Begin the journey: Why your ethics might require adoption of Free Software
2025-07-04
My own journey into free software began with my ethics. It was, and is, deeply personal but simultaneously connected to my understanding of the larger world I am a part of. I’ve long believed and argued to those around me that what we do as individuals matters. We are not helpless, we are not without power in our world. And our ethics are important. Our ethics should be primary to who we are which means they should be taken seriously. It’s been my lifelong practice to actively consider my ethical framework as a part of my daily life. My ethics are my personal, philosophical operating system. I critique, measure and challenge my behavior based on these ethics. Put another way, my ethics are meant to be the basis of the standards of my behavior.
I recently realized that I had a deep mismatch between my claimed ethics and my behavior. A chasm that could not be reconciled with any kind of justification. To be honest, I don’t think it was a recent realization at all. I’ve known it on some level for a very long time. It was a nagging feeling of discomfort but rather than turn my attention to it fully I did what we often do when we are afraid to act. I turned the light elsewhere and pretended there was no problem. I lied to myself because to confront the incongruity would mean disruption to my convenience and my comfort. Making compromises for convenience and comfort is a slippery slope. It’s easy to muddy the waters with hand-wavy justifications and that’s what I did for a long time.
The thing is, we live in a time and culture when personal ethics seem to have lost their value and meaning. In progressive, leftish online spaces like Mastodon I regularly see casual comments flung around that seem to acknowledge the extreme harm and violence of capitalism as a system. A casual acknowledgment of oligarchy and loss of democracy. In response to the rise of fascism in America it’s accepted and even popular to single out “big tech” and, specifically US-based big tech: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta being most notable. That’s all well and good but it seems to stop at that. We pretend that we have no choice. Boy, this sucks, doesn’t it!? We moan, we complain but at the end of the day, we shrug and accept. we compromise.
Now, more than ever, our ethics matter. To be clear, our ethics always matter. Our ethics always matter. Speaking for a moment to my fellow citizens in the US, if we as a nation had spent the past 70 years paying more attention to the functioning of our democracy we might not be in the current crises. As citizens we have failed because we didn’t do our job. We were not accountable to ourselves or to one another.
Now, finally, I will get to the point of this post. We spend a great deal of our time using computers. Many start their day reaching over to a smart phone that they will carry with them everywhere all day long. That they will use all day long. And when we’re not using those many of us are likely using some other computer for work, fun or whatever purpose. The point is that computers are embedded in our lives now. And it is long past the time that we made more of an effort to confront the ethics or lack of ethics we have in regard to how we use these devices and the roles that they play. Our ethics should matter and so how we compute should matter.
From the hardware to the OS to the software applications we use, there is much we should consider. I’m arguing here for a more ethical approach to computing and I’m suggesting that it should be a priority because the impact it has on our personal lives and our society is significant. The marketing of capitalism has taught us to think of technology as an object of desire rather than as a tool. When our phones had cords we treated them as boring household objects. Useful and important, yes, but just tools that enabled an important action. Apple turned the computer into something else.
I’m not arguing against attractive visual design in hardware or software. I’m arguing against allowing ourselves to be manipulated by marketing. But more significantly, I’m arguing that we take a more thoughtful and critical approach to how we evaluate the computer hardware and software being offered and accepted. In February I had to step back and take a look at my ethics in regards to my computing, the tools and the companies that provided them. When I began the process I realized that I’d not taken the time to really consider the tech I was using. Frankly, I had adopted a great deal simply because it was convenient and worked well for me. There were no ethics involved. I used Apple and iCloud because it worked well for me.
But on the periphery of my thinking there was this dark cloud looming and when I pulled it in and broke it up I began to get a sense of what I’d been overlooking. The low hanging fruit are those things almost everyone complains about, even the hard core Apple fans. For example, Apple is greedy and stingy. Yeah, this manifests in all sorts of ways ranging from exorbitant costs of hardware upgrades, costs of iCloud tiers or lack of more free storage in the free iCloud tier, treatment of developers, the general running of the App Store, increasing frequency of Apple promotions and advertising in various apps in the OS and so on. That serves as the background for a general, growing frustration and realization that yes, indeed, Apple is a giant global corporation, that is primarily concerned with profit. In other words, a capitalist doing capitalism.
