What is my Why? 13 Apr 2020
WHY?
“Why am I doing this?” As I’ve continued down this path of learning to develop software I’ve asked it more times than I can count, especially on those long nights staring down the barrel of a deadline.
WOW!
My interest in computers and software began when I was given a Knoppix live cd around 2002. This disc opened up a whole other world to me, and stoked my passion for GNU/Linux and the FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) ethos. The next summer I worked full time at a gas station for $5.15/hr to save up for my first laptop and immediately started experimenting. Those early years weren’t easy, as anyone trying to run Linux on mobile hardware in 2003 can attest, but I kept hacking, clobbering, borking, and reinstalling until I had a system that suited me, and this process continues to this day.
WAT?
As I learned and read about my hobby, I began to understand that all this amazing software belonged to an ecosystem that relied on certain rules and tenets in order to function, such as the four essential freedoms of software, which describe free software as free speech. I also began learning about the controversies surrounding that freedom, such as the US government’s criminal investigation into PGP. Discovering this case was a kind of watershed moment for me. I began to see the relationship between the community driven hacker culture I’d come to enjoy in the FOSS community, the definition of software as, essentially, speech, and threats on that software as threats on my own privacy, autonomy, and rights as a user and a citizen.
I want to develop software because I think most of the startups turned mega-corporations have abused users’ trust and turned them into products themselves, and that is wrong. I want to contribute to the open source community and give back to projects that have given me so much utility, knowledge, and entertainment. I want to change things, but not in the way Google has, by using open source software as a base for the most popular mobile OS in the world and then increasingly building a proprietary system on top that they control and monetize. It removes user freedom and choice for nothing in return. It ties them into a system that mines their every moment for information to sell. And yet at its core is a monumental amount of work that an entire community of developers continues to release for free to benefit the world. It is a similar strategy to Microsoft’s policy of embrace, extend, extinguish, which accounted for attempts to monopolize: the internet, word processing, Java, instant messaging, and PDF-style documents. And who wouldn’t want to work for Facebook? Which, by the way, also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, essentially accounting for most of the ways people interact on the internet, and is a multi-billion dollar enterprise funded by harvesting all they can about their users and using that to serve them lies. I mean ads.
I want to push back against these corporations and, more fundamentally, against the ideology they represent, which is currently being used by the United States Government yet again. These policies erode our freedoms guaranteed by our founding documents. America does not need more mass surveillance, we need a GDPR.
NO!
It doesn’t have to be this way. I don’t want it to be this way. Instead of building products to target or serve ads, why not just make a good product? There are many organizations building great tools that allow us to communicate, collaborate, learn, and explore without it costing our privacy, our choice, or our freedom, such as: the FSF, the EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, Signal, ProtonMail, and Purism. This is the kind of software I want to engineer. I want to be an educator and an advocate for everyday individuals. We can find ways to use the incredible power and convenience of software without becoming a series of data points to manipulate. I have been a builder my entire life, and this is what I want to build next.
PS
Here are some great FOSS browser addons to give you a safer, cleaner, more private web browsing experience:
And one to stick it back to the man: