I'm probably preaching to the choir with this, but users of IMC as well as those who are activists, tacticians, critics and similarly engaged in bringing about equality, social justice, local responsibility and autonomy and related projects who don't use GNU-based software are really missing a trick. The digital globe has rewritten how civilisation interacts, works, thinks, & destroys. Even that basic social tenet - identity - is rendered a series of data "blobs" which can be owned, exchanged, altered, deleted with the non-trivial impacts of influencing, if not outright deciding, the fate of the "wetware" unit - the physical human being.

Governments and corporations have seen the control value in this, and while corporations are seducing new generations with whizzy-visuals and "interactivity" in exchange for countless bits of real-time data, the digital cordon tightens - a ring of silicon - a technological adjunct to that under-pinning London's infamous "ring of steel". Through a myriad of portals, we leak so much information of what we do, what we think, who and where we are ... and this is not just through the Internet and P2P software; this is through many of the applications and the OS itself so fervently adopted by the corporate world and foisted upon ordinary users when they buy a new computer, due to historical deals between the OS corporation and distributors of pre-built computers.

Certainly GNU and FOSS are not going to be able to reverse this function creep of the digital globe, but what they do enable is for those who care about the principles of equality, social justice and local responsibility and autonomy, etc. to achieve ethical continuity between one's activism and one's use of digital technology, which is also premised on the unshakable belief in freedom and shared collective knowledge. It is also reassuring to know that there are no "back doors" to one's system that sends use data to the source or even government agencies (such as Microsoft's "CryptoAPI" architecture which enables both Microsoft and NSA to install two different cryptographic keys to a user's computer without any knowledge - let alone authorisation - from the user. [1] These security exposures can - and do - wreck havoc for ordinary people, but this can be dramatically exacerbated when one is an activist/ critic against the prevailing order. Now that the governments - with a programme of supportive propaganda from the media, of course - have started calling activists, environmentalists and animal rights groups "terrorists", it is entirely possible and even demonstrable that governments and security forces will exploit the digital penetration of the various communities to get at them.

Finally, FOSS and GNU software is available both for free (as in beer) and as free (as in speech), characteristics which are near and dear to all activists, I'm sure. And if this weren't enough, the coding and packaging communities have done an amazing job of putting together a quite bewildering range of packages (distributions) from science analysis specific distributions, to those aimed at multimedia editors, to those with a development preference, as well as the business and home user.[2]

For these reasons, and more - such as general superiority of code-base for applications, robust peer review of submitted and maintained code, security audits (see for example, Open and Free BSD), OS architecture design for stability and low resource requirements (NetBSD is reputed to almost be able to run on a toaster!), bug fixes are rapid, a wide variety of system architectures are supported out of the box, and of course if you are a coder then you can even change the source code to reflect your preferences - there really is no better choice than to adopt GNU and FOSS for your digital requirements and to join me in a robust hearty rendition of (sorry, but I couldn't resist!):

"Happy birthday to GNU
Happy birthday to GNU
Happy birthday dear GNU
Happy birthday to GNU"


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References:

[1] This was only discovered due to sloppy work from Microsoft packagers when a version was shipped out without being stripped of identifying information. See the following for the story:

 http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/nsa_backdoor_windows.htm

 http://www.geocities.com/~budallen/backdoor.html

 http://cryptome.org/nsakey-ms-dc.htm

and CNN news release:

 http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/03/windows.nsa.02/

[2] Distrowatch is a great site for overviewing the range of GNU/Linux and *BSD distributions.

 http://www.distrowatch.org

GNU FSF purists would argue that neither the GNU/Linux nor the *BSD variants express the true spirit of GNU and FSF, which is fair enough, but a distinction that I won't belabour here when astronomically better cases have been advanced in support of this point, such as that found here:

 http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html