I had originally posted a shorter version of these thoughts as a comment on fireborn’s excellent recent post publicly gutting a moron who tried to argue that Linux being inaccessible is good, actually:tm:. I decided to write my own post about this because (1) I’m insufferable and (2) I have a lot of thoughts about this, actually:tm:. So…here goes.

This is galaxy-level navel-gazing

Yes, correct.

I want to get this out of the way: I am well aware that this entire conversation exists in a bizarre no-man’s-land of meaninglessness. It is unlikely that fireborn, or the poster of the comment referenced above, is ever going to read this post. I’m writing it anyway, because writing is cathartic and it makes me feel better about the state of the world. This post is in no way meant to put more emotional burden on fireborn to engage with me on top of the other folks commenting on the blog/reddit post.

All that being said…

Freedom as a concept

I think there are two prevailing schools of thought on the word “freedom”; one is what I would call “positive freedom”, the other I would then naturally call “negative freedom”. The idea is very simple:

• Positive freedom emphasizes that freedom gives you the ability to do something. This includes things like the (American) right to own a gun, the right to free speech, the freedom to love and marry and make a family with whoever you want. Think of these as “freedom-to’s”.

• Negative freedom emphasizes that freedom gives you protection from inhibition. The freedom from needing to practice a religion, the freedom from needing to vote (in many countries, at least), the freedom from needing an explicit license to use a piece of software. These are “freedom-from’s”.

Free software as a movement (not capital-f capital-s Free Software as defined by GNU, the concept of free software) is constructed from both types of freedom.

Free software is constructed from positive freedom. It gives you the freedom to modify your software as you see fit; it gives you the right to examine the source code and understand how it works; it gives you the freedom to build commercial enterprises on top of free software, given certain responsibilities are met.

Free software is also constructed from negative freedom. It gives you the freedom from needing to ask permission to, e.g. copy a piece of software onto a flash drive and hand it to your friend. It gives you the freedom from needing to engage with a for-profit entity to use your computer.

One of the things that I think is hard about this conversation about “freedom” is that freedoms imply responsibilities. The right to redistribute free software comes with the explicit responsibility to redistribute the license text along with it. The right to modify and share software comes with the implied responsibility to treat other humans using your software with dignity and respect at all times.

Now, why is all this preamble important? Simply put, and I hate to use this line, because it’s also used by some of the very worst people: freedom isn’t free.

I know, eye roll, groan. But there’s a kernel (heh) of truth to it.

What happens when passionate people lose the plot

The original post by fireborn (it’s very good, go read it) points out a bunch of serious flaws in the Linux accessibility stack. There are myriad problems caused by a combination of newer and older software not playing nice with each other, totally missing implementations of important standard functionality, and an ecosystem that seems more interested in finding ever-more-complex workarounds to difficult problems rather than questioning the foundations that are causing the problems in the first damn place. For the record, I agree that software that must be launched with a complicated shell script orchestrating it and its 10 dependencies together is not production-ready. That’s amateur hour bullshit, and not a valid answer to users who just want to use their computers.

I am going to make a pretty difficult argument here, knowing I’ll probably fail, but who gives a shit? No one will likely read this anyway.

Your freedom to modify your own software is not a replacement for your freedom to use your own hardware unimpeded.

What I mean is that configurability is not a substitute for usability. The fact that all this stuff works if you light nine black candles, recite an arcane verse, and paint a goose on your forehead left-handed does not mean it “works”.

I would argue that software that is difficult to use is just as freedom-restricting as software that requires licensing with a capitalistic enterprise. Nonfree software is still more free than impossible-to-use free software, at least to the average user. Ideological purity be damned, there is no universe in which the average person will consider Linux “free” if they have to jump through hours of driver compilation, shell script alchemy and fighting with their package manager just to get basic features working.

The commenter has thus forgotten their “freedom-from’s” in their attempt to justify their “freedom-to’s”. You have a freedom to use your computer when using Linux, sure, but you should also have a freedom from artificial inhibition when using your computer.

The fundamental problem here, then, is that the commenter can’t let go of their strict, narrow definition of freedom to let in other viewpoints. Their assumptions that the original post author must be “lazy” or “afraid of the terminal” belie the deeper, more fundamental problem here, which is that they have let their passion for the free software movement turn them into an exclusionary zealot.

