Free Software Foundation on Ivon's Blog

Notes from the SLAT Software Liberty Association Taiwan 2026 Member Meeting

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:00:00 +0800

Because I met Hsu Chia-chun at the KaLuG 2603 meetup and was pulled into SLAT’s exclusive Mattermost small-circle group, I stated that I would definitely attend this year’s Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT) member meeting.

March 28, 2026, happened to be the day of the Students’ Information Technology Conference (SITCON). Because traveling from Kaohsiung to Taipei takes too much time, there was no way to make it.

This time I went north to attend the SLAT meeting, but because of Ubus I arrived two hours late. As a result, the meeting ended early and everyone had already run off. GG. I could only awkwardly chat with the people who stayed behind about what was fun at SITCON.

I looked at the agenda on SLAT’s NextCloud. It was mostly sharing what members had done, including the practice of introducing free software into medical systems, and two new books to be published soon, one of which was the printing of 《電腦上試跑 LINUX：硬體測試筆記》. Mm-hmm, it seems… I probably did not need to rush to take the bus early in the morning and suffer from Ubus delays. If I had known, I would have just bitten the bullet and taken the high-speed rail.

After having the experience of attending KaLuG, I knew that although I did not have much to say, I had to gather courage, overcome social anxiety, and not run away directly like two years ago. I had to talk with people. It is a bit of a pity that I did not get to talk with Professor Hung Chao-Kuei.

The main thing was exchanging experiences with Bo-Ren Lin about using reMarkable 2 e-paper. Wow, it is color e-paper. The matte screen makes writing notes feel just like writing on paper. They claim this is an open Linux system that provides SSH and Root privileges, but it is not completely open either. You need to use their proprietary format to install APPs, and you cannot install Linux desktop software. Also, although it supports color, the PPI is low and the colors are dim… at most it prevents you from being unable to distinguish dark tables when reading. Looking at it this way, the NT$20,000 price seems worse than an iPad. I originally thought it could install a Debian system by itself like the Pine64 PineNote, but reMarkable 2 seems to be cut from the same cloth as mainstream e-paper manufacturers.

At this point, Wally Lian came over and told us the story of how their company developed a Jin Yong novels e-paper device and failed miserably.

I also asked Bo-Ren Lin about Ubuntu contributor packaging issues. And where translations should be contributed: if I want to fix missing translations in the GNOME desktop, should I report them upstream or to LaunchPad? I found that even though Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has been out for a long time, there are still incomplete translations. He briefly described the development process to me and said that if it is Ubuntu’s own thing, then contributions should probably go to LaunchPad. Bo-Ren Lin previously noticed that the GNOME desktop’s new-folder action could not use iBus to input Chinese, and helped fix Mutter. So impressive. I think it is because GNOME desktop upstream basically does not want you to put things on the desktop, and Ubuntu applied its own patch, so almost nobody noticed.

Free Software Extremism: If You Insist Everything Must Be Open Source...

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:00:00 +0800

Free Software Extremism isn’t Far Enough. ← This title is so good I just copied it directly.

Why should we use free software led by Linux? Well, many people have already offered their brilliant opinions on this topic.

However, if you pursue free and open source everything…

You will be unable to move an inch.

This is a trap that some users who come into contact with Android & Linux and then follow the open source faith easily fall into.

The reason it is called extremism is that you stubbornly fight all the way to the end, refusing to compromise. You become an “open source chihuahua,” or an “open source obsessive,” going everywhere to “educate” Windows and macOS users that they should repent and use Linux.

Thus, you force yourself into an ideological dead end.

Note: In this article, when I use free software, most of the time it also includes the definition of open source software.

Swallowing the Red Pill
#

We can understand how far the most fanatical free software lovers can go by looking at this tech newbie vs. tech master image. I once had the experience of sliding toward the right side, but because of various factors, I ultimately did not reach the most extreme state. I realized that humans do have limits after all, so my current state is somewhere between 2 and 3.

In another crazy universe, Jobs and Bill Gates, who made proprietary software, would both have to go to prison. From: Luke Smith - Free Software Extremism isn’t Far Enough.

If you enter the world of free software through some of the “manifestos” from the Free Software Foundation, rather than merely learning about open source culture through Github, it is very easy to be brainwashed by this idea and become a believer in free software ideology. Cannot understand it? Here are some Chinese translations, and the tone is very intense: GNU專案的理念思想

The most important part is the four freedoms:

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works and modify the program to suit your own needs. Access to the source code is a precondition for realizing this freedom.

Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute the program in order to help your neighbor.

Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program and contribute those improvements back to the community, so the whole community can benefit. Access to the source code is a precondition for realizing this freedom.

This feels like reading The Communist Manifesto. It has strong agitational power, and with its emphasis on the spirit of sharing, it easily makes people think this is communism. But free software is not communism; I discussed this in a previous article.

