[fsf-community-team] Introduction

[Matthew Davidson]

Hi,

My name is Matthew Davidson, and my special talents are enjoying the 
sound of my own voice, and procrastination. I'd like to say I haven't 
read anybody else's introductions yet so as to avoid inadvertently 
plagiarising here, but really I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

My introduction to free software came about by needing a free-as-in-beer 
programming language (I settled on Perl), and while avoiding work one 
day I read the copy of the GPL - specifically the preamble - that came 
with it. I was literally thrown back in my chair by the world-changing 
implications of that text.

On a personal level, I was also excited by the way the free software 
movement showed that it was possible to take up a trade and work 
ethically and in pursuit of desirable social goals, rather than 
confining one's ethical concerns to philanthropy or weekend radicalism. 
On reflection, I'm shocked that I should have found this a novel idea.

At around this time, the open source movement had just started, and 
despite hearing about free software first, the sheer amount of attention 
that open source proponents were attracting led me to a hold a few of 
the still-common erroneous beliefs that "open source" encourages (or at 
least doesn't discourage) for longer than I'd like to admit. I'm 
therefore quite sensitive to the distinction between the free software 
and open source movements, the importance of having a clear 
understanding of the issues involved, and making it (politely) clear to 
people on which side of the fence you sit. It's also necessary to accept 
with some degree of equanimity that inevitably someone somewhere will 
eventually, and probably quite often, call you a zealot.

Last year RMS asked for volunteers to help him out by separating signal 
from noise on Slashdot and Boingboing. As my non-tech interests seem 
pretty close to his, I have been emailing him the most interesting links 
from BoingBoing two or three times a week ever since.

Most of the other blogs/aggregators I used to follow regularly 
(Slashdot, FSDaily, etc.) have largely fallen by the wayside due to the 
frightful Identica addiction I've developed (http://identi.ca/freemjd). 
A while ago, I successfully cajoled Matt Lee into piping the "Political 
Notes" RSS feed from stallman.org into the formerly inactive account at 
http://identi.ca/rms.

By virtue of being the only person who turns up to every meeting, I'm 
seen as a leader of the unfortunately named http://clublinux.org.au 
local user group. In the new year I'll be proposing adopting the 
LibrePlanet moniker for the group. I'd much rather be spending my time 
helping complete newbies run free software on their Windows computers 
(for now) than "helping" people run proprietary software on an operating 
system they think is called "Linux".

I consider myself a not-very-active member of the Drupal community. I 
never intended to be much of a hacker, having a fairly old and mushy 
brain, but necessity has been driving me in that direction. I'm trying 
to address that problem by running a local Drupal user/developer group 
(http://groups.drupal.org/taxonomy/term/7117) and mentoring people 
younger and smarter than me who I hope to eventually rely upon to do the 
clever stuff.

As a web developer, a particular interest is where the ethical concerns 
of the free software touch upon related non-software domains. The FSF 
has to date avoided many strategic pitfalls by deliberately keeping a 
narrow focus on the freedoms relevant to users of software who have this 
software installed on a device they own. This has helped prevent the 
mis-steps that organisations with a wider scope have made (*cough* 
creativecommons *cough*), but I'm not sure whether this can be sustained 
in future.

While I am sympathetic to RMS's opinions on the inadvisability of use of 
third-party services in place of your own software, being both a 
provider of and user of such services, I'm forced to recognise that 
there is often a need for them which is impractical to satisfy by wholly 
user-owned solutions.

All else being equal, it is preferable to own your own infrastructure, 
but all else is rarely equal. For instance, due to public policy in my 
country which dictates that network connectivity should be priced as a 
luxury commodity rather than a public utility, it makes much more sense 
for the data transferred a crow-flying distance of perhaps a few 
kilometers between my clients and their clients on the east coast of 
Australia to be routed through a hosting service in Seattle.

In such circumstances clearly my hosting provider has a moral 
responsibility to deliver some degree of freedom to me with respect to 
what they provide, and in turn I owe the same to my clients. I find the 
work the Autonomous group is doing in this area very interesting 
(http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/).

As society comes to consider how the ethical concerns behind the four 
freedoms of free software might be reformulated for remote services, 
data, protocols, formats, academic and cultural works, and so on, I 
think it is important for the FSF to play a significant role. I am 
dismayed to find for example that movements for free access to 
government data are overwhelmingly explaining their goals by analogy 
with open source rather than free software, or worse, by analogy with 
"Web 2.0", a term not only devoid of any ethical import, but without any 
intelligible meaning whatsoever. These discussions should principally be 
about the responsibilities of governments towards their citizens, not 
about how cool it is to do a "mashup", and how government departments 
can benefit from having a Facebook account.

