Free Software's Relevance in 2021 | Blog | jackkelly.name

2020 was a bad year at the end of a bad decade for software freedom. This post discusses how software rules everyone’s lives, how bad the situation is for software freedom, why software freedom matters, and explains why I believe that free software developers should direct their efforts toward emerging language ecosystems.

Over the past year, there have been incredible restrictions on people’s freedoms of movement, speech, and association, in the name of protecting public health. On a recent trip, I was required to carry travel papers for 14 days, and to show them on request to certain classes of authorised officers — something I never thought I’d be required to do in a first-world liberal democracy.

In Australia, we are now required by law to pump our personal information into one or more “contact-tracing” platforms in order to visit the supermarket or have something like a normal social life. This all-but-forces people to own a smartphone, and to interact with an enormous pile of proprietary software just to participate in society. Despite earlier promises to only be used for contact tracing, these databases have been used by police. Because of course they have.

Elsewhere, there are talks of “vaccine passports” on smartphones, which accelerates techno-authoritarianism and should therefore be resisted. (Search for “raise the more generalized version of this objection”.)

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