This is Larry Lessig...

The people at the Free Software Foundation asked me to do a short pitch to support the Free Software Foundation, and I'm happy and honored to do that. Indeed here in my office at Harvard Law School you can see one of the posters I most proudly have up is the award I got, the Free Software Foundation's freedom award, which was an extraordinary honor that I received for ideas that I felt like I was just copying and spreading from Richard Stallman.

As I've said many times the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman's work represents the most important work for freedom that this culture, the American culture, has seen in many many generations because it takes the ideas of freedom and it removes it from the ivory tower, and it removes it from lawyers, and places it in a community--a technology community--that is one of the most important communities defining the contours of freedom that most people in our culture and increasingly around the world will know. And to have the battles over these ideas of freedom expressed in this context is extraordinarily important.

We took the same ideas that Richard launched in the Free Software Foundation and tried to carry them over to culture, in areas of music and art and education and science to take the same struggle to define what the scope of a free culture should be and have people from those communities engage in that conversation. So we've benefited enormously from the ideas that Richard first launched in the Free Software Foundation and in the free software community more than 25 years ago and we think people ought to give back to those who inspire in such an extraordinary way.

I'm honored to contribute again this year as I do every year and I would hope you do to, because this is a movement that needs our support. Not just in the context of technology, but in every place where these ideas of freedom need to be pushed. So thank you for this opportunity and thank you for supporting the Free Software Foundation.

Last modified 2009-12-24 11:36 AM