Time for Coders to Get Political?

When I interviewed Richard Stallman back in 1999, he had some interesting thoughts on the subject of freedom:

I'm going to keep working on the free software movement, because I don't see who's going to replace me, and I don't see how I could do something more important in some other area. The issues of freedom that everybody's heard of are much more important than this - freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free assembly. The reason I'm not more involved with them is that I don't know what to do about them very effectively.