I've been asked, occasionally, about why I participate in the free software community. Some of it is due to a youth spent reading sci-fi. It's not hard to pick up a utopistic undercurrent from that, of possible worlds, of solved problems and of improvement of the human condition. Another factor in it is my love for math, which naturally led to coding. It was not hard to get to know computers, with an older brother who went through that track first.

Though I did little but play games with computers for years.

Once I got mostly past that, I got into learning to use Linux. I explored all the commands and the file system until I found a collection of text files which were distributed along with Emacs. The GNU philosophy resonated strongly with the ideas I had encountered in sci-fi. Science has the potential to solve any material problems, some day, but here I saw opportunity for something that could be done today. In any utopia that I can think of, all software will be free. I could participate in that, now, not in some deferred future.

There's more to what led me where I am today. I'm certainly not waiting for technology to solve everything anymore.

GNU may have been an early encounter, but I don't much care about their recent doings. Take GPL, for instance. Version 2 reads like a statement of principles, more than a license. Version 3 is mired with contemporary minutiae. Some battles are better left unfought, as they will be superseded and made moot by the tide of the history. Have faith in the community. I find myself more in the BSD camp nowadays. Our way is better, they just need to find it for themselves.

It's all bits, in the end.

Such principles aren't exactly making my life easier. I feel that I'm part of the problem, every time I end up coding proprietary software. I'm not too happy about sitting on Piperka's code base either, but I know that opening it up would take more than putting the code online. Not to mention that I'm not confident that the code is secure enough to stand open scrutiny. Don't tell me about the faults of security through obscurity.