Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Surely you don't want to convince them to use an inferior product just
  > for purity of software?

Are you defining "superior" and "inferior" based on practical
considerations only?  Most people think that way; business and the
media inculcate that way of thinking.

However, the GNU Project follows the values of the free software
movement, which hold that most important characteristic of a program
is whether it respects the user's freedom or tramples it.  If you
value your freedom strongly, you will consider any free program better
than any nonfree program.

Based on these values, switching to a free program is always a step
up.

The people who use lastpass are probably not supporters of the free
software movement.  Probably they think that lastpass is better than
no program at all.  They might thing that lastpass is superior to some
free programs.

If we want to persuade them of something, we need to argue based on
premises they agree with.  We may need to make arguments that can
persuade even a person who thinks that a nonfree program is a good
thing.

But we must be careful not to endorse the idea that a nonfree program
is a good thing.
-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)