FREE SOFTWARE, a community ... a culture.
“Freedom is not being able to choose between a few imposed options, but being in control of your own life. Freedom is not choosing who will be your master, it is not having a master "
RMStallman, Free Software Foundation
Currently humanity is going through a key moment in terms of knowledge, due to an unprecedented revolution in the technological field, and an endless number of tools and means that allow ease of handling and understanding, but which in turn prevents its analysis and study. How is it possible?
For a natural process of knowledge construction, it is necessary to be able to socialize and study the bases of learning, that is, to understand its operation and development capacity. Under this precept, anyone can say: "but this is currently possible"; but it is a mirage, if it is really observed that incurring in it is necessarily the violation of a certain patent, intellectual property, or any other form of restriction.
By the 80s, Richard Stallman, an engineer and programmer at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), had envisioned the conflictive nature of information management if restrictions and limits on the exchange of knowledge could be maintained. In this way, the beginning of the GNU project (GNU is not Unix) emerged in 1985, an alternative to the Unix operating system, characterized by its high proprietary and cost level, which with the inclusion of the Linux kernel in 1991 would become The world's most important free operating system, currently used, according to IDC (International Data Corporation) reports, by 78% of the world's top 500 servers, and by 89.2% of the world's most powerful # or super computers thanks to its reliability, security and freedom. Shortly afterwards, the non-profit organization Free Software Foundation was founded, but perhaps its greatest contribution was the invention of the concept of copyleft, which allows the free distribution of copies and modified versions of a work. It is from this that the concept of free software was opened, which is worth clarifying, it does not mean free. Free software is simply a matter of freedom, not price.
The concept of free software refers to the freedom of users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four freedoms of software users, which need to be fully fulfilled to be considered free:
- The freedom to use the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to needs (freedom 1).
- The freedom to distribute copies (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program and make the improvements public to others, so that the entire community benefits (freedom 3).
It was at that moment when the free software movement went from being an exclusive alternative to a technical market, to becoming a key structure for various social and cultural groups, in what is currently considered as free culture, where people who share this type of ideals have led it to most areas of human knowledge, competing with high performance to the main providers of software and hardware services. This has given way to a reality that today can only be explained in the words of its creator: “the duty of a citizen is not to believe in any prophecy of the future, but to act to realize the best possible future ”(Stallman).
“The free software movement is one of the most successful social movements to emerge in the past 25 years, and is run by a global community of ethically-minded programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing. . But the ultimate success of the free software movement depends on us teaching our friends, neighbors, colleagues at work, about the danger of not having software freedom, about the danger of a society losing control over its computing. "
- Peter T. Brown, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
Reading about free software today is like listening to a speech by Andrés Manuél Lopez Obrador (Mexican politician), it is always the same. FOREVER. You go to an RSM conference today and in 2 years you go back and they tell you the exact same thing. That of writing the 4 freedoms to try to explain what SL is already tiresome. They should put it in all blogs about SL in the right column to always see it ¬¬
Why change it if it's true?
Good article. It's nice to read it.
And what is there? As long as proprietary software exists, there is no need to tire of saying it
It is noted that RMS either does not know the Maslow Pyramid, or simply rejects it
At the top of the pyramid is:
-Morality
-Creativity
-Spontaneity
-Lack of damages
-Acceptance of the facts
-Problem resolution
It seems to me that in general terms the Free Software philosophy is not that far off, or at least, with some exceptions, it seems to me.
Greetings.
I was referring to the sentence that begins the article. I believe that needs limit man's freedom as if they were his masters (and while many of those masters can be chosen and discarded, others are his masters for life).
In any case, the Free Software community has plenty of fanboys, those who do nothing but criticize anyone for not using "the best", that is, their own ...
A shameful act and little questioned within our community, not like that, from the outside.
It takes more intelligence and less "hooligans."
Greetings.
+1, I agree that philosophy is not far from the concepts at the top of Maslow's pyramid.
Very good article.
in my case I try to invite them to free software and show them its advantages, I have 8 people who end up asking me to install ubuntu and they are satisfied :).
My brother installed openSUSE + KDESC on his laptop, and he likes it, now I threaten to install Windows XP when he doesn't want to do something.
Thank you very much for all your comments, first of all I wanted to tell you that this article was published in an electronic magazine of the Universidad de la Costa in Barranquilla, Colombia. In this university, although it seems incredible, few people have an idea that free software exists, and therefore they do not know many things, including the 4 basic freedoms; was this the reason that motivated me to write it. Obviously this is a blog where all people understand these principles, but at first it was intended for those who do not. Greetings from Quilla 😉
For those interested I leave the link of the original review where the cited article appears (page 5-6) https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByCBStjGCD3JU0l0aGNuaFpEMVk/edit
I installed kubuntu on my nephew's laptop and it wasn't going well 🙂 it made me want to stay with it, everything worked the first time.
Yes, besides that it is all a beauty ..