All of that, well, it’s just a reminder that behind the marketing is an ugly truth. This is the point where I would have previously said to myself, yep. It is ugly. Capitalism is ugly, destructive and unjust. But Google, Microsoft? Better to just stick with the devil I know.
But this is where I had to shift to an honest reckoning of my options. This was the pivot where my lack of ethics became painfully clear. The moment I turned my eyes to GNU/Linux and the free software movement was something of a personal revelation. My previous excuses for inaction began to crumble in that moment. In the first two to three weeks after my first install of GNU/Linux I was mostly focused on the practical aspects of making the change. How stable was this operating system? Could I find the apps I needed to do my work? Would those apps work as well or were they a compromise compared to the proprietary apps I’d grown accustomed to? Would I enjoy working in this OS and with these apps or would I find the experience a degradation? Would I find myself in friction and frustration? In those first days I’d assumed I could “make do” but that overall the experience would be less than what I was used to.
I was still primarily concerned about something Apple users are fond of talking about which is the “delight” that comes with using well designed, quality apps in an ecosystem of apps that just work. There’s a belief that Apple and the apps of it’s developers meet a higher standard than others. For now I’ll leave that as a matter of opinion for others to work out. But it’s a narrative that exists out there and some Apple users will assume it’s true. For the purposes of this post, I’ll simply say I got past those kinds of assumptions in the first days and weeks. I moved on to other considerations.
I’d still not grasped the larger ethical framework of the free software movement. My vague notion was that “free and open source software” offered an equal or better alternative because the offerings were not dictated by corporations primarily interested in profit over users’ needs. FOSS was open and the result of people working together cooperatively. Okay, yes, true and yes, an improvement over closed, for-profit software. From my frame of reference, I was ready for software that was being developed by humans for humans not for profit but to fill needs, that’s what made it better. But still, I was just beginning to get the larger story.
At some point I began visiting the Free Software Foundation and then, from there, GNU Operating System. It was at this point that I began to take a deeper dive into the history of the free software movement and, along with that, the philosophical, ethical foundation it was built on. Ah ha! What had been a vague notion was now brought into sharp focus. I’d not had the vocabulary I needed. I spent each week of June delving deeper into the history and the finer points. Rabbit holes? Yes, plenty.
Ultimately this is a movement about freedom, which is to say, liberty. So the question of your personal ethics in relation to the software you use comes down to a question of whether your ethics can be satisfied using software that you have no control over and will never own. At its core the proprietary software of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and others will never be yours to use as you wish. It is their software, their OS. And, by extension, the hardware it runs on, in many respects, is never really yours either. Ultimately, you are subject to being locked out at any moment without cause. You are subject to their whims. Users of products of each of those companies will find themselves, subjected to corporate dictates based on what benefits corporations the most. Suck it up buttercup, you don’t get a vote.
If we value our freedom as citizens it is incumbent upon us to consider the qualities of the computers we use. If those computers are closed to us, if they are locked up behind proprietary code and licensing we should reject them out of hand because, by definition, they are not designed to serve freedom or democracy. They are, at their core, designed to serve capitalism and profit.
The intent of proprietary computing is that everything users do should come under the dictates of the owners of the code. All of it. Their networks, their media, their software, their hardware: it forms a totality of experience completely outside of your control. And that my friends is cause for a complete rejection of what they offer.
You can agree to your own subjugation, that’s your choice. It may seem more convenient. It may seem comfortable. It may even seem pleasurable and safe. But in the end, you’re handing over your own fate.
Note: This is the first in a series that will explore how anyone of any skill level can begin to explore and use free/libre software. This is not an all or nothing situation. We can begin by taking steps that will gradually empower us and lead us to a better, more democratic and cooperative computing that places emphasis on users needs and desires.
Part 2: Begin the journey: Finding a practical starting point
Part 3: Begin the journey: A gentle exploration of Free Software
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