Re: [emacs-humanities] Has Emacs made you appreciate software freedom?

[Manuel Uberti]

On 22/05/21 09:57, Protesilaos Stavrou wrote:
> So my questions to this list are:
>
> + Do you think that Emacs helped/helps you value your liberties, as
>    those apply to your day-to-day computer experience?
> + Do you believe that there is something to be learnt from Emacs and be
>    applied to other parts of life?  Could/should, for instance,
>    scientific research be conducted and publicised in a free,
>    collaborative fashion?
> + More generally, do you see a connection between software freedom and
>    politics/economics?  Could/should the lessons drawn from Emacs and
>    free software in general (especially copylefted) be used as an
>    antipode to repressive forces, be they corporate actors or state
>    entities?

Hi Protesilaos,

this is a very peculiar issue. Years ago (2013-2016), my wife and I had our own 
language school where I was in charge of the IT department. Everything ran with 
free and open source software, something I was pretty proud of. The teachers, 
none of which knew much about FOSS, kindly adapted to the new 'environment' and 
comply with the overall setup of the school.

Those were also the years were I started to rely heavily on Emacs, using it to 
keep track of everything in the school, to develop a little Clojure application 
to manage classes and payments, and generally to learn my way through ELisp. To 
answer the first of your questions, yes, Emacs is still the only software which 
empowers me and values my freedom. It's true that I don't use much software 
beside Emacs (Firefox, Thunderbird, Slack and Zoom basically), but none of it 
comes close to what Emacs enables me to do.

As for your second question, I would go as far as to include most of what is 
generally termed academic reaserch. I am a Philosophy undergraduate and not 
everything I need to write my papers is readily available. On the contrary, the 
access is often restricted to specific users. Freedom here would make so much 
knowledge available to everyone to explore, study, and understand. I can't 
stress enough the value of knowledge and the value of accessing it.

Finally, your last question puts me in a weird position, because although I am 
sure software freedom could be used an example to improve politics and 
economics, I work as a Clojure developer nowadays, and all the code I write is 
copyrighted. On the one hand, when I think about software freedom and everything 
Emacs means to me, knowing that my code is not for everyone is something that I 
don't like, even though I do not have a say in this because I am just an 
employee. On the other hand, in this free market economy we all live in, how 
will the company survive to competitors if everything we code could be easily 
taken, re-written here and there, and sold with a different name on it?

--
Manuel Uberti
www.manueluberti.eu