How to improve the group of individuals fighting against the nonfree software.
I make this post for start a discussion about how we can improve as a group of individuals the promotion of the refusal against the nonfree software between ours family, friends and others.
He hecho este hilo para iniciar una discusión a cerca del cómo podemos mejorar como grupo de individuos promoviendo el rechazo en contra del software privativo entre nuestros familiares, amigos y otros.
I am a translator!
I don't believe in heavy promotion of our cause among our friends and family members. The heavier you promote the refusal of certain programs and the switch to certain other programs, the more you come off as a cultist. In addition, sometimes certain solutions become obsolete - at some point it might have been interesting to switch to Ekiga from Skype, but now Jitsi seems to be the more flexible and sensible solution.
The problem is, people do not understand the difference between free and non-free software. It's just software for them. You won't get certain kinds of people to listen to our collective ramblings about what the source code is in the first place and how important it is to have the right for studying and improving the source code.
I have given up on promoting free software between my friends and family. I simply force them to use whatever I deem optimal. If they don't want to communicate with me over, say, Signal messenger or the FLOSS Telegram client, it's just SMS from now on.
This approach is easier on the friendships and relations. I can simply tell: I don't use WhatsApp. You can communicate with me over Signal, Telegram or SMS, or any other free software application you might want to use. This defaults to SMS in the end. This ends the argument and allows me and my friends to get on with our lives.
The solution cannot be to promote free software heavily among people who don't want to listen. That only makes things worse IMHO. The most important half of the solution must lie in politics. Europe is slowly moving towards adopting free software as a standard for state institutions, this is great! After some time, once this adoption process will cover more and more institutions, open standards and free software will become the norm and everyone who is still using MS-Office and docx formats will be frowned upon, just like the LibreOffice users with their odt files might be frowned upon today! Wherever you are, you can always support the party that stands for adopting free software in your country.
I don't refuse fully to promote though. By taking part in a "linux user group" I can help people who are genuinely interested in free software to install a GNU/Linux distribution on their hardware, answer questions that they might have, encourage them to switch, tell them what hardware suits free software best, etc.
So overall, my personal suggestion is: stop promoting free software among people who don't want to listen. Force your choice of software on them with a polite ultimatum. If you were communicating via, say, facebook, just tell them you want to stop using facebook, and from now on they'll need something else to reach you. You don't have to read them a version of RMSs speech on free software, or send them links to gnu.org or whatever. Only if they ask "why are you quitting facebook?" should you elaborate, as short as possible, without promotion material. But quit you must nevertheless. If all else fails, they can email you, this is something everyone is still comfortable doing, thankfully.
I quit using Skype, never even started using FB, but quit using another social media site similar to FB. Promotion won't help sadly. Just drop the stuff, without too much talking and promoting. Real friends won't care much if they have to use some other service to talk to you, people who will stop talking to you just because you don't use WhatsApp or something else probably were not real friends. Once a person asked me, if I had Apple Facetime in order to talk with me. I just told "sorry, don't have that, we can talk over Jitsi, or Telegram if you like". And what do you know, we did talk over Jitsi.
* NB: I don't promote the use of Telegram. It just so happens, that there is a free software client for it (called FOSS Telegram), so that you can use the service without non-free software on YOUR computer or phone. So it's technically not harming the user, the harm is done server-side for whomever runs non-free server software. Privacy can be an issue of course, this is something to be aware of, don't use Telegram (even it's "secure chat" function) for confidential conversations. It's certainly far off from the ideal theoretical solution of a decentralized fully free solution, that uses end-to-end encryption by default! But it is widely spread, so that the chance of getting someone to use it for everyday chatter is high, therefore I offer it as an option for everyone who wants to chat or have a video call.
Speaking from the opposite perspective, after years of being rather polite and saying little about software freedom I feel somewhat bad for not having reached many people with these ideals.
Starting a serious ethical topic out of nowhere might indeed make the other party of a converation view us as weirdos. Or it might not, depending on the situation and who we're talking with. Yet, if we fail to mention the issue at all, we'll likely miss the chance to at least make others familiar with freesw.
It's crucial to find the right way to communicate such things. Things that should not be mentioned directly can perhaps be mentioned on the margin in some way. For example through a sticker on one's laptop.
One university teacher used to include a reference to an "intelligent system of legal information" he was working on... in his automatic email sign-off. It didn't really get in the way of a normal email conversation and at the same time everybody who conversed with him became aware of mere existence of such thing.
I took inspiration from this and started including "digital freedom hints" in my own email sign-offs (example at the end). Those are still not perfect, I could make them shorter, etc. But I believe something imperfect to still be way better than nothing.
Note that being exacting when talking to others is not necessarily a bad thing. When I know someone expects something from me, I am motivated to meet those expectations. Sometimes someone seems angry with us because we are exacting. But anger alone does not mean that person is not conscious of what we're communicating. And above all, it shouldn't make us afraid.
It's also worth looking at how advertisements work. An ad saying "you should buy X" will not likely make a person immediately buy X. But someone who sees an ad of X every day for a month starts to recognize X as something familiar.
Of course, our goal isn't mere *marketing* of libre software but rather making people conscious of the ethical issues around it. And so some marketing practices are good to know but not all are suitable.
