On the contrary, it couldn't be more relevant. It's a fundamental issue of technology, and becoming increasingly important as we face the war on general purpose computing, a possible new advent of trusted computing with UEFI, and the list goes on.

I would go as far as to say Free Software is on of the most important things of the 21st century. We're moving towards an information society, and if we don't free the means to create, process and transmit information (as well as information itself), we will lose control to a few big corporations. I'm not planning to let that happen.

>When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?

I haven't done that yet, but I occasionally poke around in the sources for things like the coreutils, read them, try to understand them and learn from them. I plan to do that with the Linux kernel at some point, too. You simply can't do that on unfree operating systems.