The Free Software Movement as a Digital Civil Rights Struggle
Sun, 12 Oct 2025
To understand the world of free software, you must first discard any notion that about a superior development model, about making software faster, with more features, fewer bugs, a price tag of zero, or anything like that. The free software movement is, and has always been, an ethical and political social movement that's focused on software. It's a campaign for freedom and justice.
Founded by Richard Stallman in 1983 with the launch of the GNU Project, the movement's core philosophy is that proprietary software is a social problem - an instrument of unjust power that allows developers to control users. Free software is the solution. This framing positions the movement not as a preference for a particular way of making things or as a means to get software that's "better" in any technical sense, but as a fundamental struggle for digital civil rights.
The movement was born from a sense of loss. In the 1970s, the hacker culture at places like MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab was built on a foundation of collaboration and sharing. It was a community where, as Stallman noted, "sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers".
By the early 1980s, this collaborative ecosystem was dying, replaced by a world of proprietary software, restrictive licenses, and non-disclosure agreements. Software was no longer a shared resource for learning and improvement; it was a product, locked in a black box, designed to subordinate the user to the will of the developer. This shift created a fundamental power imbalance. As Stallman recognized, "If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users". The developer, as the program's owner, gains unjustified power over the user.
In response, Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. The goal was to build a complete operating system composed entirely of software that respected user freedom, allowing the community that had been lost to be rebuilt on a new, more resilient foundation.
At the heart of the movement are four essential freedoms. These freedoms are analogous to fundamental civil liberties.
Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. The right to run a program for any purpose is akin to freedom of speech and expression. This is the most basic right. You, the user, should be able to use your tools for any purpose you see fit, without seeking permission from anyone else.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. The right to study and modify the source code is the right to knowledge and self-determination - the ability to control the tools that shape one's digital life.
Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. This freedom is rooted in the principles of community and social solidarity. The movement holds that helping others is the basis of society, and that proprietary software, with its legal restrictions on sharing, is fundamentally antisocial.
Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. This is the right to contribute to your community. By sharing your improvements, you give everyone a chance to benefit from your work. This freedom allows for collective control over software, enabling a community to maintain and improve the tools it depends on.
The freedoms to share and redistribute are rooted in the principles of community, cooperation, and social solidarity. The Free Software Movement says that forbidding or restricting individuals from exercising these freedoms is unethical.
In the late 1990s, a group sought to make these ideas more appealing to the corporate world, coining the term "open source" as a strategic rebranding of free software. This new term deliberately downplayed the ethical and political arguments, focusing instead on the pragmatic benefits of a collaborative development methodology - higher-quality code, greater reliability, and lower costs.
The two terms describe nearly the same category of software, but they represent fundamentally different values. The distinction is crucial. As one commentator put it, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement".
For the open source advocate, proprietary software might be a suboptimal solution, an inefficient way to build software. For the free software advocate, proprietary software is a social problem and an injustice. The open source argument is one of practicality; the free-software argument is one of principle.
Viewing the Free Software Movement through a social justice lens reframes its entire purpose. It's a movement to protect users from the unjust control of developers and the tech industry, an industry that has repeatedly demonstrated it can't be trusted to act in the public's best interest. The abstract dangers Stallman warned of in 1983 are now concrete realities. The examples are many.
With their proprietary operating systems on computers and phones, companies can implement universal backdoors to alter the software without our permission. The e-readers we use can remotely delete books we have purchased. The cars we drive are increasingly filled with proprietary software that obstructs the fundamental right to repair, turning owners into tenants of their own property. The "Internet of Things" threatens to become an "internet of snoopers," a vast, distributed surveillance network embedded in our homes. Still more examples can be found at https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/.
Each of these examples demonstrate and confirm that proprietary software is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power used to spy on, restrict, censor, and abuse users.
Defending users' rights is more important than any single company's business model. In this world, free software and its four freedoms are the complete check on that power. Free software's a fight for personal sovereignty in our digital lives. It is, in short, a civil rights struggle for the 21st century.