Amount of free software

Posted Jul 4, 2010 11:19 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Two GCC stories by cracauer
Parent article: Two GCC stories

Speaking as a card-carrying FSFE supporter: the goal of the FSF is not so much to increase the amount of free software, as it is to make all developers and users aware of the role of freedom in software development and usage. Even a larger number of users is not as important as having conscious users. The amount of free software follows from the awareness, and not the other way around.

Let's see a prominent example: Apple's OS and certain core components based in free software. If people using these free components are completely unaware of the benefits of the freedoms they have (because the free parts are embedded in a thick layer of proprietary software) then said freedoms are not doing any good, except for Apple developers. As Apple users outnumber Apple developers by a large factor, making a small number of those users aware of why freedom is important would be much more important than having Apple developers switch to proprietary software. You can easily see why, in this regard, a marginal but freedom-aware OS like Debian is much more important to the free software movement than a popular but oblivious platform such as Apple iOS, or even Android.

On the other hand it would appear that the Open Source movement does indeed worry mostly about the amount (and number of users) of free software, even if in the process the freedom part is toned down. Many Linux developers are firmly in this camp, and that is why they would like to maximize use of Linux everywhere, even if certain components have to stay proprietary to achieve it.

There is a middle ground here (maximize the number of users while educating them in freedom), but as is so often the case it is not easy to achieve.