"Free Software Is Even More Important Now" (2013) is stallman's response to the argument — occasionally heard from open source advocates and technology optimists — that software freedom matters less in an era when users rely primarily on cloud services and mobile devices. stallman argues the opposite: the threats to user freedom are greater than ever, and the need for free software is more urgent, not less.
The essay surveys the landscape of threats that had emerged or intensified since stallman first articulated the free-software-definition and the four-freedoms. Cloud computing creates the saas-loophole: users who rely on software running on remote servers never receive a copy of the software, so conventional software freedom analysis (which focuses on the freedoms of those who receive copies) does not apply. They are dependent on services they cannot study, modify, or run for themselves. The agpl was one response to the server-side freedom gap, but it does not address the situation of end users who simply use web services.
digital-restrictions-management systems have proliferated: from DRM on music and video to locked bootloaders on mobile devices (tivoization) to app store restrictions that prevent users from running software not approved by the device manufacturer. Each of these represents a new front in the erosion of user control.
Surveillance has become pervasive: proprietary software running on users' devices — from operating systems to applications — frequently collects and reports user data to its developers. This connects to the argument in surveillance-vs-democracy: without the four-freedoms, users cannot know whether their software is surveilling them or not.
stallman also revisits the software-freedom-vs-open-source distinction, arguing that the open source movement's emphasis on development methodology has proven inadequate to address these threats. The freedom issues presented by cloud services and mobile platforms require the ethical analysis that "open source" discourse suppresses. The essay is an update and intensification of the core arguments of why-software-should-be-free and gnu-manifesto applied to the current technological environment.