Amen, Tuxchick!
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| Tsela Oct 17, 2005 12:45 AM EDT |
"Anyone who would trade their freedom for safety deserves neither freedom or safety." -Ben Franklin It's what's happening right now with the so-called War on Terror (notice how each time people's rights get limited things seem to get even unsafer? Do Americans really think they are safer since the Patriot Act? Do they even *feel* safer?), and it's what happened with Microsoft. People, knowingly or unknowingly, traded their freedom of choice for the safety of not having to bother about what's inside this black box of a computer. The result is well-known: the IT industry is a mess where most SMEs survive only because they have escaped the attention of the megacorps or pay them big hostage money, there is a *huge* industry of making programs that invade one's privacy and make Internet one of the most hostile place to be, a single company thinks it can decide what every customer on the planet is entitled to receive as software, and the customers themselves have no say about anything happening there, are treated by companies like a bothersome necessity rather than the center of the market, end up believing that it's the whole IT industry that is like that and that it can't be changed, and eventually deal with it by ignoring the problem, even when their data has been lost and/or stolen over and over again due to the lack of safety of the monoculture they ended up in. Freedom (and in particular Freedom of the user) *is* the issue. It is the issue in software like it is in any other industry, because what forces companies to enhance the quality of their products isn't the stakeholders or their own employees: it's the consumers themselves. In that way, the FOSS community is extremely consumer-oriented: developers write themselves the software they want to use, the "consumers" take their rights back and develop themselves what companies have been unable and/or unwilling to provide them. And because it is a grass-root movement organised by people themselves, rather than by companies, FOSS cannot be stopped, unless the countries become so undemocratic that the freedom of choice, association and speech are taken away from people (in which case it will carry on, just in an underground way, but people won't see its benefits and will suffer for years). |
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