Freedom Dreams

There’s an oft reappearing topic of debate in Free Software circles, about whether Free Software is really about freedom. I want to give a different take on this issue, using some ideas from classical liberal philosophy.

The debate that I see most often starts when a strong free software supporter suggests that we should use exclusively free software on our machines. To this, someone else may respond that, surely such a policy is restricting a users freedom to run whatever software they want, including proprietary software.

I want to address this issue in a different way, by asking, what is freedom? According to the FSF, freedom in software is composed of the freedom to #0 run the program in any way, #1 study the program, #2 distribute  the program and #3 modify the program.

Fair enough, but what is freedom in a more general sense? Dictionary definition time - “The condition of being free of restraints.”. Yes, there are many different ways of defining freedom, but this is the one that I, as a voluntaryist would most agree with. It its the simplest and most consistent way of thinking about freedom - you are free if you are not being restrained - that is you are not having force initiated against you.¹

So, how does this conception of freedom tally with the FSF’s. Looked at one way, not too badly. Being free from restraints (if you don’t hurt anyone or their property), in the area of software, would mean no copyright law. This being the case, you would be able to use and copy software as you saw fit (”freedoms” #0 and #2).

However, there’s a problem with this. In order to exercise the supposed freedoms #1 and #3, there is, as the FSF says, a prerequisite, the source code. Of course, in the sense of real freedom, without copyright law, you would not necessarily be given the source code, a programmer might choose to withold it. However, you could choose to use only software that is “open” (has source code), and the majority of software would probably be this way, since there isn’t the incentive of a copyright monopoly over the work, and open code makes it much easier for benevolent people to participate.

In this way, real freedom - that is, no restraining copyright law - fits very nicely with principles of free software. However, the same does not work so well the other way round. It may seem outrageous to suggest free software advocates, such as the FSF are working against real freedom and initiating force - after all, for all their heckling, they don’t actually force people to use software - but, in other ways they do.

As I said, to be actually free, you must not have the implied force of copyright threatening you. With this in mind, take a look at the GPL - what is it? A copyright license, and a fairly restrictive one at that.Yes, it is a free software license, because it doesn’t restrict any of the four specific software freedoms. But it restricts plenty of other things, you being able to distribute only parts of it (ie. binaries), or, combine it with non-compatible code and distribute (potentially very useful). These things are restricted with the threat of force. A threat, that through the legal system (SFLC lawsuits) has been carried out in some cases. Such restriction by force, is, in my eyes at least, anti-freedom and immoral.

However, in case it was obvious, these are not reasons for me to be making a big move away from free software, as I said, free software fits well with my sense of freedom - I strongly support the idea of being free to do what you want and having source code. Proprietary software is a much worse use of immoral copyright force. But, I disagree with the use of copyright, to advance the specific software freedoms, as it leads to other freedoms being lost - this is especially so with copyleft.

So, instead of fighting copyright with copyright, and amassing users to free software systems, we should try to abolish copyright, to try to make all software free. After all, do we really think we will manage to switch a majority of users away from the dominating OSes any time soon? Abolishing copyright might seem the harder thing to do, but it is much easier for ordinary people to get behind, without needing to switch much software etc. (of course, it would be good if they did). Now is as good a time as ever due to the outrage over ridiculous bittorent fines.

One final note, the emphasis on anti-copyright rather than 100% free software is why I now conceed to convenience in certain matters - namely, I now use adobe flash plugin on an ubuntu system.

#1 - Defensive force is of course another matter. You still have freedom, I would say, if you would have reasonable defensive force used against you if you hurt someone else.

Soo, its over a week since my exams ended \o/… now I just have the long wait for results day near the end of August. So, now I have time to write a long overdue blog post. There are two things that make this blog post different to previous ones…

Firstly I’ve started using the microblogging service identi.ca again. For the uninitiated, identica (I never know whether to include the full stop or not) is basically a free software version of twitter, which uses an open protocol. (The software is actually called laconica, and anyone on one laconica instance can follow anyone on any other laconica instance.) I’m not on twitter because, most the people who’d want to read my messages (people in the free software/open tech movement) are on identica (or some other laconica site) anyway.

I’m not entirely sure how to use identica yet. I don’t mean with regards to the technical aspect, type 140 characters or less into a box on the website, or in a client such as Gwibber, and you’re away. No, I mean what to type, how, and when in order to make it most useful for me. At the moment I’m probably overusing it a little at the moment, but I think what it boils down to for me is a notebook. A notebook that is published for others to see, should they find it interesting. But equally, a notebook for me to look back at. For example, I’m writing this blog posts using some of my notices as reference (tags make this especially useful. I don’t know if you can show tags for just one user yet though).

