As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.
The Free Software Foundation is one of the most important organizations when it comes to open source, as it is responsible for some of the most used pieces of software on the world. They aim to make software that benefits the user and is completely free, among many other things. Organizations like these use open source as a way to make trust-able software. As a whole, the FSF represents much more than open source software, but open source is essential for it to achieve its goals.
Open source refers to software projects that make their source code available to all. In many cases, this means one can just download it off the Internet for free. Still, open source isn’t free (speaking about price) software. Open source allows users to see what exactly is going on when you run a program.
Open source puts the power on the hands of everyone, including users. For example, there are a lot of things that you can’t change about Windows, even if the change is objectively better you’re stuck with what you’ve got. On the other hand, open source allows you to change anything you want and, in a lot of cases, make of part of the package.
Having software open to everybody changes much more than just the legal status. These can go from development practices all the way to community building. A big part
Personally, I find myself to many times be “stuck” with non-free software. In an ideal world, open source alternatives would always be just as good and have as much support as the others. There are many cases where some specific task can’t be easily achieved or my machine can’t run the opensource alternative well, and I choose the proprietary alternative. I’ll continue to make an effort to embrace free software and hopefully some day contribute to making it better.
