<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
On the afternoon of September 15, 2007, the Free Software Foundation
and
BinaryFreedom (<a href="http://binaryfreedom.info" class="external free"
title="http://binaryfreedom.info" rel="nofollow">http://binaryfreedom.info</a>)
are hosting a Software Freedom Day
(<a href="http://softwarefreedomday.org" class="external free"
title="http://softwarefreedomday.org" rel="nofollow">http://softwarefreedomday.org</a>)
event in downtown Boston.
<p>Please bring your friends and join us for talks, activities and
outreach in
support of software freedom. We'll be one node in a network of over 290
events
worldwide, and it's not often we get the chance to make that kind of
splash.
It'll be a great chance to meet other hackers and activists in the area
and to
make plans for how we can work for software freedom on a concrete,
local level.
</p>
<p>Let us know that you can come by emailing <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:info@fsf.org">info@fsf.org</a>, and keep
up-to-date or
even help us plan the schedule at
<a href="http://groups.fsf.org/index.php/Boston_Software_Freedom_Day"
class="external free"
title="http://groups.fsf.org/index.php/Boston Software Freedom Day"
rel="nofollow">http://groups.fsf.org/index.php/Boston_Software_Freedom_Day</a>.
</p>
<p>Date: Saturday, September 15, 2007
Time: 1:00pm - 5:00pm
</p>
<h2> Location </h2>
<pre> Encountro5
33 Harrison Street, 5th floor
Boston, MA 02131
</pre>
<h1>what is Free Software?<br>
</h1>
<h1>Free software!
</h1>
<h2>You can’t usually do the right thing without inconveniencing
yourself. <b>Bruce Byfield</b> reckons free software is a rare
opportunity.
</h2>
<p>When you turn on your computer, you’re making a political statement.
</p>
<p>If, like most people, your computer boots Microsoft Windows, the
statement you’re making is that transnational corporations should
control access to the most powerful public media that ever existed.
You’re passively accepting, too, that non-industrial nations should be
kept from developing, and helping to preserve a monoculture that
threatens the existence of minority languages. At a personal level,
you’re accepting that these same corporations should control your
access to educational and government services and have a right to
install lock-down technologies on your computer without your permission
– to say nothing of controlling what other software you can use and how
you use it.</p>
<p>Most people, of course, never think of these implications. When
confronted, some will claim that none of this matters. Most, even
social activists, accept the situation because they don’t know of any
alternative. </p>
<p>Yet an alternative does exist, and it’s becoming more viable by the
day.</p>
<p>It’s called Free Software. It has already built and still runs most
of the internet. Now, increasingly, Free Software is finding its way on
to the desktops of those who want their ethics to extend to their
computers.</p>
<p>From the city of Munich and the Extremadura region of Spain, to
Brazil and the Indian state of Kerala, the possibilities of Free
Software are being explored and, in many cases, implemented. Adaptation
is slower in North America, where Microsoft’s influence is strongest,
but even there many universities, corporations and government
departments are at least considering the possibilities.</p>
<!-- start of cross_head_2.mc -->
<h4>Where it all comes from
</h4>
<!-- end of cross_head_2.mc -->
<p>Free Software began in 1984 when
Richard M Stallman started the GNU project to build a free operating
system. Stallman had become concerned about a major shift in the
culture of programming. With the increased popularity of computers,
software was being treated as a commodity and the old academic
tradition of sharing programs in the name of exchanging ideas was dead.
