This image isn't all that relevant to my post. But it's still awesome. Courtesy of Wikipedia

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big supporter of the free/open source (sorry, Stallman, but I’m going to go ahead and conflate those two terms, at least for right now) software movement. It’s been about half a year since I’ve given a proprietary operating system its own partition on my hard drive, and I’ve been using Ubuntu as my main operating system for almost two years now. And I’ve always sworn by Firefox. Turns out, however, that at least in the eyes of some, I’m not a free software user. Just a few weeks ago, I found out from someone (and I wish I could remember who–it was either Prof. Stark, Christian, or Ben) in our class that Ubuntu isn’t considered a free operating system by the Free Software Foundation because, among other things, it provides for the installation of proprietary drivers.

I have to wonder how productive it is to be really strict with one’s definition of “free”.  The case of Ubuntu provides a great example. Here we have a relatively free, largely open source operating system that some might even be considered mainstream–it’s the most popular Linux (ahem, sorry, GNU/Linux) distribution out there (at least according to Wikipedia), and some computer manufacturers (notably Dell) even sell computers with Ubuntu factory installed. Being as popular as it is, you think it’d be in the interest of the Free Software Foundation to endorse an operation system like Ubuntu that’s largely free, at least for the sake of showing people that one can have a user-friendly PC without Microsoft Windows. And yet they don’t.

To be fair, I haven’t been able to find anything on the FSF’s website that sharply criticizes Ubuntu, nor have I been able to find a rant by Stallman about how awful it is (although I did find a story about Stallman warning about the dangers of cloud computing: evidently this is how Stallman feels about my Gmail account). But at the same time, I think being really strict with what one endorses as free software only exacerbates the free software movement’s biggest problem: that it isn’t mainstream. A quick look at the OSes that the FSF does endorse illustrates my point: I’m a huge geek, and even I haven’t heard of any of those distros (or at least hadn’t heard of them before today).

Ubuntu isn’t the only example of a popular piece of relatively free software that isn’t endorsed by some members of the free software movement. The FSF doesn’t approve of Firefox, either, because “[w]hile the source code from the Mozilla project is free software, the binaries that they release include additional non-free software. Also, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins.” Never fear, however, they’ve got a substitute: IceCat. (Interesting and somewhat related anecdote: A while back the community surrounding the Linux [err, GNU/Linux, sorry...why do I keep doing that?] distribution know as Debian had made some changes to one of Mozilla’s products without the Mozilla Foundation’s approval and were told they could not use the logo. Thus was born IceWeasel.)

So exactly how stringent is the FSF’s definition of “free” in practice? A look at an OS they helped design, gNewSense (which sounds way to0 much like gNuisance, in my humble opinion), gives some idea. According to the Wikipedia page on it,  even “documentation that gives instructions on installing non-free software is excluded.”  Similarly, one of the guidelines listed on the gNewSense community’s webpage is: “Non-Free software is never a solution so please do not rationalize, justify, and minimize the consequences of proposing non-free software as a solution.” Talk about strict.

Granted, I could be entirely wrong. Perhaps proprietary software is so evil and so dangerous that it must be avoided without compromise no matter what the cost. I also think that sometimes idealists with extreme views are needed to keep a movement alive. But I have to think it’s important to attract new users to the free software community, and that’s harder to do when absolutely every component of a program or system must be non-proprietary in every way in order for it to be considered “free”.  Firefox and Ubuntu might not be completely free, but they’re way ahead of IE and Windows, and it’s counterproductive not to recommend them. Don’t get me wrong, I think the free software movement is a great thing, and I must admit that even though I make fun of him, I kinda idolize Richard Stallman. That said, I’d probably still be using Windows if something like Dynebolic were the only other operating system.