Free to be, you and me MP3. It's not an accident that some of the most vocal fans of free software are also busy trading MP3s or reverse engineering encryption protections for DVD players. Music and moveis are software, today, and the Internet is, at the very least, the most effective distribution vehicle for such software ever invented. Push is coming to shove here, and no one knows how the story will play out. One can argue that every dollar Microsoft spends attacking software piracy in the third world is a dollar of advertising for Linux and free software.
Free software is a great bootstrapping tool for countries short on resources.
One of the most intriguing points about this is that free software is in large part the product of the most privileged classes of the First World. Programmers, by and large, are paid so well that they can afford to take on hobbies like free software projects in their spare time. And in doing so, they are creating an infrastructure of tools that the whole world can and will benefit from. Even long-time advocates of free software were stunned by the events of 1999. Companies like Red Hat and VA Linux had huge initial public offerings, giving them stock valuations high enough to purchase other companies, hire scores of programmers, and begin to subsidize the creation of even more free software on a hitherto unprecedented scale.