A restrictive end-user license agreement is one way a company can exert power over the user. When the free software movement was founded thirty years ago, these restrictive licenses were the primary user-hostile power dynamic, so permissive and copyleft licenses emerged as synonyms to software freedom. Licensing does matter; user autonomy is lost with subscription models, revocable licenses, binary-only software, and onerous legal clauses. Yet these issues pertinent to desktop software do not scratch the surface of today’s digital power dynamics.

Today, companies exert power over their users by: tracking, selling data, psychological manipulation, intrusive advertising, planned obsolescence, and hostile Digital “Rights” Management (DRM) software. These issues affect every digital user, technically inclined or otherwise, on desktops and smartphones alike.

The free software movement promised to right these wrongs via free licenses on the source code, with adherents arguing free licenses provide immunity to these forms of malware since users could modify the code. Unfortunately most users lack the resources to do so. While the most egregious violations of user freedom come from companies publishing proprietary software, these ills can remain unchecked even in open source programs, and not all proprietary software exhibits these issues. The modern browser is nominally free software containing the trifecta of telemetry, advertisement, and DRM; a retro video game is proprietary software but relatively harmless.

As such, it’s not enough to look at the license. It’s not even enough to consider the license and a fixed set of issues endemic to proprietary software; the context matters. Software does not exist in a vacuum. Just as proprietary software tends to integrate with other proprietary software, free software tends to integrate with other free software. Software freedom in context demands a gentle nudge towards software in user interests, rather than corporate interests.

How then should we conceptualize software freedom?

Consider the three adherents to free software and open source: hobbyists, corporations, and activists. Individual hobbyists care about tinkering with the software of their choice, emphasizing freely licensed source code. These concerns do not affect those who do not make a sport out of modifying code. There is nothing wrong with this, but it will never be a household issue.

For their part, large corporations claim to love “open source”. No, they do not care about the social movement, only the cost reduction achieved by taking advantage of permissively licensed software. This corporate emphasis on licensing is often to the detriment of software freedom in the broader context. In fact, it is this irony that motivates software freedom beyond the license.

It is the activist whose ethos must apply to everyone regardless of technical ability or financial status. There is no shortage of open source software, often of corporate origin, but this is insufficient – it is the power dynamic we must fight.

We are not alone. Software freedom is intertwined with contemporary social issues, including copyright reform, privacy, sustainability, and Internet addiction. Each issue arises as a hostile power dynamic between a corporate software author and the user, with complicated interactions with software licensing. Disentangling each issue from licensing provides a framework to address nuanced questions of political reform in the digital era.

Copyright reform generalizes the licensing approaches of the free software and free culture movements. Indeed, free licenses empower us to freely use, adapt, remix, and share media and software alike. However, proprietary licenses micromanaging the core of human community and creativity are doomed to fail. Proprietary licenses have had little success preventing the proliferation of the creative works they seek to “protect”, and the rights to adapt and remix media have long been exercised by dedicated fans of proprietary media, producing volumes of fanfiction and fan art. The same observation applies to software: proprietary end-user license agreements have stopped neither file sharing nor reverse-engineering. In fact, a unique creative fandom around proprietary software has emerged in video game modding communities. Regardless of legal concerns, the human imagination and spirit of sharing persists. As such, we need not judge anyone for proprietary software and media in their life; rather, we must work towards copyright reform and free licensing to protect them from copyright overreach.

Privacy concerns are also traditional in software freedom discourse. True, secure communications software can never be proprietary, given the possibility of backdoors and impossibility of transparent audits. Unfortunately, the converse fails: there are freely licensed programs that inherently compromise user privacy. Consider third-party clients to centralized unencrypted chat systems. Although two users of such a client privately messaging one another are using only free software, if their messages are being data mined, there is still harm. The need for context is once more underscored.

Sustainability is an emergent concern, tying to software freedom via the electronic waste crisis. In the mobile space, where deprecating smartphones after a few short years is the norm and lithium batteries are hanging around in landfills indefinitely, we see the paradox of a freely licensed operating system with an abysmal social track record. A curious implication is the need for free device drivers. Where proprietary drivers force devices into obsolescence shortly after the vendor abandons them in favour of a new product, free drivers enable long-term maintenance. As before, licensing is not enough; the code must also be upstreamed and mainlined. Simply throwing source code over a wall is insufficient to resolve electronic waste, but it is a prerequisite. At risk is the right of a device owner to continue use of a device they have already purchased, even after the manufacturer no longer wishes to support it. Desired by climate activists and the dollar conscious alike, we cannot allow software to override this right.

