Bonum Certa Men Certa

Free Software at Times of Conflict

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 15, 2024

Red soviet star with hammer and sickle isolated on white background

Don't succumb to "Free software helps Putin" (emotional blackmail or Red Scare)

IN THIS site, unlike the FSF's site and its mailing lists, we needn't shy away from the politics of Russia [1, 2]. The FSF took money from IBM, so it doesn't say a word about IBM's attitude towards the GPL or IBM's past with Russia (lots of it connected directly to the family called Watson; we wrote many articles about that in 2021).

To avoid repetition, we'll relate to the latest status quo; when the war of aggression against Ukraine broke out we wrote a great deal about what it meant to Software Freedom. To be clear, we're not neutral, our Daily Links make abundantly clear who we've identified as a vicious aggressor and liar, but that does not change the facts about GNU/Linux adoption and the danger of using Microsoft Windows (no matter whose side; Ukraine adopts GNU/Linux more than most [1, 2], apparently, as the measures we rely upon are not steady).

Moscow metro underground station

Conflicts, whether kinetic or not (hot war, cold war, hybrid war etc.), necessarily motivate countries to weaken or break one another's systems, sometimes critical infrastructure too. There's the element of deterrence and furthermore retaliation, pilotless (cheaper and less prone to PoW dilemma) or manned aircrafts, air defences as a high-altitude barrier, assassination at home and abroad, extortion with nuclear weapons, disinformation online and so on and so forth.

To us, due to our limited scope, what matters is the aspect of software distribution and revocation. When you give Free software away it can be legally spread onwards, free of technical or legal restrictions. Any revocation, whether by technical or legal means, would be hard if not impossible. Free software does not "phone home" to some licence server (DRM) and even if it did, due to the source being freely available, it would be trivial to circumvent.

Overcoming censorship of software ("no, you can't run this program!!") is important. If the price of software freedom is one's foes/enemies/destroyers having that too, then so be it.

Trying to deny Russians access to Free software would be both futile and foolish. In practice this may cause opposition activists to have no means of digital resistance, whereas the regime has high-budget teams to work around software sanctions.

Let Free software be free. Don't make dumb arguments using divisive issues.

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