Why free software is important to me

I have been asked this ques­tion recent­ly in an inter­view and was very dis-sat­is­fied with my answer. I thought anoth­er short attempt could be worthwhile.
I am utter­ly inter­est­ed and fas­ci­nat­ed by the notion of free soft­ware, though I do not like pro­gram­ming at all.

per­son­al conviction

I view soft­ware as a lan­guage, per­haps a deriv­a­tive of math­e­mat­ics. Just as with maths, I can­not think that one should release a result (a work­ing piece of soft­ware), while also restrict­ing access to the proof (the source code) and for­bid­ding inspec­tion and modification.

Pro­pri­etary soft­ware, such as Microsoft Win­dows, is an aber­ra­tion to me. It is pre­tend­ing that a mere com­pi­la­tion of thoughts, intan­gi­ble process­es and ideas, is like hard­ware: a man­u­fac­tured box, that can be stolen, bro­ken, and mere­ly re-pro­duced, instead of copied.

curios­i­ty and bemusement

I gen­er­al­ly deeply dis­trust soci­ety and human group behav­ior; yet free soft­ware shakes this suspicion.

Indeed, tell me that you will re-invent copy­right, seri­ous­ly ques­tion the very notions of own­er­ship and intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, and shuf­fle tra­di­tion­al author­i­ty, gov­er­nance, par­tic­i­pa­tion and deci­sion mak­ing estab­lish­ments: I will smile back and sigh.

Yet, it works. The suc­cess of Wikipedia, or the com­plete­ness of Lin­ux, will aston­ish any­one who has read a good his­to­ry book. I view this as the sin­gle most inter­est­ing social exper­i­ment in our his­to­ry; I observe its progress with inter­est, and strive to participate.

hope

We are awful­ly bad at most­ly every­thing we do – just ask a child.
I put a lot of hope in free soft­ware, con­vinced that it is nec­es­sary for a free soci­ety, an indis­pens­able ingre­di­ent for free­dom of expres­sion, and, by exten­sion, a sol­id frame for indi­vid­ual reflec­tion and respon­si­bil­i­ty. In an amus­ing way, thought-enabling, hope-pow­ered math 😉