Beyond copyright, privacy, and sustainability concerns, no software can be truly “free” if the technology itself shackles us, dumbing us down and driving us to outrage for clicks. Thanks to television culture spilling onto the Internet, the typical citizen has less to fear from government wiretaps than from themselves. For every encrypted message broken by an intelligence agency, thousands of messages are willingly broadcast to the public, seeking instant gratification. Why should a corporation or a government bother snooping into our private lives, if we present them on a silver platter? Indeed, popular open source implementations of corrupt technology do not constitute success, an issue epitomized by free software responses to social media. No, even without proprietary software, centralization, or cruel psychological manipulation, the proliferation of social media still endangers society.

Overall, focusing on concrete software freedom issues provides room for nuance, rather than the traditional binary view. End-users may make more informed decisions, with awareness of technologies’ trade-offs beyond the license. Software developers gain a framework to understand how their software fits into the bigger picture, as a free license is necessary but not sufficient for guaranteeing software freedom today. Activists can divide-and-conquer.

Many outside of our immediate sphere understand and care about these issues; long-term success requires these allies. Claims of moral superiority by licenses are unfounded and foolish; there is no success backstabbing our friends. Instead, a nuanced approach broadens our reach. While abstract moral philosophies may be intellectually valid, they are inaccessible to all but academics and the most dedicated supporters. Abstractions are perpetually on the political fringe, but these concrete issues are already understood by the general public. Furthermore, we cannot limit ourselves to technical audiences; understanding network topology cannot be a prerequisite to private conversations. Overemphasizing the role of source code and under-emphasizing the power dynamics at play is a doomed strategy; for decades we have tried and failed. In a post-Snowden world, there is too much at stake for more failures. Reforming the specific issues paves the way to software freedom. After all, social change is harder than writing code, but with incremental social reform, licenses become the easy part.

The nuanced analysis even helps individual software freedom activists. Purist attempts to refuse non-free technology categorically are laudable, but outside a closed community, going against the grain leads to activist burnout. During the day, employers and schools invariably mandate proprietary software, sometimes used to facilitate surveillance. At night, popular hobbies and social connections today are mediated by questionable software, from the DRM in a video game to the surveillance of a chat with a group of friends. Cutting ties with friends and abandoning self-care as a prerequisite to fighting powerful organizations seems noble, but is futile. Even without politics, there remain technical challenges to using only free software. Layering in other concerns, or perhaps foregoing a mobile smartphone, only amplifies the risk of software freedom burnout.

As an application, this approach to software freedom brings to light disparate issues with the modern web raising alarm in the free software community. The traditional issue is proprietary JavaScript, a licensing question, yet considering only JavaScript licensing prompts both imprecise and inaccurate conclusions about web “applications”. Deeper issues include rampant advertising and tracking; the Internet is the largest surveillance network in human history, largely for commercial aims. To some degree, these issues are mitigated by script, advertisement, and tracker blockers; these may be pre-installed in a web browser for harm reduction in pursuit of a gentler web. However, the web’s fatal flaw is yet more fundamental. By design, when a user navigates to a URL, their browser executes whatever code is piped on the wire. Effectively, the web implies an automatic auto-update, regardless of the license of the code. Even if the code is benign, it is still every year more expensive to run, forcing a hardware upgrade cycle deprecating old hardware which would work if only the web weren’t bloated by corporate interests. A subtler point is the “attention economy” tied into the web. While it’s hard to become addicted to reading in a text-only browser, binge-watching DRM-encumbered television is a different story. Half-hearted advances like “Reading Mode” are limited by the ironic distribution of documents over an app store. On the web, disparate issues of DRM, forced auto-update, privacy, sustainability, and psychological dark patterns converge to a single worst case scenario for software freedom. The licenses were only the beginning.

Nevertheless, there is cause for optimism. Framed appropriately, the fight for software freedom is winnable. To fight for software freedom, fight for privacy. Fight for copyright reform. Fight for sustainability. Resist psychological dark patterns. At the heart of each is a software freedom battle – keep fighting and we can win.

First published by Alyssa Rosenzweig under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Given the "trap" that supposes the presense of JavaScript on the web, we could be executing proprietary software without realising. This software can compromise our privacy or do tasks that we don't want. Maybe we don't want to run JavaScript because we're testing how a page functions without JavaScript during the creation of a website.

Keep reading Disable JavaScript easily in Firefox and derivatives

This article was originally published by Alyssa Rosezweig under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

I refuse to carry a cellphone – to my puzzled friends in our techno-obsessed society, here’s why. A number of you have already asked what my number is to text me. Perhaps you were a teacher in one of my classes asking me to run some proprietary software in class. Maybe you were a family member, concerned that in an unsafe situation, I would not be able to call for help.

There are four layers of reasoning beyond my refusal to have a cellphone, despite being an active Internet user. In order of least to greatest importance:

First, mobile electronics are uncomfortable to me. My time on computers is largely spent on writing, programming, and art; for me these tasks require full-sized keyboards or drawing tablets. This is not an ethical reason to avoid phones and tablets, of course, and I recognise that many people have uses more suited to the tiny form-factor.

