or they could only use brands that are well known for not feeding their fish shit. Even without a brand police, it could be done with badges that are difficult to reproduce, for example, like RFID.
Of course, that would be more expensive than buying whatever Walmart sells, and just hope there is no shit in it.
In the end, what I believe is that people prefer to buy cheaper and easier, even if there is a possibility of shit in their food.