Believers in free software ideology think that insisting on free software is an act consistent with moral principles. Therefore, they gradually begin detoxing the things around them, to the point that from top to bottom, they pursue absolute “freedom.” They swallow the red pill and gradually understand the truth of the world.

Reaching Above My Station Again: Attending the 2024 Software Liberty Association Membership Meeting

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 23:00:00 +0800

Two years ago around now, I joined the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT). Roughly speaking, this is Taiwan’s nongovernmental organization equivalent to the Free Software Foundation in the United States. I joined because I identify with free software.

This year I finally attended the membership meeting in person. Before going north from Tainan, I already knew the rough agenda, which was about the association’s annual work report and preparations for upcoming LibreOffice Asia-related events.

This year’s meeting room was rented from III. Only after walking over did I realize that STR Network, the company behind The Night Night Show, was also in this building. Entering the meeting room and sweeping my gaze around, I finally learned who the people behind Jason Tools and the Toy Utopia blog on the internet were: humans, nothing special.

The meeting began, and I saw the familiar KDE desktop on the projector… even the person who later came to talk about BSD systems was also using the KDE desktop.

LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 will be held in Taiwan this August or October. Should the association organize it independently, or should it be held together with COSCUP 2024? We will see how the chair coordinates it. Speaking of which, I also really want to go to COSCUP this year. If so, I can piggyback and show support. I hope it does not conflict with my Singapore itinerary. The association discussed that later they will also need to host travel itineraries for foreign guests… just thinking about it is complicated (puts on Tucker Carlson’s worried face). Better to focus on the program content.

Later, Taiwan’s LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 was confirmed to be held in August this year, from the 2nd to the 4th, for a total of three days.

The chair mentioned that LibreOffice is a popular activity in Latin America, where many countries take turns holding conferences (I suppose so, since Latin America even has FSFLA responsible for linux-libre kernel development), while Asia has relatively fewer, with only Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan having hosted it. Hosting it in China or Hong Kong? Damn, I had better not say.

Today I learned an important viewpoint: when governments introduce LibreOffice software, what they should value is the “ODF” format, not obsess over the software itself. This is a concept advocated by the association chair after exchanges with foreign LibreOffice communities. Very interesting. The association also plans to promote ODF certification exams.

Small gossip: part of the Software Liberty Association’s funding comes from the Ministry of Digital Affairs. Recently, Audrey Tang was severely criticized by KMT legislators, and the DPP also wants to grab that cushy post, which may affect us. Shivering. But relax, our Taiwan People’s Party legislators support Audrey Tang a lot.

Worth mentioning is that today’s meeting also invited people handling AsiaBSDCon 2024. This conference focuses on sharing technical discussions around the BSD family, and many heavyweight foreign developers will come to Taiwan to lecture, such as discussions on the ZFS file system. It is all relatively technical stuff. The gentleman who spoke today is even a full-time engineer hired by the FreeBSD Foundation. Too awesome.

Recording My Thoughts After Using Linux Systems for Two Years

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 20 May 2023 21:00:00 +0800

「果てまで　気の遠くなる様な旅をしよう」

To the end, let us begin that long journey.

Source: https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/65891187

Learning to use Linux systems and no longer returning to Windows has finally entered its second year. For the record of my first year learning Linux and earlier, see this article.

This year was a year of completely continuous Linux system use. I did not use any other system on bare metal.

This year’s journey:

Ubuntu 22.04 → openSUSE Tumbleweed → FreeBSD 13 → Arch Linux → Gentoo → Linux from Scratch → Arch Linux → Debian → Arch Linux

Every distribution has a different color and a different culture. It is just like what the OP of Kino’s Journey sings: traveling through different countries, what a beautiful world.

1. Preparing My Mind
#

Linux is free if your time has no value. Studying Linux during the senior year of a humanities student, when there is the most free time, could not be better. This time, I wanted to truly make it my main desktop system and use it in every aspect of life.

Thought brings motivation; this is self-evident. During this period, I was mostly building theory. Contact with the implementation side of systems would only begin in the next stage, “wandering around.”

In March 2022, after leaving Ubuntu, I chose to install openSUSE Tumbleweed, a rolling-release distribution with automated testing to ensure update stability, and came into deeper contact with the ideological system of free software.

For one month in May, every day I read articles from websites such as the Free Software Foundation, “Information Human Rights Nobles,” and the Software Freedom Conservancy, studied the GNU GPL license, and argued for the reasons to use free software. Richard Matthew Stallman’s Free Software, Free Society advises you to read more.

In June, this blog was established, and I began writing articles discussing free software, as well as usage tutorials for various Linux software.