Second, cellphones users create cellphone culture. In a fraction of an adult lifetime, cellphones have changed from nonexistent to socially acceptable to use while talking to someone in real-life. This culture is not inevitable for digital electronics – many people use technology responsibly, for which I applaud them – but it remains depressingly common. If I were to have a phone in front of my nose while pretending to talk to my own friends, it would continue to perpetuate the notion that this is okay behaviour. As I fear I might become someone who misuses technology in this way, I avoid carrying a cellphone at all to avoid the ethical risk.

Third, cellphones are grave risks to freedom and privacy. The vast majority of phones on the market run proprietary operating systems, like iOS, and are chock full of proprietary software. Additionally, unlike most laptops and desktops, many of these operating systems run signature checks. That is, it is cryptographically impossible and in some cases illegal to replace the system with free software. This in and of itself is a reason to refuse to touch these devices.

The real situation is unfortunately worse. In conventional electronics, there is a single main chip inside, the CPU. The CPU runs the operating system, like GNU/Linux, and is in full control of the machine. It is not this way for cellphones; these devices have two main chips – the CPU and the baseband. The former has the usual set of freedom issues; the latter is an Internet-connected blackbox with a terrifying set of capabilities. At minimum, due to the design of the cellphone networks, any time that the phone is connected to the network (that is, the baseband is online), the user’s location can be tracked by triangulating cell towers. Already the risk is unacceptable for many people. Traditional telephony operations are vulnerable to surveillance and tampering, as neither calls nor texts are encrypted. And, to add insult to injury, few phones feature acceptable baseband isolation. That is, the CPU, which might run free software, does not control the baseband, which for practical purposes is illegal to run free software in the United States. Rather, in many cases, the baseband controls the CPU. It doesn’t matter if encrypted messaging over XMPP is used if the baseband can simply take a screenshot without the CPU-side operating system’s knowledge nor consent. Alternatively, again depending how the baseband is connected to the rest of the system, it may have the capabilities to remotely activate the microphone and camera. 33 years late, a world in which everyone carries a cellphone surpasses George Orwell’s nightmares. Maybe you have “nothing to hide”, but I for one still care about my privacy. Cellphones are spooky. Count me out.

Finally, in light of the grave implications for society and freedom, I refuse to perpetuate this system. I could decide to carry a cellphone anyway, deciding that as a boring person I can sacrifice the freedom in the name of instantly-gratifying convenience. But by being complacent, I would only add one to the size of the problem, a heavy ethical burden when using the cellphone network contributes to the network effect, as the name suggests.

If I were to have my phone out in front of others, I would be signaling that “cellphones are okay”. If anybody looks up to me ethically, they too might continue to use a cellphone.

If I allowed my friends to text me rather than use more ethical media, I would be signaling that “texting is okay” and “it is reasonable to expect people to text”. If they were on the fence about the ethics and need of carrying a phone, this might push them to keep it.

If I used a phone for activities in class, I would be signaling that “21st century students should have a phone”. I would rather be the final holdout in the class to remind them that this is not an ethical assumption.

If I get a puzzled look from my acquaintances, confidants, and teachers, I now have the opportunity to educate them about free software and privacy. Few people are aware of the risks of these “portable surveillance devices” as Richard Stallman would write. These “awkward moments” are perfect opportunities to help them make a more informed decision.

By carrying a cellphone I would be perpetuating something evil. By actively refusing to carry one, I push back and actively do something good.

So, rather than use a cellphone, what are my alternatives?

For most digital tasks, including writing this post, I use a laptop running free software. As a bonus, to connect to the Internet, I use a Wi-Fi card which runs free firmware!

To talk to my friends, I use decentralised, open specification protocols where possible. In particular, I’m available on email, XMPP, and Mastodon. In some cases where this is not possible due to the network effect, I use free centralised systems like IRC. Occasionally, I use proprietary systems that have been reverse-engineered for use with free software, like Discord [the reverse-engineering project she linked to no longer exists]. Where possible, I layer on strong encryption implemented with free software, like GPG and OTR, for extra protection against privacy threats. If locational privacy is an issue, I will connect via Tor. Any one of these measures is a major step above phone calls, text messaging, Whatsapp, or Snapchat. All of them together will shield you from most adversaries.

To connect while I am away from home, I look for public Wi-Fi networks, which can be made secure when paired with encryption and Tor. If this is not an option, I may need to ask someone else to borrow their electronics – this is unfortunate, but while the network effect is in play, it is ethically acceptable to exploit it. Most of the time I will avoid connecting to the Internet away from home anyway; I’m more productive offline!

So, yes, I do get by without a cellphone. It is not always convenient, but productivity, freedom, and ethical behaviour win over convenience any day.

I encourage you to do the same.