This is a controversy among major ‘free software movement’ activists. The free software movement advances a philosophy and practice that values the freedom of users to create and share software that enables Internet access, and challenges the dominance of ‘big tech’ software and systems over the online experience. This includes prioritizing Internet Relay Chat (‘IRC’), an online instant messaging system dating back to the 1990s, over larger social media platforms. The challenge that the free software movement presents is not only technical, but also of a social, economic or ethical nature, and it accordingly supports some broad sets of values.
The claimant, Dr Matthew Garrett, describes himself as a software engineer with an academic background in (computational) genetics, computer security expert and free software activist. He received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge and has worked with ARM Ltd, a Cambridge-based software design company, throughout his career. He is currently based in ‘Silicon Valley’ in California, where he holds a senior position at NVIDIA, one of the top half-dozen large technology companies globally, and teaches Operating System Security for Master’s courses as a part-time lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. He points out that he has worked on some of the most important projects in the free software movement and won a Free Software Foundation award in 2013 for his work on Secure Boot, UEFI, and the Linux kernel (at the time, he says, the FSF was one of the most important organizations in the world for the advancement of free software).
The defendants are a Manchester-based married couple, each of whom operates a UK website focusing on free software information, interests and campaigns and hosts an IRC channel. Dr. Roy Shestowitz describes himself as a software engineer, interdisciplinary researcher, and fair competition advocate with an academic background in medical biophysics. He operates the website www.techrights.org (‘Techrights’). Mrs. Ryan Shestowitz describes herself as a computer scientist who works for a FOSS (free and open-source software) specialist. It operates the website news.tuxmachines.org (‘Tuxmachines’). Both the websites have been operating for almost two decades. Dr. Shestowitz has declared these websites to be a non-profit venture – a committed labor of love, he says, on which the two of them tirelessly publish, to the extent of thousands of articles a year.
Dr Garrett has filed a defamation claim over a series of 24 publications appearing on TechWrites or TuxMachine or both in August and September 2023. Annex A This decision. Dr. Garrett brings a further claim in data protection in relation to these and several other publications appearing on the websites at approximately the same time. Dr. and Mrs. Shestowitz counterclaimed harassment.