Oops we did a fascism!

Okay, that title was inflammatory, and someone will probably get mad over it, but I don’t really give a shit. It’s true and I’m sticking with it.

One very very (very very very very very) common problem in leftist spaces is the application of purity tests to determine membership. These purity tests, I think, come from good intentions: the group must preserve freedom for members, it must protect itself from bad actors, it must ensure that it doesn’t descend into zealous infighting. But it’s all too easy for purity tests to devolve into the same kind of bigotry that powers the engine of fascism.

For example, a common sentiment I see is that religious people can’t be leftists because religion is, structurally, hierarchical and therefore anti-egalitarian. Another common one is that knowledge workers are inherently bourgeois because they don’t do “labor” in the same way as folks who are moving boxes in warehouses, and therefore don’t know the struggle of labor. Both of these ideas are fucking asinine because they make totally baseless assumptions about peoples’ ideologies due to their group membership. This is the basis for bigotry, which is the basis for fascism. Yup, it’s fascism again! sound airhorn

I get really tired of this kind of shit because one, I’m a big-tent socialist; I believe everyone has the ability to be a part of the solution, so long as they acknowledge their unique set of privileges and challenges; and two, I don’t think it’s particularly productive to exclude people if your movement is going to require majority support to get off the fucking ground. This is true of socialism and it’s also true of free software. I actually don’t have a major problem with companies like Red Hat and Canonical who make money off of free software, at least when they are behaving correctly. Both have made significant missteps, of course, and I’m not about to say they’re blameless for the current suck that is engulfing the software industry, but when they’re at their best both are quite capable of making free software better. Loud tankie morons screaming about how eating meat is bourgeois don’t help the cause, nor do loud Stallman-worshiping chuds who think they’re special by calling anyone who doesn’t understand their arcane runes idiots.

Oops, we did a Linux!

To be clear, I am very familiar with Linux and all its silliness. I have written device drivers, I have compiled my own kernels for embedded targets, I have stood up Kubernetes clusters by hand on bare metal, I have written shell scripts that keep satellites from crashing into the Earth (this is only barely a joke). I do the Linux. I actually really like working with Linux and tinkering on it and making my systems beautiful and good and happy. But I would liken the process of maintaining a Linux computer to the process of raising a toddler (a thing I’m also experienced with); it almost knows how to do about 5 things on its own, and everything else it falls over and cries. And it’s total luck of the draw if today will be the day it spontaneously forgets how to do one of the five things, and you’re back to reading them exactly 4 books, singing Old MacDonald with exactly 5 different animals, and playing exactly the ocean wave white noise they like just to get them to nap even though just yesterday they crawled into bed and slept for 9 hours on their own. (No this isn’t a personal anecdote, why do you ask?)

But what do I use for my big kid job? A fucking macbook. You know why? Because when I wake up in the morning, the last thing I want to think about is whether my computer will decide to shit the bed today. I need to log in, do my work, and leave. I empathize a lot with folks who need their computers to work day-to-day, and I still don’t recommend Linux to them even though I have at least four different computers in my house running various flavors of arch(btw) and Ubuntu, all running all manner of custom scripts and tweaks that make me happy to use them. Computers running Linux are still too fragile for your average person to use, and that means that Linux is not free to the average person. It costs in time, and it costs in features that are unusable.

Owning and Using a computer

Folks who need accessibility features are not stupid or lazy for throwing their hands up and going back to a nonfree operating system. They’re fucking practical. I don’t blame anyone who needs a screen reader or support for braille boxes or a headmouse or a speech-to-text system that actually works for using Windows or Mac OS; they need to use a computer to access the internet and do their work, and they are getting what they need somewhere else. The Linux solution that wavers somewhere between pointing and laughing and recommending they run some untrusted bash script a random guy in Belarus wrote 11 years ago is not acceptable. I think plenty of folks who believe in free software know this, and that’s why there are distros like Debian who care very much about their machines being accessible and usable out of the box. Because the freedom to use your PC also means the freedom from inhibition in using your PC, and without both types of freedom, your computer isn’t “yours”.