Denouncing vs. Advocating: In Defense of the Occasional Denouncement

For the last decade, I've regularly seen complaints when we harder-core software freedom advocates spend some time criticizing proprietary software in addition to our normal work preserving, protecting and promoting software freedom. While I think entire campaigns focused on criticism are warranted in only extreme cases, I do believe that denouncement of certain threatening proprietary technologies is a necessary part of the software freedom movement, when done sparingly.

Denouncements are, of course, negative, and in general, negative tactics are never as valuable as positive ones. Negative campaigns alienate some people, and it's always better to talk about the advantages of software freedom than focus on the negative of proprietary software.

The place where negative campaigns that denounce are simply necessary, in my view, is when the practice either (a) will somehow completely impeded the creation of FLOSS or (b) has become, or is becoming, widespread among people who are otherwise supportive of software freedom.

I can think quickly of two historical examples of the first type: UCITA and DRM. UCITA was a State/Commonwealth-level law in the USA that was proposed to make local laws more consistent regarding software distribution. Because the implications were so bad for software freedom (details of which are beyond scope of this post but can be learned at the link), and because it was so unlikely that we could get the UCITA drafts changed, it was necessary to publicly denounce the law and hope that it didn't pass. (Fortunately, it only ever passed in my home state of Maryland and in Virginia. I am still, probably pointlessly, careful never to distribute software when I visit my hometown. :)

DRM, for its part, posed an even greater threat to software freedom because its widespread adoption would require proprietarization of all software that touched any television, movie, music, or book media. There was also a concerted widespread pro-DRM campaign from USA corporations. Therefore, grassroots campaigns denouncing DRM are extremely necessary even despite that they are primarily negative in operation.

The second common need for denouncement when use of a proprietary software package has become acceptable in the software freedom community. The most common examples are usually specific proprietary software programs that have become (or seem about to become) “all but standard” part of the toolset for Free Software developers and advocates.

Historically, this category included Java, and that's why there were anti-Java campaigns in the Free Software community that ran concurrently with Free Software Java development efforts. The need for the former is now gone, of course, because the latter efforts were so successful and we have a fully FaiF Java system. Similarly, denouncement of Bitkeeper was historically necessary, but is also now moot because of the advent and widespread popularity of Mercurial, Git, and Bazaar.

Today, there are still a few proprietary programs that quickly rose to ranks of “must install on my GNU/Linux system” for all but the hardest-core Free Software advocates. The key examples are Adobe Flash and Skype. Indeed, much to my chagrin, nearly all of my co-workers at SFLC insist on using Adobe Flash, and nearly every Free Software developer I meet at conferences uses it too. And, despite excellent VoIP technology available as Free Software, Skype has sadly become widely used in our community as well.

When a proprietary system becomes as pervasive in our community as these have (or looks like it might), it's absolutely time for denouncement. It's often very easy to forget that we're relying more and more heavily on proprietary software. When a proprietary system effectively becomes the “default” for use on software freedom systems, it means fewer people will be inspired to write a replacement. (BTW, contribute to Gnash!) It means that Free Software advocates will, in direct contradiction of their primary mission, start to advocate that users install that proprietary software, because it seems to make the FaiF platform “more useful”.

Hopefully, by now, most of us in the software freedom community agree that proprietary software is a long term trap that we want to avoid. However, in the short term, there is always some new