After watching the historical documentary Revolution OS, this article came into being: My thoughts on the Free Software At School

Studying free software philosophy is an immersive experience almost like religion, and it gave birth to a kind of wild-take article like this: Why Give Up Minecraft. An even worse negative consequence: I once became a “free software police,” attacking those bastards who used proprietary software everywhere. I once argued with people about why translation projects should use Crowdin instead of Weblate, and in the end I was blasted for missing the point. After all, those translators really had professional work in the real world, while I did not; I was only running my mouth. Several similar conflicts broke out within a few months, which has made me much more restrained now. I learned love and tolerance, and I argue pure ideology with people much less often.

At the same time, to satisfy my then-still-unextinguished desire to play games, I went to Arch Wiki and Libregame Wiki to investigate what free and open source games were available. The final results were: Switch to Libre Games, as well as Join Minetest

FSF on Minecraft Malware and Proprietary Games

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 03:06:46 +0800

Microsoft Inserts Malware into Minecraft… The Free Software Foundation Criticizes Problems in the Game Industry.

This article was translated from the official Free Software Foundation website. The phenomena described in the article may be time-sensitive.

Original URL: Malware in Games - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

Translation: Ivon Huang

The text below repeatedly mentions “addictiveness” and “addictive characteristics.” For the FSF’s definition, see here: Proprietary Addictions The following phenomena are sorted by time.

Malware in Games Malware in Games
#

Nonfree (proprietary) software is often also malware, used to abuse users. Nonfree software is completely controlled by developers, and developers have more power than users. This is deeply unfair. Developers and publishers often abuse this power and harm the basic rights users deserve, usually through malicious features.

Among the various malicious features in games, the worst is addictiveness, because it not only affects users physically but also harms them psychologically.

2020-10

Microsoft openly surveils users in Minecraft. Every player must register a Microsoft account to continue playing. Since Microsoft bought Minecraft, it has merged everything under its network, enabling it to obtain player data. (News source)

Minecraft players can switch to Minetest. The core advantage of Minetest is that it is free software and respects users’ computing freedom. In addition, it has more options.

2020-10

The addictive Genshin Impact uses various loot boxes in the game to force players to spend money. (News source)

2020-10

Between 2019 and 2020, Minecraft players were forced to migrate to Microsoft servers. This is an invasion of privacy. Microsoft released a program allowing users to run their own servers, but that program is proprietary software and unfair to users. (News source)

Minecraft players can switch to Minetest. The most basic advantage of Minetest is that it is free software and respects users’ computing freedom.

2020-04

Riot’s anti-cheat software is malware. It runs at the Windows kernel level during boot. This kind of software is extremely unsafe and increases the operating system’s attack surface. (News source)

2020-03

Roblox (and other games) build anti-features that make it easy for children to abuse unauthorized third-party payments. (News source)

2019-08

Microsoft eavesdropped on Xbox players, with real people behind the scenes specifically listening. (News source)

2019-07

Rich kids found a way to spend their parents’ bank savings dry: spend it all buying packs in EA football games.

The random elements of these packs, also called “loot boxes,” make the game highly addictive. In practice, to get the predatory pleasure of beating other players, players are forced to buy more packs. (News source) In 2018, the Belgian government classified such packs as illegal. (News source)

The only sufficient reason to possess a copy of a proprietary software game is to study it for the development of free software.

2018-09

Clash of Clans can be said to be a good example: the developers released it as a free mobile game, got many players addicted, and then used psychological control techniques to turn the game into a cash cow.

Free Software in Universities After Watching Revolution OS

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 03:01:46 +0800

This is A Humble View on Free Software in Universities, Reflections After Watching the Film Revolution OS.

For an assignment, I needed to write a film reflection, so I took the film Revolution OS as a starting point to explain why free software matters and offer a humble view on the current state of software use in universities.

Revolution OS

Revolution OS (2001)

*There is a version on Youtube with Chinese subtitles revised with help from Professor Huang of National Cheng Kung University.

At the time, personal computers were beginning to rise in the 1980s, and a group of hackers wanted to build a brand-new operating system to change the world. Time has proven to us that under Microsoft’s rule, users will never have true freedom, so we need other choices, especially systems that respect user freedom.

