Ask HN: Do you believe in GNU's Free Software?
&gt; Do you believe in Free Software?<p>&gt; If we believe in things like right to repair...<p>&gt; immoral<p>When it is phrased like that (and it often is phrased like that) it sounds like a religion. Also the notion that there is no compromise to be had also seems very religious. I already have a religion and Free Software isn&#x27;t it.<p>I support the majority of the goals of the FSF, SFC, OSI, and EFF. Some of them overlap, some I don&#x27;t agree with (particularly the FSF&#x27;s stance on handling  nonfree firmware), and some goals of mine aren&#x27;t represented by any of the above groups.<p>What I absolutely reject is the all or nothing approach even implicit in the question. If I buy a piece of proprietary software or hardware that does not mean I don&#x27;t &quot;believe&quot; in Free Software or that it is a lost cause. It means I want to play video games with my friends. It means the way I put food on my family&#x27;s table depends on it sometimes (although 99% of what I do is FOSS even for work).<p>Even in religion we make these moral distinctions of how closely we&#x27;re willing to cooperate with evil in the course of our daily lives. I don&#x27;t want to live the ascetic lifestyle of Richard Stallman. And to imply that I should to really consider myself a supporter of Free Software is what drives me and a few other people away from such a movement. Not to ramble about my FOSS CV, but I release software under the GPLv3, I&#x27;ve donated to FSF, SFC, OSI, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD just to name a few, I&#x27;ve spent hours tabling for the FSF at different events. Because I sometimes use proprietary software does that excommunicate me from the belief of Free Software?