And the second thing? I’m writing this blogpost using yet another different keyboard layout, colemak. This is the second time that I have switched layout, the first being to dvorak. Colemak is still slightly less popular than dvorak (it is third after dvorak and qwerty). So what made me switch? The fact that I had several weeks to spend doing something rather pointless… well kindof. But colemak does have some nice benefits. Your fingers move much less than on either qwerty or dvorak (dvorak places emphasis on hand alternation instead). But what really sets colemak apart from dvorak? Its pragmatism.

Okay, I’m not sure that’s quite the right word, but it sounds good. Basically, whereas dvorak moves keys, including punctuation, all over the place, making it harder and more formidable to learn, colemak moves only letter keys and not all of them at that. Many of the loss common keys, especially those on the bottom row, are in exactly the same place as in qwerty. This is ro much so (especially to the far left) that I showed the layout to a friend, who said, “thats not much different to a normal keyboard”. That would never happen with dvorak.

This may be a silly thing to be picking up on, but its important. As much as I like to be weird and different, it would be great if more people started trying more efficint layouts. Not only is colemak easier to learn coming from qwerty, it also simply looks less intimidating - making perple more likely to give it a go.

Confession time. I didn’t actually find colemak any easier to learn than dvorak, but that is because i was previously using dvorak full time, and dvorak and colemak are *very* different. However, the similarity to qwerty did manifest itself in a different way: it was much much easier to switch between colemak and qwerty than it had been between dvorak and qwerty. In fact, for the first couple of days, whilst I was learning, I used qwerty at night to type faster to people.

This is in *massive* contrast to dvorak. Whilst dvorak destroyed my qwerty skills at first, and i never properly recovered them, using colemak actually seems to have improved my qwerty typing! This ability to have both the common and the efficient layout at a good proficiency, without them conflicting inside your mind, is what really sets colemak apart from dvorak in my opinion. The fact is, as efficint as a layout might be, you’re still going to run into qwerty quite often in this society we are in, and colemak allows you to have the best of both worlds.

I’ve been practising and learning colemak for just over a week now. Its now very usable, although, maybe not as fast as I would like. More than good enough for writing an 800 word blog post. And, the problem in my case is not with colemak itself, it is coming to it from the weirdness of dvorak.

So, do I think most people will be using colemak it any time soon? No, afraid not. However, I do think its a great alternative, and hopefully, as aproachable as it is, will attract a growing userbase, in the geek community at least.

Today I found out (although not very reliably), that someone I had known last year at school had been arrested, possibly on terrorism charges. This person had been producing homemade bombs, and was apparently planning on trying to blow up the school. This person was an anarchist.

When the media, or the majority of people refer to anarchists, this is the type of person they are thinking of. Someone who is violent, is a threat to people’s life and property. And can you blame them? This person called themself an anarchist, and, in point of fact, was one. They believed in a society without government.

However, the propblem with the idea of anarchy, is that it is a negation - without government. I oppose a government, and therefore am technically an anarchist. Do I agree with this person’s actions? Not in the slightest.

The thing with anarchy is that it is a negation, of a broad, complex, and arguably misunderstood thing. By most people, the government is seen as an agent of order - thus anarchy is seen to be a society without order. In fact, from talking briefly with this particular anarchist, a society without order is exactly what he wants - and violence is a means which he will use to achieve it.

Why I so strongly disagree with his actions can be seen when you consider my view of government. Government is an agent of violence, of coercion. It is this violence I wish to be rid of - my anarchy is a society without instituionalised force, a voluntaryist society where people interact with each other peacefully and civilly. This is almost the opposite of what is wanted by this other person.

We need to focus on the positive. What we want not what we don’t. People might also presume that since we are against the state, we are against the “enslavement” of property; that we are anarcho-syndacists. We need to stop presenting ourseves as anti-state, although we are. We need to change ourselves from being anti-state to pro-freedom, pro-voluntary interaction and pro-individuality. And I know all this has been said by others before. But it is now that I realise the importance of it. I plan to stop using the word “anarchy” - I will say what I am, what I am not.

However, back to this person - I do sympathise to a degree. I think he may genuinely have caught a glimpse of what is wrong with modern society. But they have misidentified it, and are trying to correct it in a way that, will in fact make things worse. Violence is not the solution, it is the root cause of our problems. Attacks such as his just give the government a reason to be more oppresive.

