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Free Software Needs Free Tools

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Software
OSS

Over the last decade, free software developers have been repeatedly tempted by development tools that offer the ability to build free software more efficiently or powerfully.

The only cost, we are told, is that the tools themselves are nonfree or run as network services with code we cannot see, copy, or run ourselves. In their decisions to use these tools and services -- services such as BitKeeper, SourceForge, Google Code and GitHub -- free software developers have made "ends-justify-the-means" decisions that trade away the freedom of both their developer communities and their users. These decisions to embrace nonfree and private development tools undermine our credibility in advocating for software freedom and compromise our freedom, and that of our users, in ways that we should reject.

In 2002, Linus Torvalds announced that the kernel Linux would move to the "BitKeeper" distributed version control system (DVCS). While the decision generated much alarm and debate, BitKeeper allowed kernel developers to work in a distributed fashion in a way that, at the time, was unsupported by free software tools -- some Linux developers decided that benefits were worth the trade-off in developers' freedom. Three years later the skeptics were vindicated when BitKeeper's owner, Larry McVoy, revoked several core kernel developers' gratis licenses to BitKeeper after Andrew Tridgell attempted to write a free replacement for BitKeeper. Kernel developers were forced to write their own free software replacement: the project now known as Git.

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