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.
Nonfree software does other nasty things besides spying; it often implements digital handcuffs—features designed to restrict the users (also called DRM, for Digital Restrictions Management). These features control how you can access, copy, or move the files in your own computer.
DRM is a common practice: Microsoft does it, Apple does it, Google does it, even the BBC’s iPlayer does it. Many governments, taking the side of these companies against the public, have made it illegal to tell others how to escape from the digital handcuffs. As a result, competition does nothing to check the practice: no matter how many proprietary alternatives you might have to choose from, they will all handcuff you just the same. If the computer knows where you are located, it can make DRM even worse: there are companies that would like to restrict what you can access based on your present location.
My vision of the world is different. I would like to see a world in which all the software in our computers— in our desktop PCs, our laptops, our handhelds, our phones—is under our control and respects our freedom. In other words, a world where all software is
Free software, freedom-respecting software, means that every user of the program is free to get the program’s source code and change the program to do what she wants, and also free to give away or sell copies, either exact or modified. This means the users are in control. With the users in control of the software, nobody has power to impose nasty features on others.
Even if you don’t exercise this control yourself, you are part of a society where others do. If you are not a programmer, other users of the program are. They will probably find and remove any nasty features, which might spy on or restrict you, and publish safe versions. You will have only to elect to use them—and since all other users will prefer them, that will usually happen with no effort on your part.
Charles Stross envisioned computers that permanently record everything that we see and hear.[2] Those records could be very useful, as long as Big Brother doesn’t see and hear all of them. Today’s cell phones are already capable of listening to their users without informing them, at the request of the police, the phone company, or anyone that knows the requisite commands. As long as phones use nonfree software, controlled by its developers and not by the users, we must expect this to get worse. Only free software enables computer-using citizens to resist totalitarian surveillance.
Dave Winer’s article[3] suggested that Mr. Gates should send a copy of Windows Vista to Alpha Centauri. I understand the feeling, but sending just one won’t solve our problem here on Earth. Windows is designed to spy on users and restrict them. We should collect all the copies of Windows, and of MacOS and iPlayer for the same reason, and send them to Alpha Centauri at the slowest possible speed. Or just erase them.
Copyright c 2006, 2007 Richard Stallman
The BBC invited me to write an article for their column series,
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire chapter are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
Chapter 41.
Avoiding Ruinous Compromises
The free software movement aims for a social change: to make all software free so that all software users are free and can be part of a community of cooperation. Every nonfree program gives its developer unjust power over the users. Our goal is to put an end to that injustice.
The road to freedom is a long road. It will take many steps and many years to reach a world in which it is normal for software users to have freedom. Some of these steps are hard, and require sacrifice. Some of them become easier if we make compromises with people that have different goals.
Thus, the Free Software Foundation makes compromises—even major ones. For instance, we made compromises in the patent provisions of version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) so that major companies would contribute to and distribute GPLv3-covered software and thus bring some patents under the effect of these provisions.
The Lesser GPL’s purpose is a compromise: we use it on certain chosen free libraries to permit their use in nonfree programs because we think that legally prohibiting this would only drive developers to proprietary libraries instead. We accept and install code in GNU programs to make them work together with common nonfree programs, and we document and publicize this in ways that encourage users of the latter to install the former, but not vice versa. We support specific campaigns we agree with, even when we don’t fully agree with the groups
