This article will be the first in a series of educational posts about technology freedoms and personal data protection. In this first article, I will try to explain what free software is and what problem it solves.
Introduction
Maybe you are a user of software like Windows, macOS, iOS, Word, PowerPoint, or Photoshop. If that is the case, you use what is called “proprietary software”, some of them are free (as in they cost no money), some of them are not. But they have in common the fact that you can’t use them legally without agreeing to an end-user license agreement (EULA).
In English, the word “free” can have two meanings: either that something costs nothing, or that something does not impact your freedom. In this article, unless explicitly stated, the word “free” is intended as the latter.
Do we own the software we purchase ?
Let’s start with a small comparison to dive into the subject. Let’s imagine that you purchase a bike, but as you are about to pay, the seller tells you that you must sign a contract that establishes that:
- You cannot ride this bike wherever you want, you must stay on specific roads allowed by the bike manufacturer.
- You can use it to move around, but not to workout.
- You cannot disassemble the bike to try to figure out how it is made.
- You cannot lend your bike to anyone, let alone resell it.
- If you try to build a similar bike from the one you bought, you cannot share it either.
Would you purchase this bike? Probably not, after all, purchasing a bike and not being able to use it or lend it however you want seems silly.
But for some reason, we accept that every day with a lot of our software. If you’ve already used one of Microsoft Office products, such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, then you agreed to the end-user license agreement, probably without even reading it. In the 2024 Word edition, here is what you can find in it:
The device manufacturer or installer and Microsoft reserve all rights (such as rights under intellectual property laws) not expressly granted in this agreement and no other rights are licensed to you. For example, this license does not give you any right to, and you may not (and you may not permit any other person or entity to): publish, copy (other than the permitted backup copy), rent, lease, or lend the software;
At any time, the software may determine that the installed instance of the software is counterfeit, improperly licensed or includes unauthorized changes. (…) If you do not reconnect your device to the Internet when required as part of the activation or reactivation process, the software may operate with reduced functionality.
You may not transfer the software to share licenses between devices.
If we summarize:
- It is forbidden to lend the software. You might get sued if you allow another person to use the software even occasionally.
- It is forbidden to use this software on multiple devices. If you have a desktop and a laptop, you cannot use the same license. You must purchase another one.
- At any time, Microsoft can decide that your software is counterfeit and deactivate it.
I’m putting up a link to the complete license agreement if you want to read it. I encourage you to do so—most of these software products come with similar restrictions.
Knowing that, can we really consider ourselves owners of the software we purchase? I must add that this also applies to pre-installed software that comes with a device when you purchase it.
But that is not all, non-free software raises other issues.
What do computers do ?
We use computers every day in many different forms, our PCs or smartphones obviously, but today, we also have our watches, televisions, game consoles and more broadly, any device that can connect to the Internet.
But there is a fundamental problem with computers: almost everything they do is invisible. Except what is on our screens or what comes out of our earbuds. But that is only a tiny fraction of all the computation that are made in the background.
To give you an example, when you visit a website, your device will reach out to the server to know what to display. It will physically send out information on the network, either with an electric signal when using a cable or optical fiber, or using electromagnetic waves when using WiFi or a 4G/5G cellular network. All of this is completely invisible to you, the user. We only see what is displayed on the page.
Why is this important? It is because this implies that you need to trust your device to not record your video, listen to you, or simply send personal information to someone else. And if you tell yourself that this is fantasy, that’s actually what Avast did. This antivirus, with a free edition, made the news in 2020 for collecting user data to sell to one of their subsidiaries.
Fortunately, there is a way to not have to blindly “trust” your device: it is to use software whose source code is freely available.
The source code is the sequence of instructions that every software is made of. It is written in a programming language. You might know some of them by name: Python, Java, or JavaScript. Of course, reading and understanding source code requires some technical skills, but it contains the reality of what the software really does.
Now, if you are not a developer, you might say, what does this change for me? It changes everything, because even if you can’t understand the program personally, millions of people with technical skills can. And they do go through the code to understand what programs do, improve them, learn, or check them for security issues.
Proprietary and Free software examples
| Category | Free software | Proprietary software |
|---|---|---|
| Operating system | GNU/Linux | Windows/MacOS |
| Browser | Firefox | Chrome |
| Office suite | LibreOffice | Microsoft Office |
| Image editing | GIMP | Photoshop |
You probably know the proprietary software in this list better, but you probably use much more free software than you realize.
The vast majority of online services are based on open-source technologies. For example, servers that run Linux instead of Windows. Likewise, Android smartphones, even if they are not all free software, are based on a foundation that is free. It is called AOSP for Android Open-Source Project
The four fundamentals freedom for software
In order for software to be considered free, it must fulfill four requirements:
- The freedom to run the program as you please
- The freedom to study how the program works and modify it if wanted
- The freedom to share the software with others
- The freedom to share modified copies of the software
These freedoms are based on the software “license”. For example, you can find the license of the Firefox Web browser (equivalent to Google Chrome or Safari): here. You can take that opportunity to look around in the source code, even if you don’t understand it, you can at least see with your own eyes that what is run on your computer can be accessed somewhere.
For proprietary software, the license explicitly forbids these liberties. Those walls of text that we often agree to without reading them are depriving us of our own hardware.
Why use proprietary software then ?
If free software has so many advantages and proprietary software only has disadvantages, why even bother with non-free software?
The answer to that question is complicated, but one of the most important factors is the marketing strength of software editors. Windows comes pre-installed on all PCs because Microsoft has deals with hardware manufacturers. Projects around Linux don’t have that luxury.
Most free software is financed by foundations through donations. It is managed by developers who willingly give some of their time and energy for this software to exist without constraints. Sometimes these projects have companies backing them up, but in general, they lack the marketing power that major editors rely on.
The free/non-free opposition is a continuum
An important subtlety to keep in mind is a direct consequence of the four freedoms cited earlier: not all proprietary software is equally restrictive.
There are, for example, software products that are technically “Open-source”, as the code is publicly available for everyone to read, but you cannot use the software freely either. You might have to pay some fee for example. Such software is “proprietary”, but it at least respects the liberty to study how the software is made.
Also, for software we use daily, it is often made from both free and non-free software. It is, by the way, one of the major complaints that can be made about tech companies. Some of them use a lot of this free software, developed by people on their free time, without any contribution whatsoever while making a profit off of it.
What to do with that ?
The answer is yours; I’m just trying to describe the state of things. When free software emphasizes freedoms and sharing, sometimes impairing its ability to fund itself, proprietary software will often empower the developer more than the user. In any case, knowing the difference can help in asking the right questions before using software.
- Does this software respect my freedoms? Are some of them negotiable?
- Do I really need to use that software?
- Does a free alternative exist, and if so, who’s developing it and can I help?
- Do I trust the entity behind this software?
I hope you learned something reading this and that this will help you think about the software you use and the liberties—or lack thereof—that come with it. I will come back to how you can use more free software, if that’s something you would like to do, in a next article.