The Android situation yet again proves that Stallman was right

One is often awed and astonished by Richard Stallman's ability to accurately predict the future at such critical junctures when nobody would have even thought about it. In a way, Stallman is like a leading-by-decade stock-market indicator which says exactly what's going to happen in future, if only people care to listen.

Stallman had penned this article way back in 2011 (as it was first published in the guardian) when the Android world wasn't perhaps as messy as it is today. Or maybe it was but we were so deeply shackled into the clutches of Apple's iOS at that time that even the mere appearance of an "open source" mobile OS in the market seemed like a breath of fresh air to us. As Stallman rightly puts it in the article:

To what extent does Android respect the freedom of its users? For a computer user that values freedom, that is the most important question to ask about any software system.

Stallman further elaborates his point by explaining what freedom really means for the free software movement and how the "open source" perspective which focuses entirely on code quality misses the point about freedom. He also warns us about the danger ahead of allowing Google to get away with a lax open source license like Apache-2.0 for Android:

Linux aside, the software of Android versions 1 and 2 was mostly developed by Google; Google released it under the Apache 2.0 license, which is a lax free software license without copyleft.

And yes, harm it did to all of us as it gradually allowed the developers of Android OS and the mobile OEMs to deprive us of our privacy and freedoms one by one over the years. They have successfully molded us to such an extent that we take proprietary non-free apps for granted today, we don't even think for a second before installing them from our favorite play store.

Those of us who used to assemble the 486/P3/P4 computer back in the late 90s by buying a hard-drive from Seagate, motherboard from Asus, disk drive from Samsung, etc. and felt the joy of putting it all together into something that was fully powered by free software can clearly see today what is being deprived of us and we can also see the doom that lies ahead of us.

Those were the times when companies used to follow standards and people like Richard Stallman were highly respected for their views (even if they were highly controversial and politically incorrect like in Epstein's case). Most importantly, the commoners used to enjoy the true freedom. When an app ran on my machine, I could rest assured that its 100% free software (at least the majority of software barring exceptions like Adobe).

But this same freedom and flexibility didn't translate to the mobile OS world when it came into being. In 2011, the Android companies told us that they are collecting data for just showing us benign advertisements and we bought into that argument. Today, they have graduated further and using that data to influence elections and other political outcomes. We, on the other hand, have still dug ourselves deep like ostriches, refusing to believe what is obvious and right in front of our eyes!

History has been witness since centuries to the fact that no one can be trusted with absolute power, especially when it comes to users' freedom. This is a very simple point which Stallman has been trying to make since always but the message still seems to escape the majority of people for some reason. Maybe you are too busy while earning your daily bread, maybe you have problems of your own, maybe you don't care about freedoms and privacy of the commons as long as you get to play your favorite android game? Think about it, its the question of your freedom after all. If not you, then who will defend it?