Yesterday I was watching a free software video, I noticed Richard Stallman had no hair on his head and his beard is gone. First I thought he shaved it because he had gotten old and want to get rid of hair, but then I went to his Wikipedia page and found that he had cancer. It shocked me.

How many of you know that your smart T.V takes screenshot of your entire screen every two seconds and sends it to a centralized server? How many of you know Xiaomi phones, Kindle and other devices you use spy on you? Are you able to stop it spying? Have you thought how to stop corporate’s spying and controlling your life using software in the devices you own?

India is ruled by a leader who conducted genocide when he was a Chief Minister, he also spied and spying on fellow politicians using software in their phones. Many of us have Government utility software in our phone, how can we be sure the government is not spying on us? Those software products are made with our money, why aren’t we able to see how it works? It might have a bug that might be exploited by a foreign actor, why are our programmers not able to look at the code, and are unable to comment on code quality, fix code issues etc?

Those software products that are closed, and has a potential to cause harm to you are called proprietary software. A software that you can see the source, understand its working, modify it, and redistribute possibly better version of it to your friends is called free software.

Stall man pioneered the Free Software Movement, which aims to educate and liberate us from proprietary software. His efforts shook evil empires like Microsoft, today even Microsoft (though no way less evil than before,) is run by free software. It simply can’t compete with GNU/Linux and lots of other free softwares out there.

Stallman created the free software movement, gave us awareness about free software with his relentless campaigns, he is a fighter who never gives up, he is a leader who you would think should live forever, and he getting cancer is blow to our morale. He even replied to my emails. To Emacs user, he is God.

The world would be far worst without Stallman, we would have been shackled by software far far more than we are shackled now. I might have not had this program to Jekyll create this blog. I would have been blogging using some other software like Medium that shackles me and spies on my readers. We would have accepted being spied and shackled by software, we would have happily accepted it as the norm. Stallman challenged it.

I wish Stallman recovers soon, comes back with more energy, and we have mechanism where no matter what happens, free software movement exists and becomes stronger and stronger.

Free software still has immense potential, imaging what would happen if every human in this world realizes what free software is and demands that he would only use free software? Lot’s of digital evil will be gone. Your data won’t be sold left, right, and center to evil marketing people. Just imaging a world without spam on your phone. That’s just one side effect of having free software.

Imagine your government which is unable to spy on you and control you with information gathered about you, focuses instead winning the next election by providing the nation with good governance. The world will be far better if it switches to free software.

Imagine a world where some tech guy in a big company unable to listen to your kid and watch it by turning camera on its devise. That’s the kind of world we want, not a world what it is now, where we are spied upon relentlessly.

I hope people reading this blog understands what Free Software is and who is Stallman, and I wish you too take a step into the wonderful world of free software.