I regret a lot of things. Small and big decisions. It’s part of growing up. I try to keep an open mind so with new evidence, my ideas change. There’s no shame in that. I change my ideas because I’m not just another hard-headed person who sticks to what he believes in forever.

Something I do regret for a while, now that it’s more than two thousand hours that the internet is shut down in Iran, now that it’s the 85th day of the digital blackout, is helping and contributing to all those projects and organizations in the name of digital and software freedom.

I believed that a free society needs free software, but I now believe that those who promoted this idea didn’t really care about people’s freedom, if they did care they would’ve protested the current situation in my country. With my limited unstable slow internet connection that I barely have access to after weeks, if I’m lucky, I browsed through some of those projects I used to contribute to and not a single word.

It was a sad yet awakening realization.