I think a lot about free software and social change and what follows came to me on the way to work today.
I’ve never been a mainstream guy, at least not as mainstream as some folks. Because of this I know a lot of people who work in different aspects of social change movements. People who run their vehicles on vegetable oil and folks who are weekly participants in peace rallies. I’m also a full time computer nerd so I know a lot of folks involved in and who support the free software movement. They have a lot in common but I don’t come together as often as I would like.
I know folks who are very strict vegetarians who know where everything they eat came from, how it was grown and how far it had to travel to get to them. This is not only a personal choice for many of them but political and social as well. Factory farmed food just isn’t as good for you. But these same people don’t think twice about sitting down to work at a computer whose operating system and applications were supplied entirely by giant corporations like Apple and Microsoft. And I know ardent supports and proponents of the free software movement who won’t go near a computer unless they know that every bit of software on that computer is licensed as free software. Again, this is personal and political and social for them. Computers are used to control information and communication, software controls computers therefore the people that control the software control the information and communication. If individuals don’t have control then they can’t truly be said to be free. At the same time these free software advocates won’t even blink before heading in to a McDonald’s to order so-called food that has been factory farmed and processed almost out of existence.
Please don’t think I’m casting stones because I am without sin. I’m just as guilty of all of these behaviors as anyone else. What I would like to do is to get these different groups of people to start to communicate because I believe that they have a lot to offer one another. The nerds, if you will, can offer the hippies a great deal in information technology and tools for getting their message out to other people as well as providing new ways for the organizations to keep in touch. The hippies can offer the nerds decades and even centuries of knowledge and skills around building grassroot movements and techniques for educating people about the issues.
For the uninitiated on both sides I offer the following.
Choosing to use Open Source software is very much like choosing to buy a diesel automobile and running it on biodiesel and vegetable oil or converting a house to run on solar electricity or becoming a vegetarian. Initially it will likely take some extra work to get things going and your likely to have to learn some new ways of doing things. Just as with a car running on biodiesel you would not be able to buy fuel at every gas station, you’ll have to learn some new ways of doing things when using open source software. Eventually things will begin to seem normal and you’ll stop noticing the new things that you’ve learned how to do.
But there’s another level to this analogy that I think is equally important and that is the intent behind making these kinds of changes in your life. Switching to renewable forms of energy, working for social change and using open source software are all very similar in that they all not only ask to make changes in the way we do things but also in the way that we think about things. Just as the peace movement asks us to re-think our ideas of how we live together and how nations interact and resolve conflicts, the open source movement asks us to re-think how we manage information and in whose hands the control of information sits. Computers are central to how we communicate these days. It ranges from online communication (like email and instant messaging) to the computers that sort mail at the post office, that manage the telephone switches and more and more are counting our votes. And what controls the computers? Software.
The open source movement seeks to make software open and available to anyone and everyone so that you have the option of inspecting the software to ensure that it does what it claims and if you wish to change the software to better meet your needs. This may seem like the making of a mountain from a molehill but when you consider things like elections and free speech make use of computers more every day then it starts to become a very important idea. Just as social change is important so that we can make sure that everyone has access to free software and not just a select few based on things like wealth, gender, color and sexuality.
governance, musings, people, technology
