How To Free Software If You Are Not A Programmer
There are a tremendous number of things that people could do that aren’t programming. People tend to assume that the only way to help the free software movement is to write software. Well sure, we would like more people to write free software but there are lots of other things to do such as organizing activism. Become a speaker. Write articles. Write letters to the editor whenever you see a newspaper or magazine praise non-free software, by judging it according to shallow criteria, only caring what job it would do and what’s the price and not caring whether it respects your freedom. Well, write a letter to the editor. Do this every time you see one. If you write one once a week, from time to time they’ll get published and it’ll do some good. Join the FSF. That way you’ll contribute some money to our work. Participate in our anti-DRM campaign DefectiveByDesign.org. Just go there and sign up. Join in a protest. There are many ways you can help. Write documentation. We really need more free documentation of free software. If you’re good at writing English, that’s a great way to contribute. Perhaps even more useful than writing source code. If you are in a school, then you can organise with other people in the school and pressure for the school to move to the exclusive use of free software. Look at gnu.org/help for a long list of suggestions for how you can help. This is a campaign for freedom, and nowadays we have to campaign against unjust laws and proposals to impose additional unjust laws that forbid free software. To block those we need political activity and we have to do it despite the fact that democracy is very badly ill. For businesses to have special political influence means that democracy is ill. The purpose of democracy is to make sure that wealthy people cannot have influence proportional to their wealth. And if they do have more influence than you or I, that means democracy is failing. The laws that they obtain in this way have no moral authority, but they have the capability of doing harm.
The How To Free Software If You Are Not A Programmer by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
April 14, 2007 | Filed Under Personal Thoughts
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