September 20th is being celebrated worldwide as software freedom day. Ankur Sharma, a Nepali Software Freedom activist, has sent an article to promote awareness regarding software freedom. His article is being presented here as a series of three posts: Concepts, Cases and Celebration. This post is the second post in the series where he discusses the benefits of software freedom.

Admin’s Note : A user comment on the first part of this article led Rangeen Chara to declare the contents presented in this web-site as free to use, redistribute and modify with the requirement that source and author/creator information be attached with the content.

The lack of software freedom causes three major problems. Firstly, we need to work hard to earn more to afford licensed copy of software, expensive because there are no alternatives, which is indirect harm to our productivity and financial capability. Secondly, since we are so entangled using these software, we barely want to learn new things and use alternatives even when they are available. We become victim of monopoly and the government at one time will be forced to invest millions of dollars in software when law is enforced and piracy is taken seriously by donors and multinational companies. To some extent, it is like giving few first doses of drugs for free. They want us to be captive of their vendor lock and razor blade model (sell razor for cheap, and later earn by selling blade to dependent customers).
Third and most prominent problem in my opinion is freedom. I always fail answering questions like: Am I free to use the software I own (You’d agree with me if you have ever read EULA before hitting “I Agree” button)? Is my privacy preserved/respected(do you know what your software is doing at background when you are surfing the web or creating a new document)? Am I free to modify this software (How could I, if I haven’t seen its source code or couldn’t reverse engineer it.)? Am I free to distribute/redistribute the software I own? (proprietary license doesn’t let us do so, I can not install it on N machines without paying money for N number of licenses.)
There are countless benefits of using Free Software. Many of you might be using it knowingly/unknowingly, Best examples I can portray here is that of the popular web browser Firefox. Also, most of the web’s back-end apache servers and Bind DNS servers are free software. The second popular OS gnu/linux is free software too.
Few years back, people used to complain about usability and aesthetics of free software but now free software have topped all the rankings. Even big corporations are shipping their hardwares with free software and gaining more profit and delivering less end price for user.
Thousands of freely available applications to choose from and wide user base makes open source software optimal for students, researchers and for other uses. If you want to migrate to free software, you can either start with a open source operating system like ubuntu or you can migrate softly by using open source softwares available for windows environment and later switching to free OS.

Author Information
Ankur Sharma completed his Bachelor in Engineering (CS) from Nepal Engineering College in 2006. His final year project with Shankar Pokharel, titled “Mero Sanu Sathi”, went on to collaborate with One Laptop Per Child Project. At one time, he served as a technical lead and General Secretary for One Laptop Per Child Nepal collaborating with Nepal Government to successfully deploy OLPC laptops on selected government schools. He has been FOSS activist since 2004 participating actively as a resource person for raising awareness and facilitating migration of Free Software in Nepal.