Sharing is what makes a strong community. It has always impressed me to see how
people in the free software community share their time, ideas, achievements,
knowledge, and software with others. This sharing community is what attracted
me in the first place to the free software movement: I wanted to know what it
is that people spend so much time and joint effort on and why. What I found
convinced me and won me over to free software.
I started to climb the freedom ladder in 2014. Having profited
from software like KeePassXC, Calibre, LibreOffice,
F-Droid, Zotero, VLC media player, Privacy Badger,
and TeXstudio for more than seven years, I wanted to give back to
the free software community. When the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
was looking for a program manager, I considered this to be the perfect
opportunity to utilize my organizational, managerial, and
interpersonal skills, and I am immensely grateful that I now have
the privilege to contribute to the free software movement as the FSF's
program manager.
My path to the FSF took me through academia. During my doctorate, I spent four
years writing articles and contributing to collaborative volumes which I was
not allowed to share after the publication because the authors, who do the
research and write the text, usually have to assign the distribution rights to
the publishers and for decades most of the academic publishers have distributed
books in DRM-restricted, proprietary, and incompatible formats. This is
why policies such as the memorandum to ensure "Free, Immediate, and Equitable
Access to Federally Funded Research" published this year in August by the
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) or projects like
"Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly
Communication" (DIAMAS) which in September launched a project to develop
a diamond open access publishing model are long-overdue steps in the right
direction. These initiatives work to ensure that scientific data resulting from
federally funded research and peer reviewed scholarly publications are made
freely available and publicly accessible by default. Academia, as with so many
other fields, cannot exist without collaboration. But how can we collaborate if
we lack the freedom to share the code, the data, the documents, the articles,
and the (e-)books we are working with?
Let me give one example from my experience in academia to illustrate this. At
the Department of Ancient History at the University of Zurich, I prepared
inscriptions from the Roman Empire for the Epigraphic Database Clauss / Slaby
(EDCS). Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions and there are hundreds of
epigraphists worldwide, all working to understand and analyze inscriptions from
the Roman Empire who therefore must be able to access images and texts of the
inscriptions. The easiest way to do this is to use an epigraphic database. But
there is not only one epigraphic database, there are plenty of them. In addition
to the EDCS, there are for example the Epigraphic Database Roma (EDR), the
Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH), the database Hispania Epigraphica,
and the database of the Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy
(EAGLE). Most of them contain similar information about the same inscriptions.
So, why duplicate information instead of having one database or linking from one
to the other? Most of the datasets are not shareable, at least not in a compatible
format. It is very difficult to share the database and the software it's running on,
and this makes it close to impossible for different universities to work together
on the same database.
Whether in the form of databases, books, or articles, the availability
and accessibility of findings is crucial to ensure high quality in
research. Rationales and results of any scientific research can only
be verified by others if scientists share the data they collect and
the code and configurations they used to collect it with others in a format
that everybody can open and process. Other scientists can only
reproduce measurements and thus build upon them if they are shared with
them in freedom.
But against all reason, universities and other research institutions
worldwide use proprietary software like Matlab, the Microsoft Office
suite, or ArcGIS software, to name only a few. These companies
trap documents and data in their software, so that users can't share them
with peoplewho don't use the same software. The same companies
claim that their products are made for collaboration. But they are designed
to do the opposite: to exclude people who don't use the product of the same
company. Imagine that people modify and improve a piece of software, adapt
it to their needs, but then, they are not allowed to share the improvements.
To give you an example: my favorite typesetting system, LaTeX, started as a
markup language for science. I could only use it for my PhD thesis in history
because some amazing people adapted it for the use in the humanities
and then shared their improvements in the form of TeX extensions as
XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, and packages such as betababel which
for a long time has been the only way to write polytonic Ancient Greek.
No wonder that science is facing a reproducibility crisis after,
for decades, having produced books and used software which deny the
reader or user to share it. DRM-free books and free software are
important steps on the way out of this crisis, because we can only
build upon and advance the work of others if we have the freedom to
share it. The good news is that there is fantastic free software, free
documentation, free programming languages, and free tools that are made
for science and for sharing. Scientist who care about sharing often use
programs like GNU Guix, or Git, which have reproducibility
and shareability at their core. Code that has been written in Python
can be shared easily without forcing the receiver to use a proprietary
computing environment like Matlab. In general, every fully free program
grants its user the freedom to not only run and modify the software, but
also to copy and share it. To find software that is granting you these
freedoms, check out the 16796 records in the Free Software Directory.
It is a shame that mega-corporations are trying to limit a user's freedom
to share; that they not only prevent interoperability between social media
platforms and messengers to maintain their monopolies, but also
impose DRM on books and other media. It is often misunderstood that
sharing has to be noncommercial. Most people are absolutely willing to pay
for a copy of a free (as in freedom) program that has been developed
professionally, or a DRM-free song, movie or e-book that is shared
with them. Professional development as well as the creation of art requires
much time, sometimes many people, and numerous resources. Paying money
ensures the continuity of it. Many companies and a whole bunch of software
would not exist without the freedom to share. Even proprietary companies
build on free software and profit immensely from it. What I value in the
free software community, however, is the sharing for the sake of sharing;
for values like collaboration, community, solidarity, and participation.
In our year-end fundraiser and during this year's International
Day Against DRM (IDAD), we've been stressing the importance of
sharing. So much of what we do depends on sharing, studying, and
building upon the works of others. We can only truly foster free
software, free documentation, and free cultural works for users around
the world if we have the ability to share. This is why the freedom to
share is at the core of the FSF's work.
Can you join the effort to defend the freedom to share as an
FSF associate member? You can start for as little as $10 per
month ($5 for students), or $120 per year. With your support, we can
continue to show people how the freedom to share can affect change in
all areas where software touches modern life. Besides that, your
membership gives strength to the idea of free software. Plus, your
membership will count towards achieving our fall goal of 455 new
associate members before December 31, and you will be eligible for
this year's snazzy and secure webcam cover when you join as an annual
associate member at $120 or more. You'll also be able to enjoy all the
member benefits, which include merchandise discounts, a 16GB
bootable membership card, and use of our associate member
videoconferencing server.
As the FSF's program manager, I want to stand up for the freedom to share, and
look forward to working with you to do that. Please help spread the
message on social media networks using the hashtag #FreedomToShare.
