The arguments for open source software and free software are many and well articulated.
In addition to those, open source software is also important in the context of what we discussed yesterday: the risks of having your data stored in the Cloud, often in proprietary data formats, with your access to it subject to the terms and conditions of a small set of increasingly dominant tech companies.
Open source software inherently deals with open source formats. It’s difficult to imagine an open source (or free software) project with its own proprietary data format. Perhaps such software may be able to work with data formats from other proprietary software, but that’s a plus. For instance, LibreOffice being able to read and edit Microsoft Office files and GIMP being able to work with Adobe Photoshop files.
Open source and free software projects may offer to host your data in the Cloud, usually for a fee. But there’s almost always the ability for you to host the software on your own server. Bitwarden offers a hosted version, which I use. But I can always host it myself. Likewise, you can either download and self-host Wallabag, the open source read-it-later service, or you can use the Wallabag.it service run by the developers. The choice is yours.
On Mac OS, I try to use open source software unless it’s inconvenient. Over time, I expect to move most of my everyday software to its open source equivalents. For now, here’s a subset.
From left to right, the highlighted ones are
- Mozilla Thunderbird for email
- Mozilla Firefox for web browsing
- Textmate for plaintext and markdown editing
- nVALT for quick note taking and fast text search
- iTerm2 for the command line (and therefore a gateway to a whole host of other free/open source command line tools)
- Transmission for torrent files
- Tor Browser for anonymous web browsing
- Bitwarden – password manager (while open source, this is – sadly – an Electron app)
- Telegram for instant messaging
- Wireguard for VPN (connects to my self-hosted VPN server and pi-hole ad-blocker, both also open source)
- VLC for video
- [Not in the screenshot] Calibre for ebooks management, conversion and syncing to my Kindle
- In addition, in my menubar are
- Flux to ‘warm’ my screen colour to mitigate the ill effects of blue light
- Caffeine for when I want to keep the computer from sleeping
- Shiftit for window management
None of these is a compromise versus a proprietary equivalent. All of them use open formats natively. With them, I’m confident of my access to data.