</p>
<p>As an alternative to the new proprietary programs, Stallman created
the Free Software Foundation as a home for his project and wrote a
software licence called the GNU General Public Licence. ‘The GNU
General Public Licence is intended to guarantee your freedom to share
and change free software,’ the Preamble to the licence says, ‘to make
sure the software is free for all its users.’ The licence then goes on
to grant users the right to copy, install and change any software that
uses it in any way that they please, so long as a few basic conditions
are met, including preserving the original programmers’ credit and
using the same licence for any modified version.</p>
<p>These were radical ideas in the 1980s and they were largely ignored
by the general public. Free Software’s real boost came in the early
1990s, when the internet – that it had largely created – in turn
allowed groups of programmers to co-operate remotely. In a few years
they had built a whole operating system called GNU/Linux – or Linux, as
it is often shortened to.</p>
<p>Soon, thousands of people were collaborating worldwide to fill in
the gaps. At first their efforts were focused on GNU/Linux. However,
enthusiasm quickly led to similar efforts on Windows and the Mac, as
well as several other lesser-known operating systems. An offshoot and
ally, the Open Source Movement, uses the same licences and co-operative
work methods, but its main concerns are software quality and working
with business. Today, some gaps remain – notably games and some drivers
for the very latest software. But it is now possible, without much
effort, to perform routine office functions entirely in free software
that is usually as good as, and often superior to, the proprietary
tools it replaces. </p>
<p>Need to replace MS Office? Try OpenOffice.org. Internet Explorer?
Try Mozilla Firefox. PhotoShop? The GIMP. And, in many cases, you’ll
find not just one alternative, but dozens, especially if you drop
Windows or OS X in favour of GNU/Linux. </p>
<!-- start of cross_head_2.mc -->
<h4>The free software world view
</h4>
<!-- end of cross_head_2.mc -->
<p>If you’re not a programmer or a
lawyer, all this might sound as exciting as washing the dishes. So why
should you care? Because, in ensuring their own power to tinker with
software, free software programmers have also empowered users. </p>
<p>With free software, access to programs becomes a matter of
accessibility to the internet or contact with a project rather than the
size of your bank balance. Instead of going to the store, users can
download the type of program they need from the internet – and have it
automatically installed in minutes. Upgrades are the same. If
organizations or users need some functionality that isn’t there, they
can add it themselves, or become involved with the project that
develops it and lobby for changes. Moreover, organizations no longer
need to be worried about licence audits or getting activation codes. </p>
<p>The fact that it comes without a price tag doesn’t hurt, either.
Although the Free Software Foundation prefers to emphasize
philosophical freedoms, its cost-free nature remains one of the main
attractions for cash-strapped governments and educational institutions.
Even allowing for training, free software has been found consistently
cheaper to run than proprietary software in every neutral study ever
conducted.</p>
<p>If you are socially active, you’ll probably find the values
associated with free software even more attractive. For one thing,
projects are usually communal organizations, where authority and
respect are based largely on contributions. Many of the members, too,
are volunteers, working only for credit, although a growing number are
paid for their efforts by companies like Google or IBM that see
benefits in both software results and public relations by offering
assistance. </p>
<p>In some companies, too, the co-operative ethos spills over into
their interactions with competitors, evolving a less capitalistic, more
humane way of doing business. The same clashes of ego occur as anywhere
else, but, even so, the thousands of projects around the world are
living proof of how efficient collaborative methods can be. </p>
<p>One more reason to support free software is that it helps to put the
entire world on an equal footing. Free Software Foundation supporters
believe that it is a basic necessity of free speech. Today this
requires that everyone who wants it has internet access. Yet, given the
price of proprietary software, many people – especially in impoverished
nations, but also in the inner city and remote rural regions in the
industrialized world – can’t afford legal access. Nor can some
governments afford to build the technological infrastructure to improve
their countries. Free software removes many of these barriers.</p>
<p>Admittedly, hardware can also be a problem. That’s one reason why
One Laptop Per Child, an initiative whose goal is to build a $100
computer and see copies distributed as widely as possible, finds many
of its most enthusiastic supporters in the free software community. The
computer will be distributed to millions of schoolchildren in the
developing world and free software will be installed (see <a
href="http://laptop.org">http://laptop.org</a>).</p>
<p>Some people question the priorities of the project, arguing that it
matters less than ensuring food or shelter. Yet, by the same arguments,
efforts to improve education in developing nations should also be
ignored. The issue is less about priorities than about people helping
in the areas where they can make a personal difference.</p>
<p>Similarly, personal computers and the internet threaten to produce a
monoculture. Fortunately for the British, North Americans and
Australasians, the language of the monoculture is English. Those in
less dominant states or in minority regions aren’t so lucky. Often they
have trouble finding programs written in their own language, because
proprietary software vendors have judged the market too small to be
worth developing a product for it. However, armed with enthusiasm and a
perception of need, volunteers can often bridge the gaps that economic
realities leave. OpenOffice.org, for example – the alternative to MS
Office – has been the first office suite in many languages, including
Welsh, Scots, Gaelic and Slovenian. With free software tools, minority
language users can keep their language alive and growing. In fact, Free
Software projects have frequently been the originators of dozens of
computer terms in such languages.</p>
<!-- start of cross_head_2.mc -->
<h4>Ethical computers and civil society
</h4>
<!-- end of cross_head_2.mc -->
<p>It’s all very simple: supporting
free software is good for you and even better for the global community.
