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@ -43,20 +43,28 @@ The developers of Debian operating system have created their own guidelines (Deb
## Measuring Practical Freedom With Freedom Distance
One big issue related to free software and similar causes (e.g. [free hardware](free_hardware.md)) is slipping into the trap of only apparent freedom, getting false feeling of freedom without actually having real, practical freedom; that is having freedom given legally on the paper which however may be [de facto](de_facto.md) extremely hard or impossible to make use of practically in real life. Imagine for example a highly complex software that by its license gives everyone the right to modify it but in practice to make meaningful modifications one needs specialized hardware and deep knowledge and know-how of how the code really works -- example of this is for example the [Android](android.md) operating system. This particular example is called [bloat monopoly](bloat_monopoly.md) and is highly used to mislead users into thinking they have freedom or that they support something ethical while in fact they don't (see also e.g. [openwashing](openwashing.md)). Giving only this apparent freedom is how [capitalism](capitalism.md) adjusted to the wave of free software, it is how businesses silently smother real freedom while pretending to embrace free software (which they rather call [open source](open_source.md)). For this we always have to evaluate practical freedom we have, i.e. whether, and with what difficulties, we can execute the four basic freedoms required by free software -- remember that all are essential and once even a single of the freedoms is lost, the whole software becomes completely [proprietary](proprietary.md) and non-free.
One big issue related to free software and similar causes (e.g. [free hardware](free_hardware.md)) is slipping into the trap of only apparent freedom and acquiring false feeling of freedom without actually having real, practical freedom; that is having freedom given legally, "on the paper", which may however be [de facto](de_facto.md) extremely hard or impossible to make use of practically in real life. Imagine for example a highly complex software that by its license gives everyone the right to modify it but in practice to make meaningful modifications one needs specialized hardware and deep knowledge and know-how of how the code really works -- this demonstrates for example the [Android](android.md) operating system. This particular example is called [bloat monopoly](bloat_monopoly.md), a modern phenomenon commonly used to mislead users into thinking they have freedom or that they support something ethical while in fact they don't (see also e.g. [openwashing](openwashing.md)). Giving only this apparent freedom is how [capitalism](capitalism.md) adjusted to the wave of free software, it is how businesses silently smother real freedom while pretending to embrace free software (which they rather call [open source](open_source.md)). For this we always have to evaluate practical freedom we have, i.e. whether, and with what difficulties, we can execute the four basic freedoms required by free software -- remember that all are essential and once even a single of the freedoms is lost, the whole software becomes completely [proprietary](proprietary.md) and non-free.
One possible measure of practical freedom is **freedom distance**. For any piece of software that comes with a free license (i.e. one that gives the four essential freedoms legally) let us define freedom distance as the average minimum distance to the nearest man that can PRACTICALLY execute ALL of the freedoms (taken over all people in the world). In other words it says how far you have to go to reach the freedom you are promised. As any metric it's a bit of a simplification, but while physical distances may seem to not matter much in the age of Internet, the measure contains in it embedded the number of people who have control over the piece of software, it says how centralized the control is and how difficult it will be to for example spot and remove malicious features. Large freedom distance means the freedom is far away, that you are relying on someone in another country to fix your software which of course is dangerous, even the Internet may get split, it is important for you to be able to execute your freedom locally (even if you're not doing it now, it is important that you COULD). It may also happen that the foreign maintainer of your software suddenly turns evil -- e.g. in pursuit of profit -- and then having someone close who can take over fixing and maintaining that software is key for freedom. From this point of view a freedom distance shorter than one's body is ideal -- it would mean that any single individual has complete control over his own tool.
One of possible measures of practical freedom is what we'll call a **freedom distance**. For any piece of software that comes with a free license (i.e. one that gives the four essential freedoms legally) let us define freedom distance as the average minimum distance to the nearest man that can PRACTICALLY execute ALL of the freedoms (taken over all people in the world). In other words it says how far you have to go to reach the freedom you are promised. As any metric it's a bit of a simplification, but while physical distances may seem to not matter much in the age of Internet, the measure contains in it embedded the number of people who have control over the piece of software, it says how centralized the control is and how difficult it will be to for example spot and remove malicious features. Large freedom distance means the freedom is far away, that you are relying on someone in another country to fix your software which of course is dangerous, even the Internet may get split, it is important for you to be able to execute your freedom locally (even if you're not doing it now, it is important that you COULD). It may also happen that the foreign maintainer of your software suddenly turns evil -- e.g. in pursuit of profit -- and then having someone close who can take over fixing and maintaining that software is key for freedom. From this point of view a freedom distance shorter than one's body is ideal -- it would mean that any single individual has complete control over his own tool.