So, although we should always be clear to distance ourselves from people such as this. But they’re part way to where we are. They know the state is bad, but don’t know way, don’t realise that violence is the problem. So, what I wonder now, is can we help them progress further. I knew this person, and knew of his beliefs. If I had managed to help him understand voluntaryism, might he never be where he is today. Could I have saved him risking time in jail, and converted him to a pro-freedom but anti-violence activist?

I don’t know. I think he may have been to far gone. But the point is, some people are straying towards traditional violent anarchism, and we need to stop them, show them the real problem, and the real alternative. Voluntary action, not chaos, is the real remedy to the state.

This blog his a whole year old today. Happy birthday freedomdreams! Its funny really, in many ways, it seems like much longer than a year has passed, and so many things have changed. My belief in freedom has shifted from software to a far wider scale; I have met a person who means more to me than any other; my future has become, in some ways clearer, and in other ways I have hazy and (arguably) wacky ideas for it.

And as for this blog itself? Well, I’m changing, and so will this blog, which is a good thing. But this state of neglect it is in at the moment is not good. I plan to start blogging more often again, probably a lot more about voluntaryism. It helps me clarify and work over my own thoughts, and hopefully I’ll be able to offer an insight of my new thoughts to others. So, watch this space, another blogpost will be coming soon (I promise). Maybe a site redisign is in order, or maybe just a few tweaks. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen… but I plan on being here for a few years to come. I’m still still Dreaming of Freedom! And I always will be, until the day when that fabled freedom really becomes a reality.

P.S. I really do ramble don’t I. Two paragraphs to say “A year since I started blogging. Not blogged so much recently, more soon.”
P.P.S. Woo, for self referencialism.
P.P.P.S. Yay, for nostalgic self-self-referencialism
P.P.P.P.S…. nah, only kidding

This is my forty third blog post. 43 is an important number for me, I am number 43 of 43 others. Part of the spiritual force that is the 43.

The 43 have existed many times throughout history. It is hard to tell quite how many times, because names change, and stories are told from different perspectives. Throughout every major event in the world’s history, the 43 have been part of it. Not just observers, but actual pieces in the tapestry of history. These 43 threads are being brought together oncee again. Destiny is collocting the members of the 43, ready for the next great change in the world.

The 43 are a force for what is right and just. The philosophy of the 43, or 43ism as it may be known, is based on three basic principles:

Love, Life and Liberty
These are the three pillars of 43ism.

Without life, there can be neither love nor liberty.
Without liberty, one can not reach that which one loves, or truly live
Without love, there can be no meaning of life, no point to liberty

The 43 follow this philosophy, and together, will bring help return its essense to the world - help the world regain its lost 43dom. A state of full 43dom is the ultimate goal of the 43. Where true love and compassion is shown by each to every other; where people are free to act in true accordance with the nature of themselves; where people no longer have to survive, as so often in the world today, but can truly live.

Watch this space, It’s a conspiracy!

It’s three months since my last blog post, and quite a few things have happened since then. There’s been Christmas, New Year, my January exams; I’ve learnt to solve a Rubick’s cube, started playing the piano a bit more often, had a conditional offer from Cambridge University. I’ve also updated this blog to Wordpress 2.7, so sorry for any breakages. Unfortunately, something that hasn’t happened is further progress on AGPLMail and Libreapps. I’m sorry, both those projects have died a slow death - I hope to resurrect them both in the future, but I make no guarantees.

However, for me personally, the biggest thing that happened is none of the above. It’s something I first started thinking about nearly a year ago, asking myself what freedom really was. Interestingly, looking back, I have blogged much about the transition to where I am now. And where is that?, I hear you ask. I am now a voluntaryist.

As a voluntaryist, I believe that every human being owns their own life, and thus their liberty and property. This is the idea of self ownership. All interactions should be voluntary, so initiating force against someone is morally wrong - the non-aggression principle. (Defensive force is a completely acceptable and unfortunately necessary way to deal with those who decide to initiate force against you). And, I believe that this principle of non-aggression applies not just to individuals but also to the government - because, all I see government now is just a bunch of individuals claiming the authority and knowledge to tell other people what to do, and I believe that their claims are false.

I used to accept government as a necessary evil, but now I realise that it is an unnecessary one. People are perfectly capable of organising and defending themselves without the force of government there. The system by which this would happen is one of anarcho-capitalism or market anarchy - The Market for Liberty did a great job of helping me understand how this would work. Not only would such a sytem be as good as a governmental one, in most places it would be far superior, because people are generally better at making decisions about there own lives than the countless bureaucrats in Washington or Whitehall, who have no idea about the individual complexities of every individual’s situation.

