"Freedom is a feature, not a benefit." — Jeff Waugh

American Freedom, by Freedom Toast, used under the CC By-NoCommercial license.

It's great to know where our priorities lie, as a community. For example, fighting for freedom is a priority. We do this by writing software and making it freely availble to use, modify, puke on, distribute, and print on t-shirts, using the many licenses which the Open Source Initiative and Free Software Foundation deem to be free. Some of these licenses are arguably more or less free than others. The everlasting BSD vs. GPL debate is a classic example. Today, there has been an exceptional amount of hooplah about the intlclock applet which was written by various people at Novell, and why it wasn't done in upstream code, why it's now becoming relevant, and the like. During this "discussion" on IRC, the concept of freedom came up, and Jeff was kind enough to enlighten me with the above quote. However, I think it very abruptly misses the point. A feature is in fact, a benefit. It is a prominent part. A special attraction. A feature in software, is a technological or functional advantage provided in an application, that competitors do not provide. Attempting to force vendors to develop any and all modifications and features upstream, basically states to them, that they are not allowed to provide technological advantage over their competitors. They must seek alternate means to provide an advantage. This alternate means, has generally in the past, been marketing. And we all know where that got us.

American Freedom, by ONE/MILLION, used under the CC By-NoCommercial-NoDerivitives license.

Freedom is not a feature. It is a right. We all have that right, and we must exercise it. I think many of us have lost sight of what the true meaning of freedom is, in our desires to have companies open up their technologies so that we may provide support for their hardware, protocols, or other features. With that desire, it seems people forget about what really matters. The people. It is the people that makes freedom real. Not the government. Not a zealot. And not some company releasing a driver under a free license. Freedom is not some tangible item that we can suddenly attain. It is like enlightenment or love that way. It's either there or it isn't, and by the looks of things we are there. Nobody is forcing us to buy iPods. Nobody is forcing us to buy nVidia. There are plenty of options out there in terms of technology. Freedom is choice. The ability to take in knowledge and make rational decisions in the best interest of one's self and those in the community. We get so lost in fighting to force everyone to free their technology, that we fail to celebrate and improve on the battles we've won. They get announced, and talked about for a few days at most, and then they are forgotten.

The irony of protest, by Fishbowl Collective, used under the CC By-NoCommercial-ShareAlike license.

We always treat code as if it's a tangible object. We place restrictions on its use. We create patents for its abliities. But it is really no more than an art form. It is a method of expression, just like poetry, photography, music, or other audio or visual art forms. It is often the core of other art forms, allowing us to product music, edit photos, or write poetry. It is an expression of our abilities as programmers. Some people write novels. Some people write lyrics. Some people choreograph elaborate fight scenes using tight wires. We write code. We manipulate pixels. We dump millions of 1s and 0s to pieces of hardware to make audio, video, and devices work together and fill our lives with the joy of the internet. So much of what we're trying to do is put the kind of restrictions on this freedom, that we really don't want. We want people to help further our goals. But we seem so vindictive when everyone doesn't behave like a few people want. Some people in the community are so tied to wanting a set of social norms to be defined, that we lose out on people who don't always follow those norms. The norms should be determined by the behavior of the community they are defined in, not by a few select people who discuss it in a private forum and come up with some list. The community should define its own behaivor, and should not prevent people from deviating slightly from those norms at appropriate times. For obviously bad deviations, yes, there should be reprimand, but for situations where someone develops interesting code and features outside of SVN, I don't think we should be so harsh. Writing code that is done fully within the limits of its licensing, is perhaps less of a problem than when someone does not fully comply with a license.