I was a free software advocate for a few years. I read Stallman's essays and
other FSF material, and I jumped at the chance to tell those I knew about the
movement. This, unfortunately, turned me into an annoying, pedantic radical
to those around me. And it appears to happen to other people in the movement.
I wanted to free my computing fully, so I installed Trisquel on my computer.
When I first installed it, I botched the installation and lost nearly all my
files. I eventually got over that, but one day, out of the blue, my computer
lost the ability to resume after suspending. It took a substantial amount of
highly technical work to fix it, and I doubt the average user would ever have
been able to accomplish it. Another time, again out of the blue, it stopped
booting altogether, and again I had to perform fixes that I am sure no
average user could accomplish. Not only that, the problem was that the boot
program was prompting the user for input on encountering an error, a terrible
programming practice.
More recently, upgrading to Trisquel 7.0 caused my screen to display
psychedelic colours. That problem was unexpectedly solved when I left my
laptop on a bus and could not recover it, but after purchasing a new one, I
found that Trisquel could not display graphical output or perform network
connections at all.
All of these things are completely unacceptable for a modern operating
system. They caused me great inconvenience and stress and cost me much time.
Yet those here would have said that, by staying with Microsoft Windows, I was
more oppressed. This brings me to my point.
The fundamental purpose of software is to run. It is not to be free and open,
it is to run. Software of any license model that does not run, or does not
run as the user needs it to run, is useless to the user. Free software that
does not or cannot perform the tasks the user needs it to perform is more
restrictive than proprietary software that does perform said tasks.
To use an analogy, if my car's blueprints are freely available, it can be
easily disassembled and reassembled, and its mechanics and manufacturers are
responsive to complaints, all of that matters nothing if the car cannot move
under its own power.
Richard Stallman attempted to answer something similar in his essay
"Imperfection Is Not Oppression", in which he states: "Making a program
nonfree is an injustice committed by the developer that denies freedom to
whoever uses it. The developer deserves condemnation for this." But by this
statement he neglects the following points: (a) proprietary software can do
good, too — indeed, most people use proprietary software and complete a
great deal of work with it; (b) oppression is only oppression when the
oppressed feel that it is; and (c) as I have said, most people do not use or
need this "freedom" that is denied, but simply need their software to run.
Stallman also notes that "Developing a free program without adding a certain
important feature is...doing some good but not all the good that people
need." But, again, "all the good that people need" is for the program to run.
If a program cannot perform the tasks that a user requires, it is not doing
any good at all for that user.
Following Trisquel's utter failure to fulfill my needs, I decided to install
Ubuntu. And it worked perfectly, "out of the box". I even found that it
worked perfectly with the Linux-Libre kernel, and without any proprietary
packages installed. I am able to maintain my freedom, even if you don't
approve of it.
Don't get me wrong. I still see free software as a good thing. But know that
you are not entitled to it. It is a bonus, and not a right.
- [Trisquel-users] Freedom versus competence: why I left Tri... LDrumbler
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