So, even once I had come to the conclusion that society could function perfectly well without government, there was still something bothering me. You see, for small government conservatives, proof that government is unnecessary for an orderly society is enough to make them voluntaryists. But, I wasn’t conservative, I’ve always to dislike political classifications (although not as much as I do now), but, on the left to right scale, I knew I was certainly somewhere on the left. I care about people and nature, I don’t want the poor exploited or abandoned, and the same applies to a lesser extent to the environment. I’ve never been a communist, but surely slightly socialist governments that make sure the poor are treated acceptably and are given a chance are a good thing, right?

Wrong. Firstly, although some people in government are genuinely trying to help the poor, there are also many people in government who do not care, and the many rules and regulations that the government create often end up stifling the opportunities for the poor. One example of this would be the fact that Churches in some places have been told they can not allow poor people to sleep in their buildings because this contravenes zoning regulations. Doesn’t sound helpful to me.

Nonetheless, I still believe that people should be compassionate and help those in need. Not only does government squash others attempts at this, when it does it itself it does it in the most inefficient and uncompassionate way possible. Money is taken from people by force (taxes) and then goes through government programs, who have to employ bureaucrats, leading to only a percentage going to those actually in need. In a voluntary society, people would give money to organisations that they support, so this kind of wastefulness with funds would not be accepted.

The idea that you don’t need government for kindness and generosity to flourish, and in fact quite the opposite, was brought to me best by The Law, an old french book by Frédéric Bastiat - “Every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.” Another point of this book is that government can not possible act for the good of everyone, it will be biased by those with friends of political power, by the most vocal pressure groups. This kind of twisting of where government force aimed is a great waste of people’s time and money, and ultimately does not favour the poor, since they don’t have time or money to spare. In the words of Bastiat - “legislation will then be — in fact, it already is — the battlefield for the fantasies and greed of everyone.” We all try and get government to help ourselves, and in the end life is made worse for everyone.

So, to sum up, I new thoroughly believe that coercion (initiated force), and is no more justifiable when it is done by “the government” than ordinary people. I value compassion - helping the poor and looking after the environment. The best and most effective way to do these things is in a world without the artificial interference of those who call themselves the government.

Free software is a good thing, its empowering, I might even go as far as to say its the way things should be done. One of the biggest threats to free software at the moment is “web services”, or if you’re an airy fairy Web 2.0 person “The Cloud” (airy could, geddit?). The reason its such of a threat is because not only most open source advocates, but also a lot of free software fans are using these propretiary, remotely hosted applications. Including me.

Now, I personally think web services are a useful thing, especially since most people end up using multiple computers. But, the critical requirement for web services that respect the users freedom is that the user can take their data and run the software, in freedom, on their own server. If they can’t do this, they are locked into one vendor who may go bust at any time, this isn’t right. (A great example of doing-it-right™ is wordpress, I was able to migrate this blog, onto my own server, using free software, with great ease.)

So, a couple of weeks ago, I had one of my amazing code genius moments, and I decided to write a free software replacement for GMail. I did this because no-one else seems to be addressing this issue (except maybe the Bongo Project, but they’ve decided to rewrite the entire web front-end, so it doesn’t seem very ready at the moment).

Anyway, I know have a working (but rather hackish) email client written in php that supports conversations and archiving, which I have called AGPLMail. The name is due to the the fact its released under the AGPL (bet you’d never have guessed). For those not in the know, this is an FSF license, like GPL, but which extends the provision about users right to source code to include programs accessed over the network. This means someone can’t take my code, change it, offer it as a service, and then not contribute this. My application actually prints its own source code.

Now, the problem with my “code genius” moments, is that over about a week I write several hundred lines of codes, and then get distracted by something else, and leave it half finished. This is the fate that greeted Freedometer, something I don’t think I’ve even blogged about.

And that, is I guess the point of me writing this, I have written this code, which works and is useful, but I don’t want to be the only person involved. So, please tell me, am I doing something valuable? Is my code/overall design good or completely crap? Does anyone else want to use it (this we be a cool honour for me). Most importantly, would anyone be willing to help me develop it.

If anyone is interested, I have created the project a git repo [1], and my own copy can be found here. There is a demo account (username: demo; password: password), if anyone is interested in having a play. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Whether anyone else jumps onboard will make a big difference to wether AGPLMail becomes a succesful project, or just another of my abondoned projects.

