mgorny-nyan (he) :autism:🙀🚂🐧<p>Slightly less technical today.</p><p>Many people don't appreciate the difference between <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/FreeSoftware" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FreeSoftware</span></a> and freeware (as in non-paid software). It's like assuming that a free world is the same as a world without prisons — except that the latter doesn't necessarily imply the former.</p><p>Most importantly, most of us aren't actually opposed to paying for software. Sure, we do often want our software to be freely available to everyone who needs them — and we do want software developers to be able to live a honest life without having to keep trying to find new ways of getting money from users to survive. But that's not the point of Free Software.</p><p>The most important thing about Free Software is the safety. The safety that if I choose to use this particular program today, then I will probably be able to keep using it a month from now, a year from now, perhaps even ten years from now. And there's a fairly good chance that I'll be able to save my work, and move it to another program. And if the program stops being developed by its original creators, then a community will form to take care of it.</p><p>There won't be a company asking me to switch to an absurdly expensive subscription in half a year, because they underestimated cloud costs. All my work won't suddenly be erased, because an algorithm flagged my account as suspicious. No company will tell me that my version is no longer supported, and I need to upgrade now — except that upgrade does a lot of unnecessary changes that I don't like, and on top of that messes up all my files. And when the company goes bankrupt, I won't lose everything, or end up with a program that eventually becomes broken — and all you can do is hammer around it, hoping you'll make it work a while longer.</p><p>I'm not claiming that Free Software is perfect, and the community is free from assholes with megacorporation-sized egos. But these essential freedoms are what makes programs sustainable. Even if you aren't a programmer and can't fix something yourself, you can pay somebody to do that — and I definitely prefer paying a honest man, to paying racket money to a corporation.</p>