A rebuttal to Meyer’s “The Ethics of Free Software”
“Not too many people today can code. However, if the Internet is as fundamental a change in our society today as the Industrial Revolution was more than a century earlier, practically everyone will eventually have to learn. Not everyone will become a software architect in the future, of course, just as a very small number of people write novels today (and fewer write _good_ novels). However, nearly everyone writes letters to loved ones, jots down the occasional grocery list, letters to the editor or local politicians… and so it will be with programming. Now we begin to see why source code is a form of popular power and freedom in the very real world.”