image transcription:

big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):

  • Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
  • Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
  • David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
  • Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
  • Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
  • Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
  • Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
  • Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
  • Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.

on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”

  • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world
    61·
    11 months ago

    Aaron Schwartz too

    https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/

    I fight laws that restrict what bits I can put on my website.

    Unlike humans, computers see everything as bits (numbers). They can’t tell the difference between the random movement of a lava lamp and a copyrighted song. I believe that our technology should similarly make no distinction and that I have the right to transmit arbitrary bits.

    Here’s a list of laws that restrict this right, in order from least controvertial (i.e. most people agree this freedom shouldn’t be restricted) to most.

    …

    …

    …

    In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.

    This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won’t make the abuse go away. We don’t arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.