For quite some time now, many users and developers of FOSS software have been encouraging it’s use by civil society, in social benefit, charity and intervention projects. One sad reality is that many of these projects do not hold the individual freedom that is the heart of the free software philosophy as the main reason to use it, opting instead to cite cost advantages and technical abilities allowing for greater scale of intervention as their major reasons.
While these reasons are good reasons, and important ones, they should not in my mind be held of higher virtue than freedom, which is the single most important reason you can have to do anything. Without freedom, all other noble values, even love must sooner or later be lost.
Thus it is inspiring to see that the free software foundation has decided to honour those projects which use free software in ways that are beneficial to a wider part of the social sphere. This is a subtle way to remind those projects just where this software came from. These projects bring benefit in a wider part of the social sphere, but they must remember that bringing freedom is a noble goal in itself and not be afraid to capitalise on it, even if we have come to live in a world that considers individual freedom a swearword – that makes it even more important for especially civil uplifted projects to hold it as a high virtue.
