cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/22180123

It is predominantly easy to just accept bad conditions when an alternative is seemingly unfeasible. “I need this software”, a lot of us will say when even presented with a better alternative. A lot of us will argue to our bones that being subject to cruelty from software developers is necessary for one potential gain or another. All of which creates a feedback loop of re-enforcement of this parasitic idea that proprietary software is somehow inescapable and we need to give up trying to do something about it. But we shouldn’t give up and we should fight. Not just to switch from Windows to GNU / Linux, but to make it so Windows itself will start respecting you too.

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With software a lot of people lose freedom all the time. Windows is so predominately used that I don’t understand why people don’t get crazy over this. Yet banning Windows would be a problem, arguably a worse problem, than all those people using it. You should have the right to use software that you want to use, the same way as you should have the right to agree with that drug-lord. The fact that people have the choice to use something like Windows is not a problem. The problem is that Windows is not respecting the person back. There are two ways to solve this problem. One would be to chose something else. Another would be to make Windows better.

If you think that it is impossible to push on corporations with enough force, so they would yield, and start respecting freedom of people, you don’t know nothing. Progress in this area has been done numerous times. Netscape Navigator, a popular 90s web-browser, became Free Software, and now it is known as Firefox. Linux, the kernel so associated with Free Software, was at some point proprietary. Blender was proprietary before 2002. Unreal Engine started releasing their sources to people. Not under a very freedom respecting license, but it is a start. And it is way better than having nothing at all. Hell Microsoft, of all companies, started developing Free Software. Visual Studio Code, their text editor from Microsoft is mostly Free Software. Hell “Meta” the Facebook company jumped onto the Mastadon bandwagon with their Threads. Not a very good thing. But them embracing Freedom is progress. And there are more examples of this, which I hope you would provide by using the comment section, that I worked so hard to make, in the bottom of this article.

We did all this by not yielding. Most web-servers are running on Free Software because configuring proprietary software is a nightmare. Proprietary software is basically incompatible with configurability. And configurability is a key to development. Hell, most software development happens on GNU / Linux for that same reason. So much so that Microsoft reacted and put what they call “Windows Subsystem for Linux” on their system, to get some developers away from GNU / Linux. But they are doing bad job themselves. They are constantly worsening the conditions on their systems so much so that people fly out of there as soon as they know how.

Enshitification cannot happen forever. At some point people just can’t take this no longer. They would not use computers at all if that came to it. But it doesn’t need to come to it. There is software available right now to switch to. Software protected from enshitification by respecting freedom. But no… “I have to use it!”, right?

Computers are interesting beasts. They are designed to run anything. Any computation can be done. Any digital information can be processed in any way what so ever. All you need to do is to tell the computer how to do it. And it will!

There was a time where almost nothing was possible with Free Software. It was many decades ago. And what people did about it? Did they yield to the corporations? Well some did, yes. But a lot of us stood up and said “Enough!”. And we developed one tool after another. First a text editor. Then a compiler. Then a whole operating system. Why? Because we wanted those same features as in proprietary software, but without the terrible terms. Without the disrespect. Without the slavery. And it was not impossible.

Those corporations did not like it. They still don’t like it. But they have no choice. We can always tell the computer to do something ourselves. And the only way they can stop us from having this freedom is if we yield to them.

The more people using Free Software, the less they can control us. The less they will have a choice. More people using Free Software is more pressure on those corporations to release their software as Free Software. They can. And they will. If people will not yield under any circumstances to their dubious demands, they will remove the demands. If people will not blindly use a program that they don’t like, that disrespects them constantly, the program will have no other choice, but to stop disrespecting.

But more than that. The more people respect themselves, the more people use Free Software, the more feedback loop, more re-enforcement Freedom itself has. And in a few decades, after the war for Freedom is over, those trying to argue for proprietary software will be met with “I need to use it” as a counter argument. Which this time I will support.

Happy Hacking!!!