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.

Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored. Google DNS may also have been affected.

Cloudflare at 2:46 says “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” CEO Matthew Prince explains that it all came down to a bad router in Atlanta:

We had an issue that impacted some portions of the @Cloudflare network. It appears that a router in Atlanta had an error that caused bad routes across our backbone. That resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone. 1/2

Matthew Prince

The company also issued a statement via email emphasizing that this was not an attack on the system.

Now, many people are talking about how we need decentralization on the internet to avoid such problems/incidents. People are complaining about centralization and how federation will improve things.

Until we start trying to understand why a thing is centralized, a federated alternative is doomed to fail even more catastrophically. Usually, a centralized thing is because money, security, convenience, reliability, and Metcalfe’s law.

With current federation system, we still miss some benefits and also there are some problems we should pay attention to. For example, a centralized system can have dedicated attention about security but a decentralized/federated system is more vulnerable as it works like a chain.

If one of the links in the chain breaks, the whole chain breaks. Also, a decentralized system doesn’t mean that data is stored in the air. Data is still stored in computers. I’m not saying decentralization is not a good thing, what I’m saying is that we should first write protocols and test it in various ways to be sure decentralization doesn’t affect our security and privacy, and it improves our experience.

With current systems, I can’t see a good point in decentralizing our networks except for certain matters such as social media.

Australia may consider modifying its law that authorizes secretly menacing any software developer in the world with punishment for refusing to insert a backdoor on Australia’s command. The decision not to menace employees individually would remove one of the many menacing aspects of this law.

Nonetheless every free software contributor would still be a target.

For this reason, I urge all free software developers to stay away from Australia.

A country willing to prosecute a whistleblower secretly and conceal his name cannot be trusted to follow any norms of decency.

Digital Rights Management or DRM is the act of imposing technical constraints that control what users can do with digital media. When you are prevented by a piece of software from copying or playing a song, reading an e-book on another device, or playing a solitaire game without Internet access, you are actually restricted by DRM.

This helps big tech and DRM abusers to gain more power over users. DRM abusers can control people’s behavior and every device that is created to run their software.

Proponents of freedom of expression and human rights, therefore, call DRM not “digital rights management” but “Digital Restrictions Management”. We should say that if we want to avoid a future in which our tools are to monitor our interactions. With digital media, we have to fight not to lose control of our media and software.