Bruce Sterling's latest column in Wired is a snarling and sharp-edged commentary on the Open Cultures conference in Vienna:
Logically – indeed, free-software geeks are the most logical hippies in the whole wide world – the revolution is at hand. Why should anybody pay for software? What do you get for your money besides shrink-wrap licenses, potential lawsuits, DRM cuffs around both wrists, and a cloud of viruses? "Property relations" are blocking social and technical progress. Secure computing and digital rights management are coercive regimes that would make George Orwell blush. The free market is a tissue of political fiction as brittle as an Eastern European regime. With open source code on tap, the software trade will collapse under its own weight.
