GNU/Linux for the Social and Political Conscience

Full disclosure: I am a social, moral and political conservative who sees the value in using Free Open Source Software that is not tied to a company that has political ties or meddles in social agendas. I am not discussing and will not discuss the merits of right-wing, left-wing, conservative, liberal or party affiliation in this article nor in the comments. What I intend to show is that GNU/Linux distributions can appeal to all these factions because it is not tied to any of them.

Companies should be socially neutral. A company should be politically active only if some legislation is going to directly affect that company's bottom line. Unfortunately, no matter what side one takes in social and political culture wars there is always some company that is supporting the opposite side. In the world we have today one can see companies taking sides or caving in to pressure from one side or another over social issues. This is just as true in the Information Technology industry as in any other. Society at large should be deciding social issues, not companies, not governments and not courts. Now that I have stated How Things Should Be, on to why GNU/Linux is the better choice for the socially and politically conscious person.

The two major desktop players up until now, Microsoft and Apple, are invested in the modern culture wars. Each has a diversity division and has supported one social agenda or another with funds and/or political activism. If one wishes to find information about these companies and their activism the nearest search engine should work quite well for that. However, both have proven to be fickle over the years and will pull out of supporting a cause if the opposite side in that cause asserts enough pressure.

If one is interested in diversity then one cannot find an operating system with more diverse people working on it than a GNU/Linux distribution. While Microsoft and Apple tout diversity they have nowhere near the huge diverse group of people that work on all the software that goes into a GNU/Linux distribution. Further, no one is coerced to toe a social line in a GNU/Linux corporate office. GNU/Linux has no corporate office.

Is one interested in avoiding funding a social cause through buying from a company, like Microsoft and Apple, that then takes part of that money and gives it to a "charity" on the opposite side from one's beliefs? Then one need look no further than a "free" GNU/Linux distribution. While a GNU/Linux distribution may be tied to a group of people or a business there is little reason to worry that using "free" GNU/Linux will help fund those in opposition to one's beliefs. GNU/Linux is "free", in other words given away, in the greater majority of cases. Since in these majority of cases no money changes hands then there is no entity behind the scenes giving part of one's money to one's political or social "enemies".

While these reasons may be trivial to some, there are those to who this will be a ray of light shining toward freedom from indirectly funding causes or supporting political agendas against their beliefs. These people can switch to a "free" GNU/Linux distribution with a clear conscience. I suspect people on both sides of many issues are tired of corporate meddling in social issues. I know I am.

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Edit Sun May 10 15:39:10 CDT 2009: Fix sentence in final paragraph.