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Software enshittification or freedom? It's not a hard choice!
Nonfree software subjugates users. That's wrong enough, but such power is now used to wrong users even harder. The easier it is for third parties to impose on a user their choice of software version the more they can twiddle the software's behavior to best serve themselves and enshittify the user's computing. This holds for dominant (nonfree) operating systems for workstations and mobiles, with their mandatory updates, but users become even more vulnerable to enshittification by using web apps downloaded at every use from somebody else's servers, by doing their computing through somebody else's services, and by using remotely controlled and remotely mediated smartIoT devices and appliances. Even when using software that's not updated automatically on their own computers, users (and their upstream distributors) may be persuaded to adopt enshittif(ied/ying?) versions, including CPU microcode and firmware for system initialization and for peripheral devices. Is using free software enough to escape?
Presented by: Alexandre Oliva
Free software evangelist. GNU speaker and advisory-committee member. Recipient of the FSF's 2016 Award for the Advancement of Free Software. FSF Latin America board member. FSF supporter, voting member, and former acting president. LibrePlanet São Paulo activist. 0G foreseer. Maintainer of GNU Linux-libre, and co-maintainer of the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU binutils, and GNU libc. Libre-SOC contributor. GNU tools engineer at AdaCore.