[1] Noww, time to open a real can of worms. I’m hosting this project on github, which does not provide the source to there interface. However, as a git host, the data is inherentley get-at-able, and more importantly decentralised. The important thing and the reason that I don’t see github as a problem is the escapist principle. I don’t need github, if it were to go down suddenly, I’d still have my own personal repositories (which have exactly cthe same info as the github one) and could point people to them instead.

In my ongoing fight against spam I have resorted to using captchas. Now, in one way, captchas generally do there job quite well, they are a big barrier to automated spam systems. However, they also act as a barrier to legitimate users, or just end up being fucking annoying.

The best solution in my opinion (since its the one I’m using xD), is reCaptcha. It uses words from books that failed OCR, so is unreadable by even the most sophisticated OCR tochnology (in theory). But, because it is words, it is inherently very readable by humans. Not only is it accurate and bearable, it is also helping to digitize the books the words are from (presumeably it must decide what the right answer is by taking a consensus).

Sooo, generally nice nice nice. I’m not sure why I haven’t tried it before now. Fingers crossed, and be sure to let me know if it breaks.

So, yeah, a little update from the Freedom Dreamer. There might be more posts coming soon, there might not.

So, I’ve never blogged about the results of the TeensOnLinux merger (with TeenLinux) vote. This is because, I was wrong in my assumption that most people in ToL wanted a merge, and I had nothing more to say about it. However, my former enemy cactaur (aka he was very vocally opposed to a merge) has written a very observant blog post about the situation we are currently in. (Apologies for taking all this time to reply to it.)

To be honest, I’m not even convinced that a merge would be as beneficial as I once thought. However, as cactaur rightly notes, the way we are currently so divided is certainly not good. He manages to some up very nicely what makes the two groups different - ToL doesn’t speak much about GNU/Linux, wheras TL does. This, he suggests, means tthat ToL and TL can work together with TL being an on-topic group and ToL being an off-topic group.

I would suggest going one step further, the two groups can be kept distinct, but should both gather as one community under one banner (ie. name). Cactaur’s argument for keeping the names distinct is that ToL has invested a lot of resources into the branding. Whilst this is the case, he misses the fact that TeenLinux, meanwhile has not got any realy investment in the name (apart from domain names of course), and, as far as I can tell, most people in TL aren’t that attatched to the name, it was simply chosen to be dilomatic during the merge between TeenLUG and TeenLinuxLounge.

So, my suggestion is this, we should both use the Teens on Linux name. How do we keep the two groups distinct? TL can become TeensOnLinux.Com and the current ToL can become TeensOnLinux.net (since it is more of an off-topic network). The current .org domain name can be a splash page, explaining the existence of the two groups. The IRC channels would similarily be renamed to the .com and .net names, with pointers in the topic to the other one (e.g. If you would prefer more on/off-topic chat, please see #teensonlinux.com/.net).

I would be interested in what others think of this idea. In my opinion, its a both nice and plausible compromise, and if we can go ahead with it, I feel it would help put an end to all the tension between groups.

So, unintended consequences. This is always an annoying thing, something you do or say just is misterpreted and causes something you don’t want. As a random example, two friends of mine were discussing, on Monday, when to have a meeting (of a Fairtrade group as it happens). A says “on Tuesday?”, B says “tommorow?” and A responds, “nah maybe on Wednesday instead”. Person B was simply trying to clarify, and proceeded to state as much, but person A went and choose Wednesday, consequntly clashing with another group!!! WTF!?!

So, another recent example of this would be Spore. I’m not going to debate the ethics of Spore in respect to software freedom, because that would take for ever. Instead, I’m thinking about people’s perception that spore is hinting at Intelligent design. Tihs is a tricky one, because I’m sure this wasn’t intended (but, you never know), but is rather hard to avoid - you have to have a designer in a simulation based game, because otherwise its not a game, just a simulation!

So, a final tangental topic. It would be the ultimate unintended consequence if a Physics[1] experiment destroyed the world, I am of course thinking of the LHC. Now the big thing here is that the chances of this actually happening are similar to an evil wizard killing us all (since both require large parts of our recent scientific understanding to be wrong). However, surely the LHC could have managed the story a bit better… or maybe they couldn’t - people do love a, sensationalist story, and people can understand End of the World much easier than actual science. The biggest irony about this whole thing is that if the LHC were to create a large black hole, it wouldn’t happen today “Switch on Day”, but in a month’s time when the first collisions happen, or maybe even later when the energy is increased.

So, to sum up, I hate conclusions.

[1] I always seem to do Physics with a capital P - should I? Am I just a Physics fanboy?