Every year, Software Freedom Day is celebrated on the third Saturday of September.
Proprietary software is a walled garden designed to foster control, dependency, and planned obsolescence.
It sells us tools as though they were favors when, in reality, they can become chains that dictate what we can and cannot do with our own hardware.
The practices of companies such as Adobe—with products like Photoshop and restrictive licensing models—or Microsoft, with its operating system and ecosystem, are clear examples of where proprietary software can lead.
In response, the only viable technical and ethical alternative is free and open-source software: radical, uncompromising, and transparent.
Real development does not ask for permission; it is built on solid, open foundations. That is why software freedom is not an abstract political manifesto, but a clear technical specification. In the case of free software, everything begins with four non-negotiable freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program for any purpose, without artificial restrictions or corporate tolls. The software works for you—not for companies whose business models depend on extracting value from their users.
- The freedom to study how the program works, made possible by access to its source code. There should be no “intellectual property” excuses for concealing security flaws or abusive telemetry practices.
- The freedom to modify and adapt the software to your actual needs, whether you are working individually or deploying it across an entire infrastructure. If something does not work for you, you should be able to change it. That is how real engineering works.
- The freedom to distribute copies, including improved and optimised versions, so that the whole community can benefit from technical progress.
This is neither paranoia nor an Orwellian fantasy. In a world where your washing machine or television can transmit gigabytes of data to goodness knows where without your consent, keeping your tools under your control is essential.
Either you control the tools you use for work and leisure, or they control you.
Beyond the Four Freedoms
In addition to the four freedoms outlined above, we can identify several other principles that are equally important:
- Owning your own documents. This is possible only when the format in which they are saved does not depend on a company that can restrict access to them. Consider, for example, documents created with Microsoft Office.
- Working without sacrificing your privacy. You should not have to sign up for an account, hand over your data, or accept telemetry and user profiling designed to analyse and monetise your behaviour. This also means avoiding unwanted advertising and constant offers for additional services.
- Choosing whether to use artificial intelligence. You should be free to decide whether AI has a place in your workflow, without losing essential features simply because you do not want to use it or do not need it.
- Choosing your operating system and working environment. A professional tool should support the system and environment that best suit your preferences, requirements, and abilities. It should never be tied to a particular platform merely because of corporate decisions or avoidable technical limitations.
- Avoiding dependence on a single vendor or licence. You should be able to use a tool freely, without additional charges for basic use or installation, while retaining the option to manage technical support yourself or entrust it to a provider you trust. You should also be able to change providers whenever you choose, without being trapped by monopolies, vendor lock-in, or layers of representatives and intermediaries that increase costs without adding meaningful value.
Try Free Software
The best way to celebrate Software Freedom Day is to try some free software if you have not already done so.
You have an entire weekend ahead of you. Try putting a Linux distribution on a USB drive and booting your computer from it. You do not have to install anything: simply run the system and see how it feels. When you shut the computer down, everything will be exactly as it was before.
Alternatively, download and install the latest version of LibreOffice and use it to create a few documents. You can do the same with Firefox if you are not familiar with the browser, or with Thunderbird if you have never used a free and open-source email client.
Free software can meet many of your everyday needs while offering a degree of freedom and user control that no proprietary system or corporate ecosystem can truly match.