One of the things I have problem with in free software communities is that a lot of older or more experienced folks have a really violent behavior in confronting with criticism of their ways. I see a lot of experienced people in free software communities, specially GNU and FSF mailing lists, that support the movement and have some logical reasons for their actions but the way they express them only makes people keep their distance from free software and our communities.

One of the reasons that proprietary software dominates the world is that many of these companies have a really nice way of treating people. Many users forget their digital freedoms and rights because they see (at least ostensibly) that they are treated with respect.

In the last few days I’ve seen at least three unnecessary insults and violent behavior in FSF and GNU communities. I and some other people mentioned that such behavior only makes people keep their distance from us.

Some people forget that our self-assigned mission and goal is to bring knowledge about users’ freedom and rights to people and not all people are technical experts or are experienced about computers. If we’re going to criticize people who have less experience or knowledge about computers, then all we did till now is worthless.

If free software is only for software developers then we should rephrase it to something that shows this false goal. Free software is not only for programmers. It’s for everybody. Free software is to bring users their freedom. We should repeat it frequently to remind it to advocates.

You don’t need to understand code or every matter in computers to support free software. If you care for software freedom and digital rights, you have every right to talk, express opinions, act, and be active in free software communities and nobody can stop you.

One of the common arguments in free software communities is a struggle about the terms “Open Source” and “Free (as in freedom) Software”.

I always say that the point of our work is to spread knowledge about the four essential freedoms. I still believe that calling a software that respects the essential four freedoms “open source” is wrong but that’s not what I would argue over.

My point and my goal is to introduce free software and four essential freedoms to people. As long as a person cares about its digital rights, I don’t care what term it uses to call that software.

Open source misses the point of the free software but it’s also respectable as most of the times it spreads the knowledge about these freedoms. The name is important only to spread more knowledge about these freedoms.

Recently, on FSF Community Team, there was a struggle about FSF ways to spread and work about free software. What I believe is that FSF and GNU are working more fundamentally. I believe FSF and GNU are top leaders in the matter of free software and it’s not their job to do technical and detailed work.

I believe what they should do is to guide the community. I don’t see them as owners of the communities, I only look at them as leaders. For sure, their opinions may be different with the community sometimes but it’s completely normal.

Every community knows the best about itself, I have nothing against that but I also believe FSF and GNU are more experienced than any of us and every community can benefit from some of these experiences.

However, I believe FSF and GNU should ask the communities to do an immediate serious action. For example, GNU+Linux, as probably most popular free software in world, lacks some serious stuff.

For example, most people still think/believe GNU+Linux is only for professional technical computer users and they have the right to believe so. It’s 2020, we can’t ask people to run an apt-get every time they want to install something. We can’t ask people to install every dependency manually to run a python script.

For sure there are a lot of great software/apps that are libre, GNU+Linux was just a general example. Action is needed for sure. Without an immediate action, free software won’t ever dominate.

As coronavirus made it impossible for students to attend classes physically, many schools, universities, and/or educational classes are using online platforms to hold classes. Most of these classes are held violating students’ rights and digital freedoms by using proprietary software.

With proprietary business software, educational administrators are violating people’s digital rights over owning their software and controlling their computers. There are great free software for education and/or holding online classes.

I myself have seen some classes and online meetings been held by great free software BigBlueButton which is really featured and easy to use.

Now, Free Software Foundation launched a petition to ask students, teachers, administrators, and schools to replace their proprietary software with a free software to stop this violation of people’s digital rights. They emailed the FSF Community Team and wrote a blog post about it. You can sign this petition on FSF’s website and join us to fight for userfreedom of students, as a large part of society.

There’s a new report about seven no-log-policy VPN providers that have collected very personal information of users, including but not limited to website addresses, user email for registration on websites, passwords, apps, files accessed, mobile operator (if a cellphone user), phone number, hometown city, etc.

It’s a really worrying news about VPNs. What’s more worrying is that they somehow managed to get the full path of the address the user visited which should be technically impossible.

This can be a new era in online privacy for people. VPNs advertise about privacy and encryption a lot and this can disprove them and make privacy activists/advocates worry about new technical capabilities for online privacy violation and invading.

I’ve always said that a community may have a leader, but it’ll never have a single owner. A community will always belong to its members. Now, how a person joins a community is a different story. For example, when we talk about the medical community, we’re not talking about every single person who ever received medical treatments; we’re talking about people who contributed to the medical stuff.

No matter you’re a doctor, nurse, hospital manager, a pharmacy employee/employer, or anyone who serves the medical system, you’re part of the medical community. Many people are getting affected by this community but we all know that not anyone who’s affected is part of this community.

Same thing goes for free software community. No matter what part of the community or which software/thing you contributed to, you’re part of the community. Now, our community may get affected by some people more than others. For example, Mr. Stallman has a serious power over a lot of people. Or GNU project can affect a lot of decisions made by other projects.

My personal opinion, however, is a little different. I accept every user of any free software as a member of the community. Now, with this said, let’s talk about how I think about making decisions in a community.