Why you should use free software?
Free software is about freedom, not price1. Freedom here refers to:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
At first glance, you would think that most users would only benefit from freedom 0 and freedom 2. While it is true that most would not exercise freedom 1 and freedom 3, they do indirectly benefits users. Because the original programmers allows derivative programs to be distributed, they cannot implement malicious anti-features, such as spying or fraud without being spotted. Being free software is thus the prerequisite for being user-respecting software.
There are of course competing reasons for choosing software, such as user-friendliness/ease-of-use. While these requirements are rather subjective, I do agree that some free software programs have less fancy UI (like ) and sometimes not easy to use (like GIMP). It is up to you to decide the balance between criteria, but there is certainly strong reasons to prefer free software, ceteris paribus2
The content below consists of lists of bad examples of proprietary software, as well as some example of free software turning bad3 which resulted in forks.
(It’s empty right now, see GNU list below or contribute)
Other lists:
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https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html The word “free” was used despite its ambiguity for lack of better word. ↩︎
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All else being equal, but in fancy Latin. ↩︎
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Subjective, I know. ↩︎
This post is a part of a wiki. That means, you can contribute to it by sending me an email to huyngo+freeguide@disroot.org