Ariel’s Playground & Toy Factory

You cannot be socially relevant and fight for social causes without embracing Free and Open Source Software.

From Linux.com:

Continuing its efforts to connect with social activists, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released an open letter signed by major environmental organizations. The letter urges activists to reject lockdown technologies in general and Windows Vista in particular as hostile to their ethics and the causes they support, and to support free software instead. The letter is only the first in a series that the FSF plans to release in the coming months, each of which will be crafted to make an ethical or pragmatic appeal to a specific group’s concerns.

Excerpts:

The letter begins by noting the environmental unsoundness of replacing existing hardware simply in order to run Microsoft Vista, then goes on to suggest that “the disposable computer mentality is a symptom of a larger problem — one that should concern all social activists. That problem is the dependency of activists on software owned and exclusively controlled by entities that design their software in ways directly opposed to grassroots social change…. each time an activist turns on a Vista computer, she is nominating Microsoft and Big Media as exclusive gatekeepers to this freedom.” The letter goes on to discuss Digital Rights Management and Trusted Computing (or Digital Restrictions Management and Treacherous Computing, as it calls them), condemning them both in themselves and as one of the reasons for Vista’s increased hardware requirements.

It then introduces free software as an alternative, stating that “While proprietary software functions by dividing people and using technical restrictions to block communication between them, free software was created with social solidarity and sharing in mind…. The celebrated power of the Internet as a tool for political action depends on the ability of ordinary people to have uncensored control over the tools they use to participate in society. If the tools used by activists are proprietary, they will be inherently limited in what they can challenge and change by those who make and exclusively own the tools.”

Read more: FSF links up with environmental groups By Bruce Byfield.