I could go on, and in fact I already have, at interminable length, but 
instead I'll take a few deep breaths, think happy thoughts, and respond 
to the following:

    * Excerpt: Richard Stallman started the FSF in order to promote
open source software like the Linux operating system, as an
alternative to expensive software like Windows.

The problem that Richard Stallman set out to address in the 1980's was 
not that some software was expensive, but that copyright was being used 
to impose restrictions on the ways people could use software. These 
restrictions meant that there were important things that you could not 
do with your software _at any price_.

In response he started a project to assemble a "free software" operating 
system, which could be distributed freely (either gratis or for a fee - 
the freedom to charge for the service of producing and distributing 
copies of free software is useful) with none of those unethical 
restrictions. He called this system GNU. Much of this system was written 
especially for the GNU project, but many components were written by 
other projects and distributed as free software, so the GNU project 
could use them in their operating system. One such component is Linux.

Linux is an operating system "kernel"; the part of an operating system 
that enables the other parts to talk to each other and to the computer's 
hardware. It is a relatively small part of the GNU operating system, but 
a vital one. It is so important that many people began referring to the 
GNU operating system as "Linux". This is not only technically incorrect, 
and fails to give credit for much of the work in creating the GNU system 
to the proper party, it also allows people to ignore the moral 
philosophy that inspired the creation of the system.

To address this widespread misunderstanding, and to give credit to the 
third party who created such an important part of the system, the GNU 
project adopted the name GNU/Linux for the GNU operating system when 
distributed with the Linux kernel. There is no such thing as an 
operating system called Linux.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) was formed to support the work of the 
GNU project, to educate people about the ethical issues around computer 
technology, and to advocate on behalf of the free software movement.

The open source movement, which formed in the late 1990's, is another 
movement entirely. People who identify as members of the open source 
movement develop, use, and promote the use of free software (although 
they call it "open source software"), but only because they believe that 
free software can often be technically superior to non-free 
("proprietary") software. By implication they would - and often 
explicitly they do - say that where proprietary software is more 
convenient for your short-term requirements, you should use proprietary 
software. We in the free software movement recognise that in the long 
term such advice would be harmful to you and society in general, so we 
consider it morally unjustifiable.

    * Excerpt: Now with cloud computing and web-based applications,
even Linux users can use the same software as everyone else, through
their browsers. With other popular programs like Skype and Adobe Flash
producing Linux versions, the Linux desktop may finally be catching
on!

The significant benefits of using a free software operating system like 
GNU/Linux lie not in the range of software available to run on it, but 
the freedom you have to customise, improve, and share these programs, 
provided they are free software.

Giving up these freedoms is never a good thing - not even if you have 
the convenience of doing so via your web browser.

There are free software equivalents of almost any popular proprietary 
software you are likely to use (http://directory.fsf.org). Some free 
software projects require support in software development, or even just 
promotion, in order to be seen as viable replacements for some popular 
proprietary programs. We encourage you to support projects such as those 
on the FSF High Priority Free Software Projects list 
(http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html), rather than surrendering 
your freedom to support proprietary software vendors.

    * Excerpt: When combined with the other chapters that include
statutory damages, search and seizure powers for border guards,
anti-camcording rules, and mandatory disclosure of personal
information requirements, it is clear that there is no bigger
intellectual property issue today than the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement being negotiated behind closed doors this week in Korea.

While the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a serious issue, it 
cannot be said to be an "intellectual property" issue, at least if you 
want to think in a clear and unbiased way about it.

"Intellectual property" is a propaganda term. Whether ideas can be 
considered property is highly debatable. Using this term when discussing 
public policy with regard to copyright, patents, or any other area of 
law lumped together as "intellectual property" means that you have 
already dismissed a large part of the debate in favour of one side 
before you have even started.

Moreover the disparate areas of law that "intellectual property" implies 
are similar are actually very different mechanisms designed to perform 
very different tasks. Copyright law is intended to encourage creativity, 
patent law is intended to encourage public disclosure of what would 
otherwise be trade secrets, and so on.

Please use the term "copyright" when talking about copyright, "patents" 
when talking about patents, and so on. To do otherwise is to confuse 
your readers and cloud your own thinking.

Congratulations to anybody who managed to read this far.

Matthew.

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