Freedom is in everyone’s language: Frihed, Vrijheid, Liberté, Freiheit, Ελευθερία, Свобода, Bebas, Libertad.
Modern Information and Communications Technology is dramatically and rapidly changing society. We have a choice to share our knowledge and understanding to help others in many ways. Commercially we can compete on how we provision the services through APIs that allow users through various apps to choose the services they want to be applied to their data.
Freedom should be a fundamental right in our lifes. Free to share what we learn with each other. We might be standing at the top of the mountain, already having travelled the rocky slopes and unmade paths to get there, but from where we stand we can see better ways of getting to the top – hope we can shout some of that experience down the slope as you continue to climb this way…..
Today society tends to have an inward focus on the self. The whole of society suffers when greed overrides common good as we saw with the global financial crisis in October 2008.
Governments can make decisions for the common good to support society at all levels. Where the best interest of corporations are aligned with the best interests of society then all is good. But this does not always work well. In a society as wealthy as ours the aim of
government should be to govern for all. Successful and wealthy societies can care for all its people, providing the opportunity for all to have an education, good health, housing, communications, and care. Freedom underpins a functioning society, one that cares for its citizens. We need to look after each other, irrespective of religion, race, eduction, age, and gender.
From an information technology perspective, the freedom to share ideas expressed in software, to build on and innovate from the ideas of others, is just one part of the picture. But we all need to strive to bring peace, happiness, and freedom, to all, whoever
they are, the world over.
This is why I support the ideas of free (as in libre or freedom) open source software (FLOSS). This empowers everyone and anyone, with basic access to computing resources, to learn from those who have gone before, and to contribute in a positive way to all of
society.
The Zuckerberg/Gates initiative for universal internet access by 2020 is a positive move that could align corporate outcomes with societal benefit if done with freedom in mind.