ThankGodAlmightyFreeAtLast™

A quote from Martin Luther King: I Have A Distro.

In this year of Our Lord, 2010, it behoves us to meditate on the nature of freedom.

We have the freedom to use an Android, for example, although that freedom is encumbered by a confusing set of licenses, and may even be taken away by the district courts of Northern California owing to obfuscatory patents. Nobody wants to buy something that Just Works. Every consumer (henceforth to be referred to as “The little people”) you’ve ever met will tell you that what matters is the license.

We have the freedom to be insulted and belittled by asking questions (or even by offering patches!) on Ubuntu forums.

We have the freedom to read 10,000,000 lines of obfuscated C/ASM code in the Linux Kernel, and say well, isn’t that special!. I think there are about forty two lines of C in there that would enhance my freedom immeasurably. Fetch hither the scrabble bag!

We have the freedom to drive a car and rip out all the wiring, just like a paranoid schizophrenic who listens to voices from behind the fridge, except that we’re listening to Richard Stallman instead. Richard does not live behind our fridges. Of course he doesn’t. The cheese is still edible.

We have the freedom to buy an IBM mainframe and rejoice in the fact that Linux is on a parity with AIX. As long as we buy that IBM mainframe. Don’t buy other hardware and install Linux on it, because you’d be compromising your freedom and indeed parity. I think that’s bit number 8. I’m not sure about the endianness on IBM mainframes.

As software developers (in the widest sense, including everybody from architects to graphics designers to testers and so on) we have the freedom to contribute. We have the freedom to be patted on the head (as long as we’re not too uppity about Bug 326066). We have the freedom to use and distribute GNU software, as long as we don’t contravene the GPL, and we have the freedom to recognise that less restrictive licenses like FreeBSD are, in fact, a contradiction of freedom. (That last one is not really a freedom. In fact, it’s mandatory.)

It’s a bit of a shame that people in the Swat valley, or Darfur, or Rwanda, or the PRC, or Upper Wellington Without The Boots, have a tendency to complain about their lack of freedom. Have they not read the manifesto?

And it’s a bit of a shame that Dr King wasted all his oratory on things like racial equality, freedom before the law, and this “beautiful symphony of brotherhood” lark.

Still, there will come a day when the last Microsoft employee is strangled with the entrails of the last iPad developer(1), and on that day we can all echo Dr King’s dying words:

“Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”

Inspirational stuff. The future of mankind is in our hands.

(1) As of 14th August 2010. Substitute tomorrow’s anti-freedomites as and when necessary.