[emacs-humanities] Has Emacs made you appreciate software freedom?

[Protesilaos Stavrou]

Hello everyone,

I recently read two blog posts that highlight the economic/political
problems of open source software development.  One is from fellow Emacs
user James Cash on "The Problem With Free Software",[1] while the other
is written by Baldur Bjarnason: "The Open-Source Software bubble that is
and the blogging bubble that was".[2] Both of them take the precarious
financial situation of the Babel JavaScript compiler as a starting point
for their claims.[3]

This got me thinking about copyleft as more than an inversion of the
spirit of copyright: copyleft through action, such embodied in software.
In the Emacs space, copyleft is experienced in full.  Consider, for
example:

1. You can run Emacs for any purpose.  Some use it as an integrated
   computing environment, others for programming, note-taking, etc.

2. Emacs grants you access to the source code as well as high quality
   documentation.  Every Help buffer that pertains to a symbol has a link
   that takes you directly to the source code of that definition.  Same
   principle for 'M-x find-library' or 'xref-find-definitions' (bound to
   M-. by default).

3. Emacs is distributed freely through a variety of sources, such as the
   package archives of GNU/Linux distributions as well as through its own
   website.

4. It is common for Emacs users to share their configurations, while
   there also are cases where people experiment with the Emacs source
   code to develop some new feature.  For an example of the latter, we
   recently got the native compilation feature in to the trunk of
   emacs.git, which had started off as a research programme by Andrea
   Corallo (as far as I can tell).[4][5]

The above map to the four software freedoms.[6] The point is that by
using Emacs we are operating with freedom and so we can, in principle,
appreciate it more than, say, some command-line program whose code we
have never inspected.

So my questions to this list are:

+ Do you think that Emacs helped/helps you value your liberties, as
  those apply to your day-to-day computer experience?
+ Do you believe that there is something to be learnt from Emacs and be
  applied to other parts of life?  Could/should, for instance,
  scientific research be conducted and publicised in a free,
  collaborative fashion?
+ More generally, do you see a connection between software freedom and
  politics/economics?  Could/should the lessons drawn from Emacs and
  free software in general (especially copylefted) be used as an
  antipode to repressive forces, be they corporate actors or state
  entities?

All the best,
Prot

[1] <https://occasionallycogent.com/problem_with_foss/index.html>
[2] 
<https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/the-oss-bubble-and-the-blogging-bubble/>
[3] <https://babel.dev/blog/2021/05/10/funding-update>
[4] <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-11/msg01137.html>
[5] <https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02504>
[6] <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html>

-- 
Protesilaos Stavrou
https://protesilaos.com