Today, I am launching my new blog.
In this first post, I will discuss the concept of freedom.
I start with general thoughts, and then I apply them to Free Software licenses and especially the Free Software umbrella KDE.
Throughout history, the word “freedom” has been used to mean many different things. It has been the central word for revolutions, for declarations of independence, for human rights movements, for philosophers, for theologians, for the Free Software movement. It is used in marketing slogans for phone companies, for KDE, for both cigarettes and non-smoking initiatives. The word has also been used to justify military occupations, torture and mass surveillance.
In many cases, “more freedom” for one side of a conflict means “less freedom” for the other side. But if you consider the debates around freedom for a while, then you can see a deeper pattern within the concept of freedom itself:
How do you protect freedom without destroying it?