I am a person who had experienced in a community of programmers in the 1970s and we shared software and this was a good way of life and then the community was destroyed. And I was faced with using proprietary software, software that you're not allowed to share and change. And looking at this, I felt revulsion and I said I refused to live that life. But the only way to keep using computers and not be part of that ugly divided way of life was to build an entire new world of software. So we built another continent in cyberspace where we could go and live in freedom. Free software is software that gives the users freedom in using it. It means you have the freedom to run the program any way you like. The freedom to study what the program does and change it to suit your needs. That's the freedom to help yourself. And if you aren't a programmer yourself, you can hire someone else to do those things for you. And you can have the freedom to help your neighbor, which is the freedom to distribute copies to others. And you have the freedom to help build your community, which is the freedom to publish an improved version. So others get the benefit of your work. Life presents people with lots of opportunities to lose their freedom. And so we have to defend our freedom constantly or we will lose it. But in order to defend our freedom, we have to value it. And in order to value it, we have to know what it is. Then you can understand why it's important and then you can fight for it when it's threatened, because it is threatened constantly. In 1983, I announced the plan to develop a free software operating system. In order to run your computer, you need an operating system. And all the operating systems then were proprietary, non-free. In order to live in freedom, I would have to have a free operating system. As an operating system developer, I felt that I had a chance of developing one, especially if I could recruit lots of other people to join in. Genue Plus Linux is the combination of the GNU operating system and a program whose name is Linux. I'm a hacker and I've been a hacker since the 1960s in spirit, although I didn't know the word yet. But this word doesn't mean what most people think it means today. To be a hacker means to do things in a spirit of playful cleverness, exploring the limits of what's possible. So you can be a hacker in all sorts of different media. Programming is just one of them. Pirates are people who attack ships. People who share software are good neighbors. Free software shows how globalization can be a good thing. The free software movement has been global since the 80s when we had developers and users on four continents. And now it's six continents, I believe. Free software doesn't tend to concentrate well. It provides ways for some people to make a living. So we can here see the contrast between globalization of power versus globalization of voluntary cooperation. Free software makes it hard to have global megacorporations that suck money out of everyone in the world and create the digital divide. But instead, free software facilitates a different kind of business, providing support and services to people in your area. Because free software gives you the possibility of hiring somebody to make changes for you. So many different small companies providing support in their various areas of expertise and providing support typically to people in their region, people who speak the same language, for instance. Teaching kids to use non-free software is training them to be under the domination of the software owners when they grow up. So when they grow up, they'd have to do extra work to escape from the non-free software. And if they don't do that, then they'll be subject to both to the loss of their freedom and to the drain of money. And so if a society, schools are teaching people to use non-free software, that is directing society into the rut of non-free software. The free software movement is partly inspired by the idea of scientific cooperation, the idea that we're working together to advance human knowledge for the benefit of everyone. And people are starting to take the inspiration back to science because of course the spirit of scientific cooperation is endangered today. It's endangered by corporate funding for research, government agencies and everybody ought to switch to free software so that you have control of your own computers. With non-free software, there's an owner and the owner controls the software, controls what it does. You don't have any power. The owner has the power over you. There is a naive myth of the patent system that if you develop something innovative, then there will be one patent covering it. The patent, people say. And they assume that you who designed this innovative product will get the patent. But that's not how it works, at least not in software. Because in software, any product that isn't trivially simple has many different ideas combined. And if it's innovative, that means it's a different combination of ideas or there are some new ideas. Even if you develop an innovative software package, you're in danger from software patents. When a software developer is in a country that allows software ideas to be patented, the result is he can be sued for the software he writes. This is completely different from copyright, for instance, with a system of copyright. If you write a program, nobody else has a copyright on it, only you do. Patents work very differently. And so you could get sued for writing and or for using a program yourself. Microsoft is trying to get patents on de facto standards that are important. For instance, you may have heard of Microsoft.net. Microsoft is applying for a patent on important basic ideas in.net. Microsoft is designing a new file format for word to use. It's an extended version of XML. And Microsoft is applying for a patent on that too. Because the mega corporations have so many patents, they can pressure everybody else to cross license with them. So you shouldn't think that software patents would protect small developers in any way from competition from mega corporations. It won't work. Right now, Europe is considering a directive on software patents. In fact, the text of the directive was written by the business software alliance. We know that because it was released in word format and they forgot to expunge the deleted portions of the text and other hidden information, which people were then able to look at and see who really wrote it. It was somebody who works for the business software alliance. The absence of software patents in Europe is an advantage for software developers in Europe because that means that you can't be sued at home. You see, because the US has software patents, anybody in the world can apply for a US software patent and then attack us poor Americans. So we are vulnerable to everybody. Europeans can get US software patents and sue us. But we can't get software patents here and sue you as long as you don't allow software patents. So you should maintain your advantage and eventually I hope the US will wise up and get rid of its harmful policy. Thank you.