When Your Family Believe Free Software Is Religious
Free software movement, or more specifically, the Gnu Project was begun in 1983. This movement is very successful in the past 30 years, but it is still always misunderstood by many people for different reasons. One of the most scary reasons of such misunderstanding is religious misunderstanding. Furthermore, the worst situation is that your family (relatives) believe that you are so religious because of free software movement.
GNU/Linux is an advance and successful computer operating system in the world. It has been widely used in many fields, especially in supercomputers and servers. About 95% percent of supercomputers in the world are powered by GNU/Linux operating system. The words like "Computer System", "Software", "Supercomputer", and "Server" are all about science and technology. When people discuss about those words, the first thing they are thinking about is technology. Why do some people think about religion nowadays? Ironically, religious or religion-like discussion was from the free software community. Yes, you are right, the developers, themselves, said that firstly, not the users, competitors or other stakeholders.
Developers in free software communities usually like discussing a lot of technique problems. Some discussions would eventually "upgrade" to an intense debate. For example, programmers who use vi text editor and those who use emacs text editor had a tremendously intense debate. They even registered their real religions formally. They are Cult of vi and St IGNU−cius respectively. The following photo is about Richard Stallman who dressed as a representative of his St IGNU−cius.
(CC BY-SA 2.0, photo by Kjetil Ree from Oslo, Norway.)
Developers discussing and doing religious or religion-like things are actually reasonable, and sometime, they even feel that such religious or religion-like topics are funny. They may feel a little relax and comfortable by talking and doing such things in their busy and boring coding and programming work. It is good for them at the first glance. However, such topics would eventually spread to the outside world, to the outside of the free software communities. Other people may misunderstand what they were talking about. People who are religious may even feel that free software developers are aggressive. Companies which develop proprietary software argue that free software communities are nothing more than a cult which hunts manpower to develop free software without any income. Full time employees of proprietary software companies do not like to take participate in free software development, because they do not want to be "slaved" by such "cults" or "spiritual control".
Richard Stallman states that free software movement is neither a cult nor a political party, because they do not have power, and they do not force people. Actually his argument is convincing, because in most fields, free software developers and users are still a "minority group". The free software movement usually just encourage developers to release their source codes, and it also encourage users to try free software and use free software as a replacement of proprietary software eventually. Richard Stallman does his speech all over the world, and many volunteers outreach free software publicly in reasonable and objective methods. In public, with the effort of Richard Stallman and volunteers, even though people believe that free software is cult, they can be convinced, and their misunderstanding can be corrected.
There is a lot of ways to spread idea and correct misunderstanding publicly, but what if in a family, your relatives such as your parents, grandparents, or spouse cannot understand the free software movement? What if they blame you that you are religious, or you have a different religious belief with them? The bad situation is that you may want to ignore them. In public, people may try to avoid talking about religious issues if they expect that a conflict will happen after talking. For example, Jeremy Lin said that he does not care about Chinese people who blame his religious belief, and he avoid talking this kind of issues in China and Taiwan. However, in family, something cannot be avoided. For example, law enforcement requires that people should take care their parents when they are adults. What if your parents ask you to buy and install a new Microsoft Windows 10 for them? Can you say something like "I don't like Windows, I can only install Gnu/Linux for you"? No, you cannot. You have to install a Microsoft Windows 10 for your parents because they are your parents. This is a requirement of law in many countries. There is another example. If you are a father, and your son is a high school student. The art class of his high school requires him to study Adobe Photoshop, but you can only provide GIMP. Is it okay? It may be okay in America but in most other countries, it is not even possible. Even if they are all good in the perspective of law, family issue is still here and can hardly be avoided. Could you image your parents and your children live with you sadly and depressively because you cannot do most technical help for them? Could you image living in a intense environment every days and nights because they think you are in cult?
When your family believe free software is religious, your life will become very difficult. Richard Stallman has no wife, so he may not understand this difficulty. Hope somebody has some ideas about how to relieve the conflict between family and free software movement.
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