The Free Software movement reaches thirty years, why is it so important?

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Thirty years ago in September 1983 Richard Stallman launched the campaign for freedom in computing, for software to be free. He is the founder and president of the Free Software Foundation (fsf.org), pioneer of the concept of copyleft and the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

He writes, "Non-free software makes users surrender control over their computing to someone else, but now there is another way to lose it: Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, which means letting someone else’s server do your own computing activities. Both non-free software and SaaSS can spy on the user, shackle the user, and even attack the user."

"If you use SaaSS, the server operator controls your computing. It requires entrusting all the pertinent data to the server operator, which will be forced to show it to the state as well — who does that server really serve, after all?"

When writing on why open source misses the point he says, "When we call software 'free', we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of 'free speech', not 'free beer'."

"These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation."

"In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of 'open source'. The term was originally proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the term 'free software', but it soon became associated with philosophical views quite different from those of the free software movement."

"The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software 'better'—in a practical sense only."

"Does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of 'free software'.”

"Raising ethical issues such as freedom, talking about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might prefer to ignore, such as whether their conduct is ethical. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may simply close their minds to it. It does not follow that we ought to stop talking about these issues."

In another article on the GNU project Richard Stallman writes, "One assumption is that software companies have an unquestionable natural right to own software and thus have power over all its users. (If this were a natural right, then no matter how much harm it does to the public, we could not object.) Interestingly, the US Constitution and legal tradition reject this view; copyright is not a natural right, but an artificial government-imposed monopoly that limits the users' natural right to copy."

"Another unstated assumption is that the only important thing about software is what jobs it allows you to do—that we computer users should not care what kind of society we are allowed to have."

Web links:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/why-free-software-is-more-important...

http://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-as-in-freedom-2/