The right to be free
This article is aimed mainly at the supporters of culture without boundaries, the people who have been convinced by Lawrence Lessig (the author of “The Free Culture”) and Richard M. Stallman’s ideas of fighting the bad copyright and non-free software licenses.
Everybody knows, that DRM is bad. Also everybody knows, that Open Source is just a compromise and a stage in transition to a close-to-ideal system, which Free Software is. The free culture advocates have written dozens of books, heaps of articles and hundreds and thousands of blog entries showing the sense of standing against the law, organizations and corporations who bound (or try to put boundaries) on our freedom. Also stacks and heaps of text has been produced showing why should we boycott “bad” products designed by the aforementioned villains, the products being designed to achieve one obvious goal : to maximize profit, regardless of the consumer’s good.
The effects of these publications can easily be recognized : more and more people are now Open Source aware (mixing terms with Free Software though), there are more and more users of free/open systems, the closed formats are being pushed out, rejected by conscious users (just to mention the Ogg and FLAC’s success or even ODF’s victory over OOXML), and the new portals like do.org.pl or osnews.pl are in bloom, attracting more and more web community.
Step by step, led by the leaders like the creator of the Linux kernel – Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Creative Commons license – Lawrence Lessig or the creator of Free Software philosophy – Richard Matthew Stallman, we go on convincing more and more people and changing our reality.
However let’s try to look at the other side of the coin : with all these activities, trying to “free” the virtual world, including the user, aren’t we sometimes, however rarely, effectively restricting the freedom of those, who we want to be free ?
