Easter and free software

On these dates, believing Jews and Christians celebrate one of the most important events in the religious calendar. Good time to draw parallels between Easter and free software.

Whether we are believers or not, our Western society was built on four pillars: Roman institutions, Greek philosophy, and Judeo-Christian morality. In one way or another they condition all our actions and thoughts, including the software we use.

In writing this article I was especially careful to avoid any disrespect for anyone's beliefs. However, if you are very sensitive about your religion, you shouldn't read any further.

What do Easter and free software have in common?

In the middle of the last century, the psychoanalyst Joseph Campbell studied the stories that Humanity had been telling for centuries and discovered that they all followed a pattern known as the hero's journey

This is so because no matter how much technology evolves, there will always be someone who wants to dominate others, who refuses to be dominated, who loves to share what they know and who idolizes false idols.

Easter and free software

On the first night of the full moon after the spring equinox, Pesaj begins, the Jewish Easter that usually falls on similar dates with the Christian one, although the reason for the celebration is different. Judaism remembers on these dates the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt at the hands of Pharaoh and the way in which they freed themselves and returned to their land.

Slavery takes many forms and one of them is the vassalage to which technology companies subject their users. There are some examples:

• Recently the owners of the English publishing rights of the author Roal Dahl decided to modify his books to make them more politically correct. Those who had the original versions purchased from Amazon and stored on their Kindle devices received the new versions no way to avoid it.
• Decisions about the availability of updates for mobile phones are made based on commercial criteria and not techniques. In fact, Apple made out-of-court agreements to release updates for the sole purpose of slowing down old devices.
• Software is getting heavier and incorporates rartificially placed requirements to force the user to buy more powerful processors or more RAM.
• Companies buy their competitors or eliminate products to force users to use others. Oracle after buying Sun closed the source code for the Solaris operating system while Adobe discontinued PageMaker in favor of InDesign.

Linux, free software, open source variants of Android like LineageOS o The Document Liberation Project they provide tools to free users from the whim of technology providers.

Loaves, fishes and bytes

The early spreaders of Christianity were very clever. Instead of attacking existing beliefs they adapted them. Christian Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first night of the full moon from March 21, which is on paper the date on which the spring equinox should occur. It is no coincidence that many towns had festivities related to fertility and the return to life around that date.

If we take what the New Testament tells as a metaphor and not as history, we find some interesting analogies with free software:

• At the wedding in Canaan Jesus turned water into wine. Thanks to the principles of free software, one project can be transformed into another, for example, Debian Testing, a general purpose distribution becomes Ubuntu Studio, a distribution for multimedia purposes.
• Matthew recounts that faced with the need to feed a crowd, Jesus multiplied the loaves and fish from those available. In the same way, thanks to the principles of free software, with programs like windy you can have multiple Linux distributions and install them as many times as you want.
• Like the apostles of Jesus, the spreaders of free software go all over the world spreading their knowledge and establishing communities selflessly to spread the movement.

I would like to say that, unlike Christianity, we don't have our Judases, but yes we do. There are also merchants who always manage to return to the temple.