Stallman: free software is a moral imperative for Christians.

“I’ve always believed that free software is a moral imperative for Christian communicators. Christians, and people of other faiths, cannot morally condone the control of human knowledge or the limiting of development that proprietary software causes.”

Below is a small extract from his talk:

I’m here not to speak, not about a technical issue,though it pertains to computers. The issue I want speak about is actually a political, ethical and social issue. The issue of freedom for the users of computers, and in particular how this relates to education.

Human knowledge developed because it was openly available to people, and people could then add on to it. We are all familiar with this idea and we use the phrase: “standing on the shoulders of giants”. But this principle has been abandoned in the field of proprietary software.

If I worked on proprietary software I’d be working for a company’s profit, not for humanity any more. I’d have to be actively cutting off other people’s access to knowledge, which is a shameful thing to do, and my conscience revolts at it. I said I refuse to live that way.

I could make some money developing proprietary software, but at the end I’d have to look back and say I spent my career building walls to divide people. Well, that was unacceptable, what else could I do? I realised that an operating system developer was exactly what was wanted. I felt that I had been elected by circumstance to develop a free operating system.

But what does free software exactly mean, what is free software? sounds very nice, but it doesn’t reach the difficult political issues which have to do with which freedoms are important and which freedoms have to give way to the important ones. There are different freedoms that conflict:: your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, is one way of putting it.

So, what are the specific freedoms that define free software? A programme is free software for you, or any specific user, if you have the following freedoms:

Freedom zero, is the freedom to run a programme my way you like for any purpose.

Freedom one, is the freedom to help yourself, the freedom to study the source code of the programme, figure out what it does and then change it to suit your needs.

Freedom two, is the freedom to help your neighbour, the freedom to redistribute copies to others.

Freedom three is the freedom to help improve your community by publishing an improved version so other can get the benefit of your work in the future.

If you have all these freedoms the programme is free software for you.

Millions of people are using free software, whole governments and education systems are changing to it because it is economical, technically superior, more secure and morally right.

Links:

Las nuevas perspectivas mundiales en la computación y el software libre
Camilo Zamora, in Media Development issue 1, 2003

Innovations and creativity: Open Source, Bio Linux and Seeds
Ravi Srinivas Krishna, in Media Development issue 1, 2003

The Free Software Foundation site can be used in the following languages, (this reflects how vibrant and inclusive the movement is):

Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese. http://www.fsf.org

Bytesforall mailing list is an active list of the free-software community in Asia
Bytesforall@mail.sarai.net
Also see the website:
https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/bytesforall

Christian related open source site:
http://www.bibletime.de

Feedback:
Dear Action staff:..I wanted to send you all a note of praise for including an article on Linux in the May 2002 issue of ACTION magazine (issue 244)...I would be very interested in coming into contact with other WACC members who have experience in this field so that we can share experiences and offer each other tips and support....Living in China, I think free software has the potential to play an important role in empowering people to gain access to affordable computing experiences in this country and elsewhere in Asia. So please consider publishing more about free software in the future....
Ian Groves, Hong Kong Office, Amity Foundation
contact: amityhk@pacific.net.hk