Re: [Audio-video] [Liberté 0] Re: http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/ghm2013/Samuel_Thibault_Jean-Philippe_Mengual-Freedom_0_for_everybody_really_.text

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

Le 27/07/2014 à 07h49, Richard Stallman a écrit :
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>     > We are talking about a program that helps many people and hurts no
>     > one.
>
>     It does hurt some people, those who can not use it just because it's
>     not accessible.  It hurts them because it's excluding them, even if
>     unvoluntarily.
>
> It does not hurt them.  They are no worse off than they would be
> if the program had never existed.  It fails to serve them, but that
> is not the same as hurting them.

Well, yes and no. At individual level this is completely true. But at
the social level there’s the issue of exclusion: it creates a
differential, a gap, between what’s provided to different users, since
valid and disabled users are unequal in front of an non accessible
software.

So let’s imagine the software doesn’t exist, and I can’t do
something. Then I’m disabled and the software for doing that exist, but
isn’t accessible. At individual level nothing changed: I’m still not
able to do it. But at social level something changed: *others can* do
it, and I still can’t.

Not only this is unjust, this is terribly more disturbing with
communicative software. Let’s imagine we build a decentralized P2P
social network based on cryptography and free software (not web, because
it’s technically horrible and anyway web is easier to make accessible,
even if it’s possible to do non-accessible horribly designed things),
and on the top of that we base asynchronous messaging systems (like
email), synchronous messaging system (like chat, IRC, etc.), VoIP,
video, pubsub system (like web/bittorrent), etc. Let’s call it GNUnet.

Well let’s say we succeed to build a better internet on the top of that,
and people begin replacing all their communication systems with that,
which would be more secure, more practical (even without access to the
world wide internet, geographically local social networking would work
very fine, no centralized network would ever be able to do this), more
free…

And let’s say it’s not accessible. From this day, for instance, blind
people would be made *disable* to communicate easily with others, that
would *harm* them (yet indirectly and involuntary), because people would
use free systems which would not have an accessible interface… *yet*.

“Yet”: like said Samuel, that cannot happens by itself. The common
denominator of disabled hackers is too low, and not enough people are
informed about these issues. So here is our mission: making this happen,
because with free software we’re *free* to do it. Ok, we’re free, now
we’re free to do this, let’s make it happen.

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