Update

free_software.md

@@ -8,11 +8,13 @@ Free software is also known as *free as in freedom*, *free as in speech* softwar
 
 **Examples of free software** include the [GNU](gnu.md) operating system (also known as "[Linux](linux.md)"), [GIMP](gimp.md) (image editor), [Stockfish](stockfish.md) chess engine, or games such as [Xonotic](xonotic.md) and [Anarch](anarch.md). Free software is actually what runs the world, it is a standard among experts and it is possible to do computing with exclusively free software (though this may depend on how far you stretch the definition), even though most normal people don't even know the term free software exists because they only ever come in contact with abusive [proprietary](proprietary.md) consumer software such as [Windows](windows.md) and capitalist [games](game.md). There also exists a lot of big and successful software, such as [Firefox](firefox.md), [Linux](linux.md) (the kernel) or [Blender](blender.md), that's often spoken of as free software which may however be only technically true or true only to a big (but not full) degree: for example even though [Linux](linux.md) is 99% free, in its [vanilla](vanilla.md) version it comes with [proprietary](proprietary.md) [binary blobs](binary_blob.md) which breaks the rules of free software. [Blender](blender.md) is technically free but it is also [capitalist software](capitalist_software.md) which doesn't really care about freedom and may de-facto limit some freedoms required by free software, even if they are granted legally by Blender's license. Such software is better called "[open source](open_source.md)" or [FOSS](foss.md) because it doesn't meet the high standards of free software. This issue of technically-but-not-really free software is addressed by some newer movements and philosophies such as [suckless](suckless.md) and our [less retarded software](lrs.md) who usually also aim for [unbloating](bloat.md) technology so as to make it more free in practice.
 
-Though unknown to common people, the invention and adoption of free software has been **one the most important events in the history of computers** -- mere technology consumers nowadays don't even realize (and aren't told) that what they're using consists and has been enabled possibly mostly by software written non-commercially, by volunteers for free, basically on [communist](communism.md) principles. Even if consumer technology is unethical because the underlying free technology has been modified by [corporations](corporation.md) to abuse the users, without free software the situation would have been incomparably worse if Richard Stallman hadn't achieved the small miracle of establishing the free software movement. Without it there would probably be practically no alternative to abusive technology nowadays, everything would be much more closed, there would probably be no "[open source](open_source.md)", "[open hardware](open_hardware.md)" such as [Arduino](arduino.md) and things such as [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md). If the danger of [intellectual property](intellectual_property.md) in software wasn't foreseen and countered by Richard Stallman right in the beginning, the corporations' push of legislation would probably have continued and copyright laws might have been many times worse today, to the point of not even being able to legally write free software nowadays. We have to be very grateful that this happened and continue to support free software.
+Though unknown to common people, the invention and adoption of free software has been **one the most important events in the [history](history.md) of computers** -- mere technology consumers nowadays don't even realize (and aren't told) that what they're using consists and has been enabled possibly mostly by software written non-commercially, by volunteers for free, basically on [communist](communism.md) principles. Even if consumer technology is unethical because the underlying free technology has been modified by [corporations](corporation.md) to abuse the users, without free software the situation would have been incomparably worse if [Richard Stallman](rms.md) hadn't achieved the small miracle of establishing the free software movement. Without it there would probably be practically no alternative to abusive technology nowadays, everything would be much more closed, there would probably be no "[open source](open_source.md)", "[open hardware](open_hardware.md)" such as [Arduino](arduino.md) and things such as [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md). If the danger of [intellectual property](intellectual_property.md) in software wasn't foreseen and countered by Richard Stallman right in the beginning, the corporations' push of legislation would probably have continued and copyright laws might have been many times worse today, to the point of not even being able to legally write free software nowadays. We have to be very grateful that this happened and continue to support free software.
 
 [Richard Stallman](rms.md), the inventor of the concept and the term "free software", says free software is about ensuring the freedom of computer users, i.e. people truly owning their tools -- he points out that unless people have complete control over their tools, they don't truly own them and will instead become controlled and abused by the makers (true owners) of those tools, which in [capitalism](capitalism.md) are [corporations](corporation.md). Richard Stallman stressed that **there is no such thing as partially free software** -- it takes only a single line of code to take away the user's freedom and therefore if software is to be free, it has to be free as a whole. This is in direct contrast with [open source](open_source.md) (a term discourages by Stallman himself) which happily tolerates for example [Windows](windows.md) only programs and accepts them as "open source", even though such a program cannot be run without the underlying proprietary code of the platform. It is therefore important to support free software rather than the business spoiled open source.
 
-**Free software is not about [privacy](privacy.md)!** That is a retarded simplification spread by cryptofascists. Free software, as its name suggests, is about freedom in wide sense, which of course may include the freedom to stay anonymous, but there are many more freedoms which free software stands for, e.g. the freedom of customization of one's tools or the general freedom of [art](art.md) -- being able to utilize or remix someone else's creation for creating something new or better. Software focused on privacy is called simply privacy respecting software.
+**Free software is not about [privacy](privacy.md)!** That would be quite misleading viewpoint. Free software, as its name suggests, is about freedom in wide sense, which includes the freedom of absolute control over one's devices that may ensure privacy and anonymity, but there are many more freedoms which free software stands for, e.g. the freedom of customization of one's tools or the general freedom of [art](art.md) -- being able to utilize or remix someone else's creation for creating something new or better. Software focused on privacy is called simply privacy respecting software.
+
+The forefront non-profit organization promoting free software has since its invention been the [Free Software Foundation](fsf.md) (FSF) started by Richard Stallman himself alongside his [GNU](gnu.md) project. Nevertheless we must keep in mind that FSF doesn't equal free software, free software as a concept is bigger than its inventor or any organization, the idea -- just as for example political or religious ideas -- has since its birth been adopted with various modifications by many others, it is being expanded, improved, renamed and yes, even twisted and abused. Free software has spawned or influenced for example [Debian](debian.md), [free culture](free_culture.md), [free hardware](free_hardware.md), [FSFE](fsfe.md), [FSFLA](fsfla.md), [open $ource](open_source.md), [suckless](suckless.md), [copyfree](copyfree.md), [freedesktop](freedesktop.md) and many others. FSF itself has become quite spoiled and political, but it has achieved sending out the message about sharing, collaboration and ethics, which at least a few people still try to keep following.
 
 **Is free software [communism](communism.md)?** This is a question often debated by [Americans](usa.md) who have a panic phobia of anything resembling ideas of sharing and giving away for free. The answer is: yes and no. No as in it's not [Marxism](marxism.md), the kind of [evil](evil.md) pseudocommunism that plagued the world not a long time long ago -- that was a hugely complex, twisted violent ideology encompassing whole society which furthermore betrayed many basic ideas of equality and so on. Compared to this free software is just a simple idea of not applying intellectual property to software, and this idea may well function under some form of early capitalism. But on the other hand yes, free software is communism in its general form that simply states that sharing is good, it is communism as much as e.g. teaching a kid to share toys with its siblings.
 
@@ -37,14 +39,14 @@ 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 the danger of apparent freedom without practical freedom, i.e. freedom given legally on 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 misled 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, 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 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 distance to the nearest man that can PRACTICALLY execute ALL of the freedoms. 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 an 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 man has complete control over his own tool.
+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.
 
 Let's show this on two extreme 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 man 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 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 do it but if you can't, it's extremely likely you will find someone like that in your street, and if not, then definitely at least a math teacher at nearest elementary school will. If we average this for all people on Earth, we may get a freedom distance shorter than size of a small village.
-- 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 on the system, 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.
+- 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