The golden rule:

Treat and respect others as yourself❣

Is the one principle which has been discussed and encouraged since thousands of years and lately also proven by computer simulations over and over, to be the key to a collaborative peaceful progressive society. However, this simple rule, only works for honest actors, as when also dishonest actors are present, it encourages corruption and standstill. Ideally we wouldn’t have any dishonest actors, but as long as we have them, there is a simple solution.

Richard M. Stallman (RMS), magna cum laude in physics from Harvard, later programmer at MIT AI Lab. In 1989, patched the golden rule, to assure by law, mutuality also for dishonest actors, after he instigated the Free Software movement and founded Free Software Foundation 1985 and created the most powerful patch of a computational system ever made, that is the General Public License.

The General Public License is mutual love, that is, one being can not limit or restrict another beings’ freedom, one being has to treat another being in a similar way as themselves. The General Public License protects freedom for software, documents and designs and protects the following freedoms for software:

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

The freedom to run the program for any purpose. Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

For a thinking honest being who understands the simple concept of mutual aid and mutual freedom, these rules should not be necessary, as anyone would understand them. Unfortunately society is still full of dishonest actors that can steal your freedom, enslave you and make you dependent upon them.

These freedoms give rise to an evolution, striving towards perfection and abundance, but unfortunately society is mostly put at a standstill, not much has happened since the 70-ies apart from segregation having accelerated.

In Sweden I remember that we once were promised that machines would do all the boring work so we humans could do the fun, self developing and challenging part, but in today’s standstill it’s even a big risk to be over qualified, which implies you do a bad job as you are bored. There is no reason to ever be over qualified. Here is one of many articles about people being bored at their work, in this case google employees who complain they are over qualified.

Over qualification is one of many symptoms of artificial scarcity, where artificial scarcity can be seen as a syndrome composed of at least:

patents, copyright, Non-Free proprietary software, Non-Free proprietary technology, Non-Free secret protocols, trade secrets, Non-Free proprietary knowledge, Non-Free proprietary information and similar types of totally artificial constraints.

Mutual freedom and fairness is an important key to progress as mutual freedom is a fundamental requirement for evolutionary development. The CopyLeft rule implemented by the General Public License gives rise to such an evolutionary process within software.

This article describes the development of operating systems for the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world during 20 years. The article is from July 2013, it was 95.2% GNU/Linux then.

Edit: new check says that from Nov 2017, there is 100% Linux 500/500.

However, regarding personal computing we still have a lot of involuntary ballast due do taxation from Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors, even though Mark Shuttleworth recently marked bug #1 in Ubuntu “Microsoft has too large market shares” as fixed. The reason for success was to a large extent due to the explosive development of smartphone OS where many different versions of Linux are dominating but Microsoft still has a tremendous grip on laptops and tablets. In many countries, like Sweden, freedom is not respected, it is almost impossible to buy a laptop or a tablet without a Microsoft system, which adds around 800SEK (around 100USD) to the price, irrespectively whether you will ever use the evil Windows system or not. There is also quite a lot of corruption hidden, as e.g. here in Sweden, each taxpayer pays around 300$ in average/year in unnecessary license fees for proprietary (evil locked in and enslaving) software in governmental use. Unnecessary as there exists free open source alternatives that both respect your freedom as well as encourage collaboration and local development.

The golden rule:

Treat and respect others as yourself❣

is based upon one essential condition though, that is, you need to love, respect and care for yourself, therefore my improved version is:

Treat and respect others at least as good as yourself❣

PS. now some may see a contradiction here, as I included copyright in artificial scarcity, as CopyLeft is built upon copyright, but there is no contradiction. Over time when the positive effects of the CopyLeft principle has abolished artificial scarcity, then there is no longer a need for copyright either.

Today people have become blinded, and often see nothing strange with proprietary designs and knowledge, but in the future, I foresee that you will be treated as a criminal and a charlatan if you would try to sell a proprietary design, they will consider you as crazy.