Free Software as a Culture of Resistance
"Society and powerful institutions lure and pressure people into a tangled web of online dis-services and nonfree software which may seem impossible to escape. But you can start by rejecting a few of them. Saying no even once is helping!" -Richard Stallman's personal site 2 days ago
Resistance sounds like a negative term. The same goes for boycotts. 14 years ago I spoke "On Techrights 'Negativism'" in response to what someone told me. That was months after Novell had been sold, which meant that to "boycott Novell" was no longer necessary like before. Over time Novell would just vanish completely and its last CEO would try to censor us. Not all that much has changed since then. We still retain the same format (with an SSG, not WordPress), we still have Daily Links (aka "News Roundup"), and our mission and focus are mostly the same. Microsofters try to censor us and they're failing at it; instead they cause problems for their facilitators, who are broke and reckless. They'll need to pay for this.
Richard Stallman's next talk is in Italy (this coming Monday after working hours) [1, 2] and his talk will focus on how people can establish control over their computing. The same applies to courts of course. Society would be in a terrible place if corporations and oligarchs who controlled them also controlled governments, courts etc. And sure, sure... that's already happening. It's happening in a lot of places. So it is imperative to resist that. Those who control the computing can control society and if we value fairness, then law should not be controlled by Microsoft, nor should sensitive data.
Free software has long antagonised a status quo. Back in the early 80s it was about holding onto what already existed in the 70s, but now, over 40 years later, it's about crushing what Quinn Norton called "Digital Fascism" (in "Digital Fascism is Still Just Fascism").
We have already amassed a tremendous amount of material to publish in years to come. We'll show fascism in the form of "lawfare" and we'll debunk a lot of lies.
Free software as an adventure (per se) is about justice, and it's not limited to the digital realm, albeit as many tasks got 'digitised' or "digitalised" there's no escaping the fact that people proficient in software can advocate or bear flags in a struggle of a vastly broader scope.
I said it some months ago: Free software may never be dominant because power will typically be seized and retained by power-hungry people, who will keep their "algorithms" (or policies) close to their chest. But the more Free software is used - or the more people adopt Free software - the merrier. All those Android users out there are indeed "Linux" users, but they don't exercise real control over their devices and almost all their "apps" are proprietary. The same goes for Steam enthusiasts. Not only is that not Free software. It's DRM.
Free software will be advocated here for decades to come (assuming I keep healthy and motivated), not only on the Web but also other protocols.
Free software as a movement accomplished a lot in 40+ years. That's why there are desperate efforts to silence people who spread the message. It'll backfire, sure, but it is still a nuisance - that's what it is designed to be.
Richard Stallman is targeted not because he is a bad person; Richard Stallman is loathed by powerful people who feel like "in freedom there's no money," as my wife puts it. █