On Wednesday, 31 August 2022 10:39:39 CEST Carsten Agger wrote:

Øjvind from our Danish FSFE team had a feature/opinion piece in the Danish newspaper Information the other day, print edition and online:

https://www.information.dk/debat/2022/08/baeredygtige-it-fremtid-benytte-fri -software-microsoft-google-apple

Its headline is: "Our sustainable IT future must use Free Software, not Microsoft, Google and Apple".

If you don't read Danish you could use a translation service to read the actual article.

I can read Danish, but it just takes a bit longer for the words to sink in that it would if it were Norwegian. (Bokmål, that is: I also experience a performance penalty with Nynorsk!)

Having rushed through the article somewhat, I think it is pretty well argued, touching on the freedom aspects of Free Software, and I think that the transparency of Free Software is definitely a selling point in this age of surveillance. However, there were a couple of things that weren't quite accurate or that risk being inaccurate.

Firstly, there was a remark about needing to use the Zoom application when one could use Jitsi Meet in the browser. While I don't feel like defending Zoom, having been obliged to use it for remote work, I did only ever use it via my browser. Initially, it only worked with Chromium, but later on also seemed to work with Firefox.

More significantly, there was a remark about using Linux on older computers. However, the ability to run Linux distributions on older hardware is imperilled by developer attitudes. With the likes of Fedora starting to require a Web browser just to run the installer [1], and with general system requirements gradually being elevated and demanding more memory than can conveniently be managed on 32-bit systems, a lot of old or lightweight hardware is being rendered obsolete unnecessarily. Admittedly, the escalation in system requirements is also due to "Web culture" where the browser has finally become the environment for running programs that Netscape wanted to deliver in the late 1990s.

Even distributions like Debian are seeing a certain amount of pressure on the 32-bit platforms with regard to how packages can be built and how these platforms can remain supported, and this in turn puts pressure on minority architectures that then risk being demoted to lower levels of support. Although many people would argue that 64-bit machines have been mainstream for many years, and that 64-bit ARM systems have become more widely available, we now risk a lot of 32-bit systems being needlessly thrown away. Then again, many of the same people might remark that many of those systems (Raspberry Pis, for instance) were "cheap" and therefore not worth saving.

So, to summarise the above, I think that some of the traditional arguments made for Free Software (transparency, control) work very well in the modern era where surveillance is a concern for many people. However, other arguments do not stand up particularly well any more. Interestingly, it is the "pragmatic" arguments that are falling down - you can re-use old computers, for example - but they were often the weaker arguments, anyway.

I think that Free Software advocacy can be a struggle purely due to the economic forces at work. Delivering Free Software environments that are resistant to consumerist trends in institutions (where people want the satisfaction of a shopping excursion) requires a strategy and a level of investment that many players in our political systems are reluctant to pursue. Governments, their institutions, and supporters of certain parties seem to regard investment in software infrastructure as "reinventing the wheel" and that such things can be bought "off the shelf" for far less.

At the same time in many countries, central government tends to have a habit of defunding local government and then blaming it for the poor state of public services. When schools are told that there is no money for anything, it becomes tempting for them to acquire the cheapest solutions, and if there happens to be free-of-charge services to use, these will quickly become adopted regardless of whether they should be or not. Considerations of privacy and control are then portrayed as unaffordable luxuries. This phenomenon is happening at absolutely every level of childcare and education.

It is hugely concerning that current economic conditions will only drive these trends further and more strongly. For a decade or more in countries like the UK where "austerity" has been official economic policy, many people will have been told that there is "not enough money" and to "make do". Even in wealthier countries like Norway who could afford to invest in public infrastructure, the tendency to emulate the idiocy of larger countries means that even modest efforts to promote Free Software were eliminated as soon as the former, right- wing, government got into power, because business and "the market" supposedly solve all problems.

But even if we take a step back and look at how "information technology" is used in education, instead of focusing on our own specific interests with Free Software, it is enlightening to see how people regard the widespread use of tablets and other such devices in the classroom from a very early age. Educators, parents and child development professionals may be concerned about such proliferation of technology and whether it is harmful, but in response you can see some familiar tendencies on display: new toys have become available, are "convenient", and "the kids like them". Also, cheap technology is cheaper than paying wages for more teachers, assistants, and so on.

Perhaps the one area where Free Software might make progress is in being able to offer a genuinely better experience. But again, without investment, this will be difficult to achieve, and it also doesn't help that many of the people designing user interfaces these days seem to be obsessed with copying the arbitrarily confected and increasingly absurd elements of established corporate products. Such tendencies have arguably stalled the progress of Linux on the desktop for over a decade, but that is another story.

Paul

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/880973/