I find food habits at Free Software events weird
This is a follow-up on: Why I use Free Software, Why I got into Veganism.
Since the Free Software movement in it’s core is an ethical movement, which cares about human rights and humans access and ability to study, share and improve on the software they use. I’m well aware that not everyone in the Free Software community is in it for ethical reasons - but I’m pretty sure that there’s enough of us that care about ethics for this to be important.
The Vegan movement is by definition an ethical movement that cares primarily about the ethics when it comes to animals - but this often extends to being nice towards human animals as well.
So by having both of these ideologies in mind I can only come to the following conclusions.
Conclusions about the free software communities
It’s only natural for an ethical community that is ethical towards human animals to extend these ethical values to non-human animals as well.
Therefore I see issues with some of the views on food that is easy to find within several Free Software communities that I’ve observed or experienced which seems conflicting to me. For example, in certain places: It’s quite common that people talk a lot about BBQ of animal flesh and secretions.
I don’t find promotion of consumption of these items to fit within the extended ethical values of the Free Software movement.
Conclusions about vegans views on software
My experiences with Vegans is quite limited, but within my own circles I happen to see that most Vegans use primarily Free Software - but I don’t think that this is a representative view of all Vegans combined. Since both Veganism and ethical Free software use are both ethical and niche.
This leads me to conclude that most Vegans either isn’t aware of the ethics of software freedom or simply think there’s more important things to care about - which I totally get and respect, especially if this non-free software is used to promote veganism, which I nowadays find to be of higher value.
General conclusions
A general rule in today’s society is the following: “vote with your wallet”.
Or in other words:
- Use the software that follows your ethical values, you want to support and see more of.
- Buy and eat the food that follows your ethical values, you want to support and want to see more of.
If you care about ethics, make the ethical choice - all the time. Regardless if it’s towards human animals or non-human animals. Ethics isn’t something that you do “sometimes”, it’s somethings applied all the times.
Running non-free software on top of a Free Software stack is arguable breaking ethics in less bad ways than eating non-vegan food since nobody dies when you run a non-free program.