Declaration Of Software Freedom

This page has moved to InternationalStatementOfSoftwareFreedom

What is left here is slowly being integrated into the second draft there.

Hello - I took the liberty of posting text someone Romeo posted in FD-Philosophy:

Humans have the natural feature of being the most flexible at participating in the information flow between systems of the universe. Therefore is their irreducible right to produce, get and handle the information surrounding them as they see fit.

The nature of information is essentially the nature of time; information is a flow, an exchange, by definition and not a standalone object. Software is a way to handle information, a representation of it, is a language, therefore a way to communicate, to participate in the information flow. Software, as any language, cannot exist if only one uses it. Software, as any language, belongs to human knowledge, and as such, its freedom should be protected from actions which treat it as a propriety object.

Therefore, in this spirit we issue the Declaration of the Freedom Software (The domain of the free software, which is not a property, but a name for the rational distinction between the fundamental right of human beings as pointed above from inconsistent notions like "information property").

The aim of the Freedom Software is to put in practice this humanistic philosophical belief . Those who treat software as propriety objects are simply cutting their links with the nature of humankind, thus distorting the meanings of words like knowledge and progress. Those who treat software as propriety objects have a single way of being consistent with themselves and the world in which they are acting: they should pay rent to MrPlato, MrAristotle, ReneDescartes, Wittgenstein and all the other public thinkers. One cannot use public information to produce nonpublic information, and call this creativity, without proof that the nonpublic part of it is not contained in any representation of the public input.

Once they have you "hooked" on their software, what follows can often be related to extortion.

Something about Scientific method and creation of new knowledge based on existing knowledge. Being able to freely study software and software development practises as much as extending existing software - how secret software is an obstacle for such studies.

Violations:

Even some corporations, after paying large sums of money to have custom software applications written to meet their needs, find that the vendor who wrote the software hold exclusive ownership rights, and will not allow the customer or their agents to modify the programs. Such vendors have been known to charge unreasonable fees to make changes, impose excessively long schedules (devoting inadequate resources to get the job done in a timely manner), or to refuse outright to make changes needed to support the customer's business needs. Often such systems must be rewritten from scratch by a 3rd party vendor -- who often commits the same abuses!
Some vendors, while refusing to provide support, enhancements or even bug fixes to customers who have grown dependent on their software, also refuse to allow anyone else to make such changes -- insisting that the customer must upgrade to more expensive supposedly "improved" versions of the software.