Leaving free software for good

I’m back to using proprietary software again! This time it’s permanent. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I’ll still be using free software tools like vim and zsh, but I’m migrating away from GNU/Linux and OpenBSD on my personal devices. I talk about it in the video, but here’s some additional lore:

I started getting into free software when I was about 16 years old, and when everything shutdown for COVID I had all the time in the world to tinker. I got deep into Gentoo, Artix, Suckless Software, OpenBSD, etc etc etc! I was taking apart used, decade old laptops and flashing Libreboot to their BIOS chips and using GrapheneOS on my phone. By 2023 I was hosting my own XMPP/Jitsi server to effectively emulate iMessage/FaceTime and I even merged my phone number to that system to make it seamless. It was really cool, but the time for that is past.

At the beginning of last year, the end of my master’s program, I started using a MacBook, iPhone, Apple Watch — the whole “Apple Ecosystem” — because my needs changed: I needed tools that worked where I could collaborate effectively. I really flip flopped back and forth on whether I should use my “free” Librebooted ThinkPad and GrapheneOS phone or these Apple devices. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance to process and I’ve settled on using the MacBook. Things like privacy, anonymity, and decentralization are cool but there’s something deeply vainglorious and proud about not accommodating the needs of those around you. For me this meant getting over myself and getting over my hobby.

“Free” (as in freedom) software claims to value your privacy and rights to modify and redistribute it. Monetarily free (as in free beer) software isn’t necessarily “free” software because it might not value your privacy and rights. What does this have to do with anything? Well, the Apostle Paul writes that, “[for] freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Gal. 5:1). In other words, true freedom for a Christian is freedom from sin and the passions.

If someone spends countless hours editing the source code and modifying the dotfiles of “free” software, then I think we can agree that person is wasting his time. That’s really what I was doing, and although I learned a lot in the process I think truly free software is that which doesn’t become a fixation and for me that’s a mix of proprietary and libre software.