 Do you use a computer or a cell phone? Do you connect to the internet? If you do, today I'm going to talk to you about a topic that's probably the most important topic anybody has ever discussed with you, and that is the free software movement. So what exactly does the free software movement fight for? Well, they fight for freedom, but not just for freedom for a certain group of people. The free software movement, it fights for freedom for everyone, and everyone wants freedom, but not everybody understands that we're not free. When it comes to our computers, our phones, our internet activities, we are anything but free. We are all slaves to the software that runs on those devices, and if the software that's running on those devices is proprietary software, in essence, we are slaves to the proprietary that made that proprietary software that's running on our computer. Think about it, who really controls your computer? Who really runs your computer? You're gonna say, well, I'm sitting at my desk and I'm typing on my keyboard and clicking on my mouse for my computer, I control my computer. No, you don't. Your computer only receives instructions from the software that's running on it, and if the software that's running on it is proprietary software, then truly who controls your computer? The proprietor of that proprietary software running on that machine. You only have a little bit of control. You have the control that the proprietor of that proprietary software allows you to have. So the person really in charge, the person really wearing the trousers and controlling your computer, are companies like Microsoft and Apple, because they make the operating systems on that computer, Google and the Android operating system and the Chrome OS operating system, other proprietary software that runs on those devices like the Creative Cloud Suite by Adobe is all proprietary software. Those companies actually control your computer. You don't actually have control. When it comes to the software that runs on our computers, there's really two kinds of computer programs. There are the programs where the user controls the program, and then there are the ones where the program controls the user. You want to be a user. You never want to be the used. So how can you take back control of your computer? How can you take back control of the software? Well, that's pretty easy. Actually, all you need to do is jettison all that proprietary software in favor of using free software. But what exactly is free software? Because that term can be confusing, especially to people that are not familiar with the free software movement. First, you must understand that when we talk about free, we're not talking about free as in free of cost. When we use the term free, we mean free as in freedom. So we're not talking about monetary charges. We're not talking about just wanting to use free of charge software. No, we are talking about free software as in freedom software. Really, we're talking about software that respects the freedom of the user. And how does it do that? Well, for something to be considered free software, it has to meet certain requirements. It has to meet the four freedoms. So if a piece of software meets these four essential freedoms, it is considered free software. And those freedoms are the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works and change it. So it does your computing as you wish. And this particular freedom implies that the source code must be made publicly available. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help other people and the freedom to redistribute your modified copies to those that wish to use it. And of course, being able to do this, this gives the entire community a chance to benefit from any changes you made in that software. So a program is free software. If it meets those four requirements, otherwise, it's non free. And there's really only two types of software. Again, it's either free or it's not free. There's no middle ground, right? It's black or it's white. There is no gray area here. Sometimes you find people trying to wedge a gray area in between the free versus non free argument. You know, there's levels of non free, there's the really evil non free, but then there's some non free software that's kind of okay. No, there's not. It's either 100% freedom software or it's not. There's no compromise here. It's either ethical or it's unethical. That's there's no, well, it's kind of ethical, right? You don't compromise on ethics. You don't compromise your morals. So the free software movement has been around for a few decades now. But we still need a lot more people involved in this fight because most people on the planet have still never heard the term free software. They've never heard the term free software movement. Most people on this planet run proprietary operating systems on their computers and mobile devices. Most people are running proprietary software on those proprietary operating systems. Most people are using proprietary web apps, proprietary internet services, billions of people around the world right now, they are running proprietary software that denies them the use, the freedoms, the benefits listed in those four essential freedoms that I shared with you guys earlier, the proprietary software that these billions of people are using. Many of them don't realize how dangerous this stuff is because of the proprietary licensing agreements that they agreed to when they started using the program. Many of them don't know that if you make a copy of a particular piece of software and share it with a friend, you can actually go to jail. Many people don't know that trying to decompile a proprietary software program and trying to look at the source code just to check the source code to see what it's doing to you. Many people don't know that actually breaks the licensing agreements for most pieces of software. So most people don't take the time to read the fine print with the licenses. Most people that run Microsoft Windows, for example, billions of people run Microsoft Windows, very, very few people actually take the time to read Microsoft's Eula, the end user license agreement. If they did, many people probably wouldn't run Microsoft Windows because if you take the time to read the Eula, there's some really scary stuff in that thing. In the end user license agreement, Microsoft basically says if you use Windows, Windows is not yours. It's ours. And we can do anything with that software. And if we damage you in any way with our particular software that you're running, you have no legal recourse of action, right? You can't sue us. Like you agree to all this stuff up front. When you install Windows, most people don't know this. And this is the thing, proprietary software is inherently unethical. And by unethical, I don't mean that proprietary software is necessarily bad or malicious like it's doing something harmful to you. A lot of proprietary software really doesn't do anything bad to you necessarily, but it's still unethical because you the user cannot control that software. And as the owner of a computer, I demand the right to do whatever I want to with the software that runs on my computer, I should have 100% full control of my computer. Now, having said that, many proprietary programs are doing bad and malicious things to their users. So many proprietary programs out there spy on their users, they track what their users are doing, they data mine them, you know, they're mining for data. So they collect all this information about you and then sell that data to other companies, they report your activities to other corporations, or sometimes they report your activities to law enforcement agencies. And of course, they restrict everyone as far as sharing the software, you are not allowed to share that particular program with anyone when you run proprietary software. And because our computers and our mobile devices, they have so much of our personal information, they log every detail about us, they have all of our daily activities and our web searches, the proprietary software that runs on those devices represents a really unacceptable danger. A matter of fact, I would say proprietary software is an unacceptable danger to having a free society. So why is no one fighting against this digital enslavement of society? Why isn't there this global uprising of programmers and developers and engineers and scientists and lawyers and people from all walks of life? Why isn't everybody fighting this fight? Why aren't we all standing together and fighting for free software and for freedom for all? Well, there is such a movement, the free software movement, and you can join the fight. So the free software movement was really started back in 1983. It was started by a computer scientist named Richard Stallman. Richard Stallman started a project in 1983 called the GNU project. GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix. He started working on GNU because he wanted to create a free, as in freedom, alternative to the old Unix operating system. Unix was not free software. It was proprietary software. And Richard Stallman wanted to create a free operating system. And in 1985, Richard Stallman started the Free Software Foundation. He founded the Free Software Movement. He created this foundation called the Free Software Foundation, which is a nonprofit foundation. And its mission is to advocate and educate people about free software and the Free Software Movement. Eventually, the free software that Stallman and others at the GNU project developed, they ended up having to combine that software with another piece of free software called Linux. And Linux was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. And once you had the GNU utilities and the Linux kernel combined, that gave birth to a free operating system known as GNU slash Linux. Although many people today simply call the operating system Linux, the true name is in fact GNU slash Linux. Some of the most popular GNU slash Linux distributions out there include things like Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, Manjaro, Arch Linux, Gen 2, Slackware and hundreds of others. So we have all these hundreds of free operating systems out there ready for people to use. And when I say free, I will mention that most Linux distributions aren't 100% free yet. There are a few pieces of non free software in most GNU slash Linux distributions, things like non free video drivers and non free firmware. And unfortunately, we haven't got to the point of being 100% free yet, but we're getting closer. We're getting closer every day. There are a handful of 100% free as in freedom GNU slash Linux distributions out there. You do have to be particular with the hardware you run, though the devices you buy those particular 100% free distributions will not work on every device. And because of the free operating systems that I named earlier and hundreds others just like it. And we're really getting to the point where now free software is really running all around us. Many people just don't know it. The free software runs on so much stuff now today free software is available for just about any kind of task you can imagine millions of people around the world, including entire governments in some cases actually use free software on their computers. So what exactly is the end goal for the free software movement? Well, for me, I think ultimately the goal of the free software movement should get people to associate the free software movement with the same kinds of basic human freedoms. When we talk about things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, we need to eventually start talking about freedom of the software. We need that to become normal human lingo. Like something people talk about as a basic human right that can't be violated. I think ultimately that should be our goal with free software, but we still have a lot of work to do because when we talk about spreading awareness for the free software movement, many people don't want to hear about this stuff. Many people will actually push you away if you try to talk to them about free software. They resist you because most people fear freedom. I'm just going to be honest. That's not a joke. Most people fear freedom. They don't want to even think about it, right? It's basically when you talk to some people about ethical issues and social injustices and human responsibility, those are big topics. Those are big issues and it's just too much for some people to handle or they think those problems are too big. I can never solve those problems. So I don't even want to think about it. I don't want you to even put those ideas in my head, right? Fixing such a massive problem as the kinds of problems that the free software movement are trying to fix. Those are such massive problems. I can't make a change in that. So I'm just going to pretend that these problems don't exist. And in a way, those kinds of people are right, right? It's a big job changing the world, right? It takes a lot of effort and a lot of work to change the hearts and minds of people across the globe, spreading the idea of freedom and changing the way people fundamentally think about software and their digital lives and their online interactions. That's a massive job but it's one we need to start focusing on and quite frankly, we need your help. So many people around the world want to affect change, right? Many of you watching this video, you want to somehow affect some major changes in the world. I know deep down, you really desire that. I think that's why so many people turn to activism. They become these social activists. So many people today are out there trying to make an impact, right? You're fighting for the betterment of all mankind. That's why you have so many people out there fighting for social justice. You have those quote social justice warriors out there fighting that fight. Now I don't want to belittle the people that are fighting for some of these other social causes that many people turn to. But quite honestly, most of the people fighting those fights, those particular fights, they're fighting for things that are quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things when you think about it. Because even if some of these social justice warriors, for example, are successful in the fights that they are fighting, they really have made a difference to usually tiny percentages of the global population, right? They're fighting for a particular demographic where the free software movement truly is fighting for everyone. We want freedom for all. And by all, I mean all people, all nationalities, all races, ethnicities, genders, gender identity, sexual orientation, a religious affiliation, financial status, social status. We are fighting for everyone. Even the people that disagree, even those people that turn us away, they shun us when we talk about free software. We're fighting for those people too. So if you want to make a real change in the world, join the fight. Join the free software movement.