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Adopting free software ideals

Mike Gerwitz is a user freedom activist and GNU Advisory Committee member. He is a software engineer by profession and a hacker at heart, and performs many, many useful services to the free software movement.

Mike’s talk draws on his experiences and evolution as a free software user and activist for the last fifteen years, to discuss practical ethics and ideals, and how to balance our conviction that all software must be free with the demands of everyday life.

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3 years, 7 months ago

Tagged with

FSF · video · lp2021 · LibrePlanet · LibrePlanet 2021 · LibrePlanet 2021 video · LibrePlanet conference · Empowering Users

License

CC BY-SA 4.0

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This talk was presented at LibrePlanet.

libreplanet.org

LibrePlanet is the Free Software Foundation's annual conference. The FSF campaigns for free/libre software, meaning it respects users' freedom and community. We believe that users are entitled to this; all software should be free.

gnu.org/important

We do not advocate "open source".

That term was coined to reject our views. It refers to similar practices, but usually presented solely as advantageous, without talking of right and wrong.

gnu.org/not-open-source

Richard Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983 by announcing development of the free operating system, GNU. By 1992, GNU was nearly operational; one major essential component was lacking, the kernel.

gnu.org/gnu-begin

In 1992, Torvalds freed the kernel Linux, which filled the last gap in GNU. Since then, the combined GNU/Linux system has run in millions of computers. Nowadays you can buy a new computer with a totally free GNU/Linux system preinstalled.

gnu.org/gnu-and-linux

The views of the speaker may not represent the Free Software Foundation. The Foundation supports the free software cause and freedom to share, and basic freedoms in the digital domain, but has no position on other political issues.