Wow!

Now that book author made what we could call a very inaccurate claim! :D

The free software philosophy is neutral in regards to economical
systems, be it capitalism or not.

What the free software philosophy isn't neutral about is in regards to
protecting democracy, that is, the philosophy fosters protection of
democracy.

That's why the use of computers for voting is the only case where the
philosophy will, contrary to our belief, fight against the dependent
usage of technology for voting[1]. That said, voting must be done in
written form, and counted manually. Optionally, the counting result can
be confronted against counting made by a machine, but this, repeating
myself again, must only be done for counting the votes, and not for the
whole voting process.

Now that I think of it... I'm not sure, but here in Brazil there seems
to be a currently-approved law that defines how the voting system should
work, and if I'm not mistaken, this very same law defines the use of
computers for voting. And this is a serious issue. I just can't
understand why the Brazilian free software supporters don't gather
together to propose a reform in this voting system. They seem to be
dormant or scattered.

To make things worse, since 2000, Brazilian free software supporters
discovered that most self-defined "free software supporters" are
actually supporters of the open source development model, and that this
guys have been making their own assumptions of "free software".

If you want to discuss this further, please create another topic for
this mater. I just won't do so myself because I don't know if there's
community interest to do so.


REFERENCES


[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.en.html#voting

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