Re: Privileges and practicalities [was: Re: [ELPA] New package: repology.el]

[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. ]]]

  > No.  If you have to use Zoom for your classes or meetings, you have to.
  > If you need to use WhatsApp, you have to.

Not necessarily.  I know people who have pressured/convinced
institutions such as schools to let them use free software instead.
It is not easy, and only a fraction succeed -- but that is better than
zero chance.

Pkease do not exaggerate hopelessness.

You are aware of many forms of mistreatment of disprivileged groups.
Usually there are campaigns to end those patterns of mistreatment.
Society is starting to become aware of them.

Nonfree software is an injustice too.  Escaping it is not easy -- but
our work is to make it easier and encourage people to escape.

Hardly anyone recognizes this injustice, so one of our priorities is
making people notice.  Every time I mention that I refuse to use Zoom
or WhatsApp, it is a chance to make people aware of the issue,
and that is progress.


  > If you make it hard to use non-free software one _has_ to use with free
  > software they _want_ to use, this is effectively a discriminatory,
  > exclusionary, and unegalitarian practice.

We never _make_ our programs not run on nonfree systems.
You're attacking a straw man.

Perhaps you've misunderstood what our practices are.

We make our programs work with free software because that's what we
want.  If you want to change them to interoperate with some nonfree
program or system, you are free to do that.  We might even help
maintain your changes, if they are easy to merge in.

But we always give priority to using software in the Free World,
on GNU.

The last part of your message seems to be a lot of vituperation.
If you have such a low opinion of our efforts, nobody insists you
have to participate.

-- 
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)