Philosophy
The philosophy of the movement is that the use of computers should not lead to people being prevented from cooperating with each other. In practice, this means rejecting "proprietary software", which imposes such restrictions, and promoting free software, with the ultimate goal of liberating everyone "in cyberspace" – that is, every computer user. Stallman notes that this action will promote rather than hinder the progression of technology, since "it means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art".
Members of the free software movement believe that all users of software should have the freedoms listed in The Free Software Definition. Many of them hold that it is immoral to prohibit or prevent people from exercising these freedoms and that these freedoms are required to create a decent society where software users can help each other, and to have control over their computers.
Some adherents to the free software movement do not believe that proprietary software is strictly immoral.
"While social change may occur as an unintended by-product of technological change, advocates of new technologies often have promoted them as instruments of positive social change." This quote by San Jose State professor Joel West explains much of the philosophy, or the reason that the free source movement is alive. If it is assumed that social change is not only affected, but in some points of view, directed by the advancement of technology, is it ethical to hold these technologies from certain people? If not to make a direct change, this movement is in place to raise awareness about the effects that take place because of the physical things around us. A computer, for instance, allows us so many more freedoms than we have without a computer, but should these technological mediums be implied freedoms, or selective privileges? The debate over the morality of both sides to the free software movement is a difficult topic to compromise respective opposition.
The Free Software Foundation also believes all software needs free documentation, in particular because conscientious programmers should be able to update manuals to reflect modification that they made to the software), but deems the freedom to modify less important for other types of written works. Within the free software movement, the Floss manuals foundation specialises on the goal of providing such documentation. Members of the free software movement advocate that works which serve a practical purpose should also be free.
Read more about this topic: Free Software Movement
Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is based on induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)
“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand, and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive.... He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death ... and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)