Free software as ideology

I’ve been asked to clarify my position, as if everything I’ve written in my time as a blogger weren’t enough.

Since I’ve always wanted to write at length about my view of libre software, and about how it is in danger, I’m going to lay out my position in a series of articles. Let’s see if it stops being dismissed as nonsense. Of course at the end I’ll answer Ricardo Galli, but I like to keep you in suspense :)

I want us to explore together what ethics, freedom, ideologies, social conscience and participation are, concepts that tend to get mixed up in discussions about libre software. Along the way I may discover that I’m wrong, or on the contrary, my view may prove to be right.

This is an exploration. An exploration of what libre software is and the dangers it faces.

Stallman has always had an ideological position on what free software should be, and he has never denied it. I separate free software from libre software: to me free software is Stallman’s ideology, and libre software is something else, which we’ll explore in the coming articles.

Ideology

“Ideology” is defined as any form of explaining society that denies or excludes every other alternative way of explaining it; in this way it presents itself as a partial and disconnected worldview that: “Ignoring the multiple interconnections of the semantic universe, it also hides the practical reasons why certain signs were produced along with their interpretants. Thus forgetting produces a false consciousness”.

http://www.jorgemartinez.scd.cl/musunit.htm

The author of this quote applies this definition in the context of the need for musicology and its social usefulness. I chose the quote for several reasons. The first is that it’s on the site of the Chilean copyright society, which I think should care a great deal about these issues. The second is that it is in the field of artistic creation where the battle between the rights of creators and of consumers comes to a head.
The third reason is that the definition strikes me as right on target and matches my view of what an ideology is.

Stallman would like everyone to share his view of what is the right thing to do with software.
So he invents the mechanisms, like the GPL, so that the licensing system “traps” its users.

I share many of Stallman’s premises, and I understand his motivations, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept everything he says. Accepting without questioning is an ethical mistake, because I’m following the herd without even asking myself whether what the herd is doing is right.

The idea of these articles is to explore the ethical problems I see in Stallman’s vision and how, deep down, it undermines freedom. But for that I have to lay the foundations of my arguments, so we first have to explore what ethics has to do with all this.

I invite you to keep exploring tomorrow.…