It was not obvious at the beginning that we could satisfy humanity's needs for fairly general published software. Back in the 1980s, people said we would never have a complete free operating system, but we do. By the early '90s the system was almost finished, and the remaining major gap was filled by my colleague who is to follow me, Linus Torvalds, producing a combination of GNU and Linux which is a system used on millions of computers today. Since then the explosive growth of free software, with tens of thousands of developers working in many different projects, more or less independently but cooperating usually when there is a reason to, shows a model for decentralized voluntary solutions of society's problems. At this point the only question really is whether governments will permit us to continue filling society's needs for software. In the U.S. there are two different laws that prohibit the development of certain kinds of free software. One of them is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a very nasty law that threatens to imprison people who independently develop software for a certain small range of very important jobs, including playing movies from a DVD, listening to the new encrypted recorded music, or reading an e-book. These formats have been designed to keep the public helpless, and any software that empowers the public, that helps the public escape from the restrictions that the publishers deliberately imposed, has been prohibited in the United States. Other countries need to reject these laws. Today a Russian programmer is trapped in the United States and threatened with many years' imprisonment because he worked for a company that allegedly released a program that lets you look inflexible ways at an Adobe e-book. Adobe asked for him to be arrested and prosecuted while he was visiting the United States. The program that he may have worked on developing is entirely legal in Russia where he may have worked on developing it. (I say "may have" because I don't know those facts--I just know that he is accused of it.)However, for the United States government ready to impose its will on all the world, that fact is irrelevant. The other dangerous law is patent law. When patents are applied to software, they tie software developers in knots. You are probably aware that many programs are extremely large and complicated, that a few people can develop in a few years a program with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and thus millions of components in the design. In such a program, you must use hundreds of different ideas, and any one of them, the danger is, could be patented by somebody else. So the danger of software patents is that you can write the program yourself and be sued by somebody else for writing it, and even your users could be sued for using it. To solve this problem, it is essential to reject software patents, and I'm very sad to say that Japan a few years ago authorized software patents, so people developing software in Japan today can be sued for the ideas used in their programs. These laws are painful for all software developers. They are especially bad for a group of volunteers working to develop free software, taking advantage of the fact that it costs very little money to do so. We can satisfy society's needs for fairly general published software, but governments have to decide to allow us to serve society. Well, where does the idea of freedom in free software go beyond software? How far can we take this idea? It does not apply to material objects. You know, am I allowed to copy this clock? I don't have a clock copier. In fact, those only exist in science fiction, so the question really doesn't mean anything. The factory that made this clock didn't do so by copying one master model of the clock. They had to manufacture it out of parts. Am I allowed to modify a clock? Well, if I buy it I can modify it. Nobody is going to object. So these two issues of freedom both do not arise for ordinary physical objects, but they can be meaningful for other kinds of information [than software]--for instance, for recipes.