Greater Good?

After reading Stallman's article this week, I came to several conclusions. While Stallman's heart is in the right place in his overall message that we should share software in order to be better citizens and break free from this selfish, economically consumed world that we live in, his hopes for the future of free software may not be realistic. One of his arguements is that hoarding software could have psycho-social harms in which we put our social bonds in danger. He compares the world to an anti-social jungle, in which everyone just tries to get ahead for themselves and expresses a hope that we can look beyond our own personal gain, to the greater good of the technological era. Initially, I thought this seemed a little naiive. How could he think people would want to work so hard on creating software, just out of the kindness of their heart? And for the greater good of society? Besides free music downloads, I didn't even know of any free software, and was sure that most people i knew didn't have free software either. But after seeing Liz and Emma's presentation of the FSF I was impressed with the amount of free software out there.It was also refreshing to see that Stallman's arguement was somewhat being put to good use, and that society isn't all bad. I started to think about the kinds of software I may have seen but never realized was free. In class we talked about software that Families could use in order to protect their kids from unwanted websites or regulate their computer usage. I babysat for a family that had software similar to this, but I had just figured that they paid for it. It did seem to be high tech software that not everyone had. It regulated what times the kids could be on the computer and within those time frames, what periods the kids could only use the computer for educational purposes and for games and recreation. It also blocked websites deemed innappropriate. After doing a couple searches, I found the software they were using and discovered it was free. Its called SafeFamilies and its mission is to provide safety and control for children online. I think this is one of the more noble free software technologies, because too often kids can get away with seeing a lot more then they should online. I think that having a childhood without computers until I was about 9 or 10 really benefitted me because I was never inside playing games or surfing the internet, but was always outside playing. Here is the link http://www.safefamilies.org/download.php. This website is an affirmation for Stallman's article that there are still some do-gooders out there, you just have to look a little harder to find them.