Free Software, Free Society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman. 2nd edition.

A free kernel, even a whole free operating system, is not sufficient to use your computer in freedom; we need free software for everything else, too. Free applications, free drivers, free BIOS: some of those projects face large obstacles—the need to reverse engineer formats or protocols or pressure companies to document them, or to work around or face down patent threats, or to compete with a network effect. Success will require firmness and determination. A better kernel is desirable, to be sure, but not at the expense of weakening the impetus to liberate the rest of the software world.

When the use of his program became controversial, McVoy responded with distraction. For instance, he promised to release it as free software if the company went out of business. Alas, that does no good as long as the company remains in business. Linux developers responded by saying, “We’ll switch to a free program when you develop a better one.” This was an indirect way of saying, “We made the mess, but we won’t clean it up.”

Fortunately, not everyone in Linux development considered a nonfree program acceptable, and there was continuing pressure for a free alternative. Finally Andrew Tridgell developed an interoperating free program, so Linux developers would no longer need to use a nonfree program.

McVoy first blustered and threatened, but ultimately chose to go home and take his ball with him: he withdrew permission for gratis use by free software projects, and Linux developers will move to other software. The program they no longer use will remain unethical as long as it is nonfree, but they will no longer promote it, nor by using it teach others to give freedom low priority. We can begin to forget about that program.

We should not forget the lesson we have learned from it: Nonfree programs are dangerous to you and to your community. Don’t let them get a place in your life.

Copyright c 2005 Richard Stallman

This essay was originally published on http://gnu.org, in 2005. This version is part of Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd ed. (Boston: GNU Press, 2010).

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire chapter are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Part VII. An Assessment and a Look Ahead

Chapter 40. Computing “Progress”: Good and Bad

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo proposed here[1] that every object in our world have a unique number so that your cell phone could record everything you do—even which cans you picked up while in the supermarket.

If the phone is like today’s phones, it will use proprietary software: software controlled by the companies that developed it, not by its users. Those companies will ensure that your phone makes the information it collects about you available to the phone company’s database (let’s call it Big Brother) and probably to other companies.

In the UK of the future, as New Labour would have it, those companies will surely turn this information over to the police. If your phone reports you bought a wooden stick and a piece of poster board, the phone company’s system will deduce that you may be planning a protest, and report you automatically to the police so they can accuse you of “terrorism.”

In the UK, it is literally an offense to be suspect—more precisely, to possess any object in circumstances that create a “reasonable suspicion” that you might use it in certain criminal ways. Your phone will give the police plenty of opportunities to suspect you so they can charge you with having been suspected by them. Similar things will happen in China, where Yahoo has already given the government all the information it needed to imprison a dissident; it subsequently asked for our understanding on the excuse that it was “just following orders.”

Horowitz would like cell phones to tag information automatically, based on knowing when you participate in an event or meeting. That means the phone company will also know precisely whom you meet. That information will also be interesting to governments, such as those of the UK and China, that cut corners on human rights.

I do not much like Horowitz’s vision of total surveillance. Rather, I envision a world in which our computers never collect, or release, any information about us except when we want them to.