Let's show this on two extreme examples:
Let's demonstrate it on a few examples:
- A simple program will have very small freedom distance. For example the [suckless](suckless.md) implementation of the [cat](cat.md) program (from the [sbase](sbase.md) package) is written in C and currently has about 50 lines of code. How far on average do you have to go to find someone that will be able to use the program AND understand every part of the source code AND share the program AND make any kind of meaningful modification to it? Using and sharing will be pretty easy for everyone, but remember, we are looking for the closest human that can execute ALL of the freedoms, so we are looking for someone who can compile and modify very basic C programs. As the program is extremely simple, anyone who ever learned complete basics of programming will be able to do this, even if he's not nearly an expert at programming -- this particular program doesn't even use [object oriented programming](oop.md), design patterns and similar "advanced" things that would further reduce the number of people who understand it. If you are reading this wiki, you can almost definitely exercise all the freedoms with this program but even if you can't, it's extremely likely you will find someone who can in the neighborhood of your very street, and if not, then definitely at least the ICT teacher at nearest elementary school will. If the Internet goes down, if your country isolates politically or if the program's maintainer turns nuts or just stops maintaining the program, the program still stays quite safe and in your hands: if it needs fixing or improvement, at worst you'll have to ask your neighbor to help you out. Now if we average this freedom distance for all people on Earth, we may get a freedom distance smaller than the size of a small village -- this is pretty good.
- A very complex program will have big freedom distance. Here let's take a look at the mentioned [Android](android.md) operating system. Compiling Android is very hard, it even requires quite powerful hardware, it's not very likely you'll find someone who can easily do it very near, however to make meaningful modifications to the system will be yet much, much more difficult. Imagine you for example want to change process scheduling in the system's kernel, add new filesystem support, remove all networking and telemetry, port it to run in web browser or you want to replace the GUI system with a completely different one etc. Can you do these things easily? Remember, as a reader of this wiki you are technically skilled, and even so you most likely can't do it -- even if you're an excellent programmer and dedicate all energy to it, you will likely need a few weeks of full time work to add a simple feature to the OS, and you are still a negligible exception among all the normies around, so how far away is someone who has complete control over Android? These people are probably just sitting in Google headquarters. So Android's freedom distance will be quite close to average distance to Google headquarters over all people on Earth, which will be a distance of many countries.
## History
Free software was invented by [Richard Stallman](rms.md) in the 1980s. His free software movement inspired later movements such as the [free culture](free_culture.md) movement and the evil [open-source](open_source.md) movement.
Precursors to free software may reach as far back in [history](history.md) as we are willing look. They may include for example ancient [mathematicians](math.md) sharing their equations with each other, people sharing recipes for meals and possibly even the general ideas of [communism](communism.md) (not to be [confused](often_confused.md) with [Marxism](marxism.md)). Early digital sharing communities on networks such as [BBS](bbs.md) and [Usenet](usenet.md) worked like free software communities "by default", without really articulating or naming the concept -- they shared software informally without [licenses](license.md) as back then capitalists haven't yet had enough time to ruin everything, but that slowly started to change with more commercialization of the brand new field.
TODO: something here
Free software, in a form discussed here, was invented by [Richard Stallman](rms.md) in the 1980s. He cites his frustration with a proprietary printer driver as an initial impulse. In 1983 he announced the now already legendary project called [GNU](gnu.md) -- one to implement a completely free as in freedom [operating system](os.md). The announcement already contains the word "free", but more in a sense of "not having to pay for permissions". Additionally in 1985 Stallman established the [Free Software Foundation](fsf.md), a non-profit for promotion and support of free software, and this is when the term *free software* seems to have been clearly distinguished.
In early [1990s](90s.md) a new project called [Linux](linux.md) -- an operating system kernel -- joined GNU and as a final piece of the puzzle completed its main goal. From now on it became practically possibly to do one's computing solely with free software.
Free software gained enough momentum to become a serious threat to capitalism and many started to attack it, most notably [Microsoft](microsoft.md) who was caught red handed with the leak of so called *Halloween documents* in late [1990s](90s.md), in which they discuss strategies for eliminating the threat of free software.
Later on the free software movement inspired movements such as [free culture](free_culture.md) (shortly after the year 2000) and the evil [open-source](open_source.md) [fork](fork.md) (1998, a malicious response of business, a kind of "free software" minus ethics).
TODO: more more more, famous cases of FS (Doom engine, ...)
**By 2024 free software is dead** -- yes, [FSF](fsf.md) and a few other software "activists" are still around, but they don't bear any significance anymore, the free software movement disappeared just like hippies disappeared with 1960s. FSF has become just an email spamming organization supporting lesbian [rights](rights_culture.md) on the Internet, and those who truly believe in free software form a community that by its size is comparable to such insignificantly small groups as [suckless](suckless.md) for example. Everything is now "[open $ource](open_source.md)", which only means one thing: it is hosted on [GitHub](github.md), and doesn't at all imply free code, available code, non-malicious features or even perhaps such a laughable thing as pursuit of freedom. Corruption, politics and [free market](capitalism.md) have finally killed the free software movement, [open $ource](open_source.md) prevailed exactly as it was planned by capitalists at the meeting in 1998, and it has now redefined even the basic pillars of the four freedoms (partial openness, [fair use](fair_use.md) or just source availability is now practically synonymous with "open source") -- just like for example "thou shalt not kill" was removed from Christianity because it wasn't convenient for the overlords -- and by this the fate of technology is sealed, free software seems to have only postponed the [capitalist disaster](capitalist_singularity.md) by a few decades, which is still a remarkable feat. { It's been pointed out to me that even some project that call themselves "free" or "libre", such as "Libre"Boot, are in fact breaking the rules of freedom now, for example by including proprietary blobs. ~drummyfish }