So is software freedom the wrong place to put the emphasis in the light of all the other problems we might fight, or might it be?
definitely not assuming that the meaning of "we" is the people on this mailinglist and similar mailinglist - this depends on the personal talents like Ben emphasized.
I'd like to contribute a further review on the term "freedom" to your mail. In my opinion it is not as subordinate as the interviewer on zdnet put it in his questions.
On the one hand all the grievances he introduces are means to minimize the personal freedom of the victims in a very existential way. Poverty diminishes the life to a search for food and triggers envy, that can lead to hate. Furthermore it most often leads to starvation and death - which is the ultimate loss of freedom - the freedom to live. The same is valid for war, invasion and occupation which almost necessarily leads to death (see above) and cuts the freedom of the occupied in almost any respect.
So in a way the target in the fight for free software is the same: helping people keep their freedom.
Now - this comparison between death and starvation on the one hand and software on the other might appear cynical. Propably this is what the interviewer meant to say.
But it is not: We live in a world of technology - and strictly speaking alway have. People don't owning the technology and the knowledge suffer from discrimination.
This is exactly, what we can observe in the so called developing world. Depending on the country it is necessary to teach the children reading and writing first of course. You can not use a computer if you can not read.
But there also exist lots of countries that are still discriminated against, because they can not afford the enormous prices the producers of proprietary software tend to take for their software and whats worse: they don't have a chance to develop this software for themself, because the proprietary software is closed source in the most cases. And if it is not they would be violate the licenses and copyrights of the software companies, if they start developing using that source.
So free software is not only a "nice to have" for the rich countries and their engineers. It's a necessity to let people in countries with a worse infrastructure to catch up the progress and by catching up improving their living conditions.
Free software is more than a toy. It's also more than a nice philosophy of people rich enough to afford philosophizing. Free software is a social necessity for globalized world. And therefore it has the same meaning for the society on this planet like the fight against the inequity and the suffering.
And by having set free software in this context the people working on it in their sparetime, the companies supporting it, and as a matter of course the people fighting for it like the fsf in the different countries earn the same respect like anybody else on earth, who tries to improve the world - or at least tiny bits of it.
Everything else is only a question of talents.
regards alexander
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