Emotional decisions are mostly destructive

While ago, I wrote about how freedom of thought is more important than free software itself. I also mentioned that people should move forward step by step with patience.

Hasty and thoughtless decisions often have a devastating effect on that work. Specially when it comes to free software, many people get excited about new tools they see. They see logic in our conversations and, unfortunately, they want to make quick changes without addressing the principles.

Free software movement is heavily focused on principles of it. There is no software that can violate or give us freedom by itself. It’s people who violate the essential freedoms and/or make a free software. When a software, for whatever reason, fails to respect and comply with the four essential freedoms, it is called nonfree and proprietary software.

Now, if people understand the concept of software freedom and believe in the philosophy of the movement, we see less of these violations and a better community. Emotional and hurried decisions, most of the times, lead us to regret. I’ve seen many people who decided to stop using proprietary software and privacy-violating services and they regretted it after a while.

Most of the times it’s because they were unable to repeat the experience they had with proprietary programs they used to use. Every time a person decides to join us in the free software movement, I tell that person to be patient. I ask people to first study about the movement and try to understand every principle of software freedom and also free (as in freedom) culture.

Software freedom is more about principles of freedom and people/users’ rights than the software itself.