We can also ask new community members to do the same. For me, it took years to start promoting digital liberty. People are shy. They could do with some encouragement :)
-- (sig_start) website: https://koszko.org/koszko.html PGP: https://koszko.org/key.gpg fingerprint: E972 7060 E3C5 637C 8A4F 4B42 4BC5 221C 5A79 FD1A Random digital freedom hint #10: Online forms As Google Forms are being imposed on more and more people, it is a good time to find out about ethical replacements for those. Losowa wskazówka dla wolności cyfrowej #10: Formularze do ankiet online Formularze Google są narzucane coraz większej liczbie osób. To dobry moment, żeby dowiedzieć się o etycznych zamiennikach dla nich. suggestions/sugestie: 1. Yakforms Want such auto email signature? Chesz taki auto podpis mailowy? https://git.koszko.org/digital-freedom-hints -- (sig_end)
I am a translator!
I was not shy to talk about free software when I first found out. Basically wanted to tell all the world :)
After seeing the reactions, progressively, I became more and more shy (for lack of a better word) to talk about it. It's definitely a cool idea to include some information in the email-signature.
@koszkonutek: Is it an automatically generated signature, with a database-backend of multiple digital freedom hints?
Yes, it is. Well, instead of a database there is a git repo with a JSON file containing the hints. Contributions are welcome.
Web view of the repository is here:
https://git.koszko.org/digital-freedom-hints
I am a translator!
How can I contribute? Pushing new branches does not work on my end:
error: Cannot access URL https://git.koszko.org/digital-freedom-hints/, return code 18 fatal: "git-http-push" failed error: Error during sending some references to 'https://git.koszko.org/digital-freedom-hints' ## please note, my error message was partly in German, I translated it, so it may not be exactly the same as original would be
Yup, it's not a public repo in the sense of allowing pushes from the public. You can either:
* send me a patch (here or through email),
* push to a public repo of your choice and send me a link or
* send me your public SSH key so I can give you push access over SSH.
You likely already know from commit logs etc. but just in case - my email is name at domain
I find I meet resistance when I say I quit X. When I said X sucks I get the retort, "Linux sucks". You think people would allow you to have your opinion, apparently not.
I need to understand how proprietary software is wrong. I think it does not offer freedoms to the developers as well as the users.
What I am talking about is the non-disclosure-agreement (NDA). It is an attempt to silence the developer and then prevents the developer from helping their neighbor. We as users can reject non-free software, but the bigger evil to me is what is done to the developer.
Trying to reexplain the free software movement:
A person can not usually assist others in running the software the way they want.
A person can not assist another to study the software; I've asked a teacher who worked at Microsoft if the code he found was buggy, his answer is he is not allowed to say.
A person can not often distribute the software she helps develop to others.
A person can not distribute their modifications of the software that allowed them to get past the bugs; maybe the developer could have received some help on this one from the public.
It's a hot night.
I am a translator!
>I need to understand how proprietary software is wrong.
This is a disputed matter and I am not sure I get RMS's arguments right.
One argument is that software is not a work of art that one can fully appreciate by looking, reading, playing or listening, it controls what one's computer does without the possibility to fully know what it does. This would justify that software is not subject to copyright laws.
Another argument is that non-material things cannot be stolen, so there is nothing wrong in copying ideas or software. That argument somehow goes against copyright laws in general and one objection is that, even though these laws don't allow many (most?) artists to make a living (they are somehow more tailored for businesses making money from artists), removing these laws while not changing anything else would make the situation worse.
It is not clear to me what RMS's views are on that.
My view is that humanity is advanced enough for production of material goods to satisfy everyone's need, irrespective of one's productivity, and production should be planned so, and that could happen under the control of everyone. If that would be the case, everyone would have free time for unnecessary activities, like art production, artists would not have the issue of making a living and copying everything as one wishes would not be a problem at all.
However, I understand that RMS does not share this view.
"I need to understand how proprietary software is wrong."
RMS spent time going over this. Rather than re-hash it, see https://audio-video.gnu.org/
For one example he explains the reasons why it's not 3 freedoms or 5 freedoms or some entirely different list of freedoms but these 4 specific freedoms that are needed:
https://audio-video.gnu.org/video/rms-jan-07-01.ogg
Like "without freedom #1 you're a prisoner of your software." I've found that the issues he talks about take some time to think about and fully understand. I've been thinking on these for years and I find that I agree with RMS.
I agreed before I even knew what the issue was, having been personally held hostage by nonfree software (this was before I knew of free software.)
https://jxself.org/how-i-learned.shtml
Unfortunately lots of people are being held prisoner by nonfree software, subject to the whims and wills of the developer whether they want that or not - And most don't even realize that things should be better. And the way they can be better is with software freedom to restore people's rights that nonfree software takes away.
I am a translator!
I love these videos and think they are essential, even more than actually writing free software, hence why I support the FSF more than any other software-related organization.
The point is indeed that people should have control over what their computers do and given the complexity of computer programmes, that requires collaboration. As RMS says, this is not a matter of convenience, this is fundamental.
I find the explanations very good, I also agree that a political fight is needed to ensure that control, but I somehow feel that the word "free" in "free software" was chosen because it is a popular word in US, while "software that let users decide what their computers do" might actually better convey the idea than "free software" and avoid confusion with freedom in general, that is often used to support economical oppression.
I don't know if it is a good idea. I was reading the GNU website on why people should call the system, GNU/Linux.
I read that and It was funny
* "Microsoft is a company; GNU is an operating system." *
And if I understand, once addicted to GNU, it's really hard leave for Microsoft windows because it show no interests. With GNU you can see how each parts work.
"We developed programs such as GCC, GNU Emacs, GAS, GLIBC, BASH, etc., because we needed them
for the GNU operating system. GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection is the compiler that we wrote
for the GNU operating system. We, the many people working on the GNU Project, developed
Ghostscript, GNUCash, GNU Chess and GNOME for the GNU system too."