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When Rianne Became Vegetarian
Sometimes the Free software groups promote veganism. Some key members of theirs are vegan. It's a statement, a stance, a strong belief. Vegetarians are a bit more permissive or 'pragmatic' as they recognise that even crops typically require pesticides and pesticides are all about killing living organisms (mostly small insects, but sometimes microorganisms).
Today we discussed the odd disconnect like people who value the lives of their pet fish while consuming (as food) lots of fish or items with ingredients derived from fish. We're hardly the only couple to debate these sorts of things. Entire books (popular literature) exist to cover veganism and more.
What does this have to do with Free software? A lot.
Think of ingredients as components put together to make applications, or large complex systems such as complete operating systems. Everything big is made of many small things and those things are in turn made with some kind of framework unless we all code directly into 0s and 1s for each target architecture (each may have different instructions set and interface/s).
When talking about Software Freedom we need to 'obsess' over the smaller ingredients and deem them ethical/unethical based on how they're produced and/or shared. Qt, for instance, is an iffy part of any major KDE application. It swings like a pendulum between proprietary to Freedom-respecting, with the habitual deviation and in recent years promotion of LLM slop (i.e. plagiarism, sometimes GPL violations).
If you are consistent in your beliefs and principles, e.g. regarding Software Freedom, you'd look deeper into the make-up of software you 'consume'.
Software Freedom isn't always the "easy way" (or most convenient paradigm), but its adoption collectively makes society better off.
Rianne became vegetarian because she truly loves all animals (even tiny spiders). She adopted or adapted to Software Freedom because she understood what's at stake. █
Image source: Weston Park Museum