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"Anyone who would trade their freedom for safety deserves neither freedom or safety." -Ben Franklin
Related to the article FOSS: The Savior of Democracy by Tuxchick
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"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). |
