&gt; how would free software prevent the NSA from spying?<p>A lot of hard problems come from the fact that you need lots of developer attention to build and maintain solutions that <i>just work</i>. The domain is tricky and complex enough to where, you can make it zero-effort for one configuration, but making it zero-effort for all possible or even all likely configurations takes more resources than is available.<p>The example relevant here is cryptography software. It&#x27;s not hard to encrypt stuff. It&#x27;s hard to make end-to-end solutions that just work, for all possible uses and across all possible platforms.<p>Free software has a restrictive effect of only making software platforms that are open and extensible, vastly reducing the effort needed to maintain end-to-end, user-friendly encryption.<p>It would make it pretty much impossible for the NSA to spy on citizens if we only had free software platforms to support.