Yet fewer than 10 per cent of computer users have any free software
installed. </p>
<p>A large part of the reason is probably the tactics used by Microsoft
to encourage the use of its products. However, Peter Brown, Executive
Director of the Free Software Foundation (<http :www.fsf.org="">) and a
former New Internationalist co-operative member, suggests some
additional reasons. For one thing, he suggests, the implications of
Free Software are so large that mainstream journalists have trouble
covering the issue. When Brown tried to interest a friend at the BBC in
covering free software, his friend was overwhelmed. ‘He was like: “This
is a big topic we’re talking about,”’ Brown recalls.‘“It covers disks,
it covers downloads, it covers television, it covers iPods. How on
earth am I going to wrap up this story?”’</http></p>
<p>Another reason, Brown suggests, is that until recently the free
software community has not managed to contact potential supporters who
lack a strong interest in technology. The philosophy and organization
of the movement have close affinities with those of social activists,
charities and religious groups, yet such people know little about them.
Many people in such groups have a minimal knowledge of technology, and
tend to accept the dominant media portrayal of technologists as smart
but anti-social people whose concerns are irrelevant to the average
person.</p>
<!-- Start "Pull Quote" -->
<p class="pullquote" style="">Supporting free software is good for you
and even better for the global
community. Yet fewer than 10 per cent of computer users have any free
software installed
</p>
<!-- End "Pull Quote" -->
<p>Yet, slowly, the connections are being made. For example, as the
Free Software Foundation explains in its Defective by Design campaign,
the increasing spread of ‘lock-down’ technologies that can limit users’
control of their own hardware and obtain information about their habits
without their consent raises issues about consumer rights, privacy,
anti-trust and industry standards. In such cases, the technical aspects
become secondary to the social implications.</p>
<p>‘When you’re talking about recycling, you don’t say that you’ll take
waste to this location and heat it to so many degrees. No-one needs to
know that,’ Brown says. ‘You don’t need to know the architecture of
GNU/Linux in order to make a judgment call about the ethics of free
software.’</p>
<p>In the end, he says, ‘Free software should be an obvious
civil-society issue. It should be as obvious as recycling cans. It
should be something that every parent should be asking when they go
into a parent-teacher meeting: is the school using free software? Is my
child being taught to use free software? Having control over your
computer and knowing that your devices aren’t spying on you, that you
have an ethical computer – [these] are all issues for civil society.’</p>
<p>Support begins with personal involvement. Instead of trying to
grapple all at once with the complications, start simply. Look up the
subject at Wikipedia and Google (two organizations with strong
connections to the free software communities) and choose a program or
two to try. Two good choices are the OpenOffice.org office suite (<a
href="http://www.openoffice.org">http://www.openoffice.org</a>) and
the Mozilla Firefox web browser (<a href="http://www.mozilla.com">http://www.mozilla.com</a>).
</p>
<p>What happens next is between you and your conscience. </p>
<!-- Start page_no.mc --><!-- Page number in magazine is:"" -->
<!-- End page_no.mc --><!-- start author_note.mc -->
<p class="author_note"><b>Bruce Byfield</b> is a journalist and editor
for the Open Source Technology Group.
</p>
</body>
</html>