By Paul Nijjar
Published in September 2013
Have you ever done a Google search? Looked something up on Wikipedia? Used a Macintosh computer or an Android phone? Updated your status on Facebook? If you have done any of these things, then you have – directly or indirectly – benefited from the existence of “Free Software”.
Free software (also known as open source, software libre,or FLOSS) are computer programs that anybody is legally permitted to use, study, improve, and share.
On Software Freedom Day, we celebrate and reflect upon how free software has shaped our world. We also get together for presentations, interesting conversations, snacks, software and free culture giveaways, and installation support. The Working Centre has helped host Software Freedom Day events since 2008. Over these five short years the way we use computers has changed dramatically. Our computing is moving away from desktop and laptop computers and onto tablets and smartphones. Our software and data is moving off of our hard drives and onto “the cloud” – hosted services on other people’s servers. Giving away CDs of software seems quaint – many modern PCs don’t even come with CD-ROMs. What role do the ideas of software freedom play in this new world?
For one thing, much of this new world is built upon free software. All of the services and products at the top of this article were built upon free software tools. Google powers its search engines on GNU/Linux servers, and administers them using the Python programming language. It built its Android phone operating system on top of the Linux kernel. Wikipedia runs on top of software called MediaWiki.
Apple built MacOS on top of FreeBSD. Much of Facebook is programmed in the PHP language. Some people in the free software community are (justifiably) wary of these organizations – the power they hold and the way they lock in our data. But free software means that even organizations you dislike are allowed to use your software for their needs, and many of these companies have used (and continue to use) free software to build their fortunes.
Quaint or not, there is a plethora of free software tools available for our desktops and laptops. We can use free software tools to make animations, compose music, write manifestos, communicate with our friends, and investigate how computers work.
In that light, many of this year’s presentations focus on multimedia:how to create it, organize it, and host it. You may not want to create your own version of Flickr or YouTube, but the fact that free software exists to allow you to do so means you are less locked into these services when they do things you don’t like.
This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the GNU project. You may never have heard of this project, but it has made much of the free software world (and therefore much of the modern Internet) possible.
We will commemorate this anniversary with a talk about the history and importance of GNU.
Technology may seem like magic, but it’s not. Free software gives us tools to understand and challenge how technology works and where it is headed. On September 28, join us, pick up some of these tools, and learn how you can use them to help empower yourself in this new technological age.
