This is no longer the case. One of the first things the Tories did when they recently got back into power was to "freeze" the BBC Licence Fee. From 2014, the BBC World Service will be funded from the Licence Free and not from the Government. The deliberate effect is to force bigger cuts onto the rest of the BBC.

To add to your excellent example of how Stallman is right about the dangers of cell phone tracking, I refer you to Eben Moglen's talk Freedom in the Cloud.

You have a cell phone and you have a cell phone network provider and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint then we can tell you that several million times last year, somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the realtime location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. Several million times. Just like that. We know that because Sprint admits that they have a website where anybody with a law enforcement ID can go and find the realtime location of anybody with a Sprint cellphone. We don’t know that about ATT and Verizon because they haven’t told us.

One may wonder, why release the documentation now?

I would say it's because they get good PR for for pretending to be transparent/friendly, whilst not actually giving away any new information.

Look at page 129 of the PDF specifying the .doc format.. (The page is actually labelled 128 in the corner, but it's page 129 of the PDF). You will see there's a bit field. One of the many flags that can be set in this bit field: "fUseAutospaceForFullWidthAlpha".

The description?:

Compatibility option: when set to 1, use auto space like Word 95

Gee, thanks. That's helpful. You know, an earlier Slashdot article said Microsoft were going to release a BSD licensed converter to convert from .doc to .docx. But this will never help anyone further understand either of the two formats: binary .doc files which are auto spaced like Word 95 will be converted to "XML" files which are auto spaced like Word 95.