The Family Guide to Digital Freedom

Shortly after the opening of the Family Guide to Digital Freedom website, Stefano Maffulli announced it on the mailing list of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Here are some comments and answers about the critics made on that mailing list to the Digifreedom approach. I am publishing them (I didn't do it earlier only because lack of time) because I see those critics as another proof that there still are communication and understanding problems between many Free Software activists and the rest of the world, which should be acknowledged and addressed.

First of all, some information: the original announce from Stefano said that:

yesterday a Italian friend wrote to me announcing his new book"The Family Guide to Digital Freedom" and website http://digifreedom.net/. His book is not free-as-in-freedom...

A partial explanation of this can be found in the FAQs and in the discussion of the second of the Copyright Myths.

Another poster said:

People who don't use computers are 1) extremely rare

Sorry, but first of all this is true only within some segments and age ranges of western societies. The biggest mistake, however, is to assume that "use" equals "understanding". Even among the people who do have a computer at home or in the office, rest assured that those who "use" it understanding what they are doing (ie not just as a fancy typewriter or as a game console which can also surf the Internet) are still very far from being the majority.

and 2) not much affected by FS one way or the other....

This is false nowadays (and, frankly, looks a bit too much like snobbery). The reality, instead, is that the quality of everybody's life depends every day more by which software is used around us and how, that is also from what FLOSS activists do or not. This is true even for those of us who can still afford to live without ever touching a computer, including children.

it seems clear that the level of ignorance about software and computers is unsustainable and cannot continue into the future indefinitely. People have learned what electricity is, after all.

Here we go again with another, potentially very dangerous, misjudgement. The truth is that people as a whole (including most university students, especially, but not limited to, non scientific faculties) have just learned how to use passively, as black boxes, electricity, internal combustion engines, synthetic fibers and so on. Since you speak of electricity, make a poll in the street: check out how which percentage of random, real people can explain correctly what electricity is, why it is bad to put one's fingers in a plug, how an AC electric engine works, what a car transmission really does...

If people had actually learned what these things are, how they work and how they are used to control society, we wouldn't suffer pollution and lots of other problems. And all those things (electricity, car engines...) are both much older and (for almost every human being) less alien than personal computers.

It will take generations to get to the point you speak of. It may take much less (if the FLOSS community language doesn't change) to dis-educate people so they passively accept whatever "PC" they find at the corner store.

I agree that the FLOSS community doesn't target non-programmers all that well, but if it is true that what people want is to forget about what a computer does, what a program is, what a file format means, then it's just not going to be possible to target them.

This is indeed impossible if traditional-style FLOSS advocate keep starting from software and source code and remain stuck to it for 90% of tht time. Things may be go very different if those same activists inverted the flow, that is if they arrived at Free as in Freedom standards and software in that order and almost incidentally, as I do in the Family Guide. I agree that such a change may be difficult for an activist used to see only software-centered issues, but here there is some very practical advice to help you.

Moving now to another:

Free Software gives society a wonderful chance to really be able to engage with the technology it uses;

Unfortunately, this sentence is negated by what its very author wrote right before it: "Society is used to tolerating technology with flaws". Saying "Free Software gives society a wonderful chance.." is just a rewording of the fifth and sixth things we're tired of hearing from software hackers.

Sure, it's true, but it just doesn't work that way nowadays. If you hope to change society before it's too late, relying only on the support and vote of the people who can and do want to hack code today, I'm afraid you're in for a big delusion.

One last comment on the next sentence of the last paragraph I quoted:

(with Free Software).. flaws are no longer necessary, nor is dependence on any particular supplier"

Another poster in the same thread had said that, had the software of his cell phone be Free, he could have fixed some bugs in it. Sure, but what keeps most cell phone users "locked to a particular supplier" is the fact that accessories and batteries are not interchangeable. No matter, however: the fact that Free or Open Source SW is necessary to be free may apply to special purpose devices (eg phones), not to all computers, especially normal desktops. See again thing #1 in the already quoted article and the paragraph starting with "The idea of software freedom of almost every person or corporation is at most..." of the Free Software Manifesto for all of us