This documentary describes the development process of Linux systems and the open source community over 20 years. It began with Richard Stallman, who worked at MIT. Dissatisfied that Unix systems were moving toward closed source, meaning users could not freely view or modify program source code and even had to pay for it, he decided to design a new system and promote the concept of free software, later founding the Free Software Foundation. Among these efforts, the GNU GPL license states that users have the freedom to view, modify, and distribute source code, and that modified programs must also be open source. This license became the legal basis for many pieces of software. After most applications were completed, the Linux kernel written by Linus Torvalds happened to fill the gap, and thus a usable system was completed, enough to compete with commercial closed systems, including Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Macintosh computers. Before this, Microsoft had already obtained a huge market share in the personal computer market through various strategies, while Linux was the challenger. Yet Linux emerged in the server field. The idea of Linux open source allowed users around the world to participate in development through the internet, while companies also used free software and open source concepts for commercial sales. What if companies did not sell software, but instead sold consulting services? This kind of revenue model, with the emergence of the killer program Apache, led Linux companies to go public one after another and win recognition from investors. This model gradually brought Linux into public view. In Eric Raymond’s essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Linux’s development model is the bazaar part: public participation, and with enough eyes, bugs become shallow. GNU’s compiler and tools are the cathedral, led and developed by only a few people. Of course, these are all development models of free software. Today, with the internet widespread, free software developers can easily use Git platforms on the internet to let everyone participate and contribute, so Linux and related open source technologies still have great potential.

Today, Linux distributions number in the hundreds, and most are free of charge. Because of public participation in development, Linux has an absolute advantage in the server market. However, the public in the personal computer market still has not developed the related awareness. Let us start with the most basic software. For ordinary people, switching to open source software (talking about freedom would probably make them not know what we are talking about, so talking about open source is more practical) is torture. Since childhood we have been trained into slaves of habit. Schools teach software because the workplace uses it. But if the software is closed source, should everyone continue using it? Why do people not use alternatives? For example, Microsoft Office often becomes the entirety of a person’s office career. Disliking other open source solutions as hard to use or unfamiliar is irresponsible toward one’s own basic human rights values.

The Free Software Foundation on Game Microtransactions and Addictiveness

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 21:01:46 +0800

Only open source games can provide true freedom.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) once called out and criticized “closed-source games”:

Microsoft monitors Minecraft players by forcing account registration

Genshin Impact contains addictive loot box elements

Sony uses software updates to prevent players from installing Linux on the PS3

1. FSF’s theory of game addiction
#

The FSF’s philosophy is to promote free software, meaning the code must be open source, distributable, and reusable, and modifiers must also open source their modifications. Specific examples include LibreOffice and Minetest. By contrast, closed-source software is proprietary software. Users cannot modify it themselves, such as Microsoft Office and Minecraft.

Games also count as software, so the FSF hopes users can support open source games. On its website, it criticizes the harms of closed-source software and extends that into a series of psychological theories: namely the “addictive elements” of closed-source game software. Malicious functions can turn proprietary game software into “malware games”.

*The formal name for closed-source software is proprietary software. For ease of understanding, I will still use the term closed source below.

Starting from the argument against closed-source software, the FSF draws out issues such as addiction and personal privacy. It even created a “malware in games” list for this: Malware in Games - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

The FSF believes closed-source games have the following addictive properties: “gambling elements” and “virtual socialization”.

Real examples of gambling include gacha, namely card draws, which, like loot boxes, are elements that entice people into excessive spending. There are also “speed-up items” that help players quickly achieve goals, but in reality do not increase returns. Worse, some games let players spend money to bypass the tedious act of “farming gear”. In national war-style games, the beginning is easy, but the growth curve then slows down. Players have to keep investing in equipment to keep up with others, and if they do not log in often, their things may be looted clean by enemies.

Virtual socialization binds a player’s daily life to the game and turns it into a fixed habit pattern. Random reward elements in the game, along with “likes” and invitations sent by friends, make the game addictive. These games send notifications to users every day to attract their attention, similar to the principle of smartphone addiction.

All of these elements make it easier for developers to control (manipulate) players. Apart from these addictive elements, closed-source software may also secretly monitor players through programs under excuses such as anti-cheat, obstructing player freedom. Or it may use DRM, remote verification, and similar methods to decide whether players can continue playing games they purchased.

Therefore, the FSF believes that if a game is free software, then people have other choices. They can modify the game themselves, and control their own rights.

Here is a list of free software games: https://libregamewiki.org/List_of_games

After playing some open source games, my personal opinion is that open source single-player games are fairly diverse and have a certain community size, but large online multiplayer games are relatively rare.

Free Software Foundation on Ivon's Blog

Notes from the SLAT Software Liberty Association Taiwan 2026 Member Meeting

Free Software Extremism: If You Insist Everything Must Be Open Source...

Swallowing the Red Pill #

Reaching Above My Station Again: Attending the 2024 Software Liberty Association Membership Meeting

Recording My Thoughts After Using Linux Systems for Two Years

1. Preparing My Mind #

FSF on Minecraft Malware and Proprietary Games

Malware in Games Malware in Games #

Free Software in Universities After Watching Revolution OS

The Free Software Foundation on Game Microtransactions and Addictiveness

1. FSF’s theory of game addiction #

Swallowing the Red Pill
#

1. Preparing My Mind
#

Malware in Games Malware in Games
#

1. FSF’s theory of game addiction
#