RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
&gt; <i>There are organizations that proclaim support for free software or the GNU Project, and teach classes in use of nonfree software. It&#x27;s possible that they do some other things that really support free software, but those classes certainly don&#x27;t. On the contrary, they work directly against the free software movement by promoting the use of the nonfree software. That increases the magnitude of the practical problem it is our mission to correct.</i><p>Just to throw out an extreme example for discussion: the Mozilla Foundation would seem to be one of the free-software organizations that RMS critiques.<p>One initiative they&#x27;ve supported is Software Carpentry: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;software-carpentry.org&#x2F;scf&#x2F;partners&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;software-carpentry.org&#x2F;scf&#x2F;partners&#x2F;</a><p>One of Software Carpentry&#x27;s packaged lessons is for MATLAB: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;software-carpentry.org&#x2F;lessons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;software-carpentry.org&#x2F;lessons&#x2F;</a><p>To be fair, the current MATLAB lesson plan includes asides for how GNU Octave can be used...but the fact that the curriculum is titled &quot;Programming with MATLAB&quot; certainly counts as promotion of non-free software.<p>Edit: by &quot;extreme&quot;, I mean that Mozilla is in most people&#x27;s minds a passionate advocate for free software, and the number of their affiliations with proprietary software lessons is extremely small as far as I can tell.<p>Edit 2: FWIW, RMS&#x27;s definition of non-free software may be much more expansive than most people&#x27;s:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;airbnb.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;airbnb.html</a><p>&gt; <i>Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel).</i><p>JavaScript is many things, but nonfree isn&#x27;t one of them.