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Why is it remarkable? Is it because it is weird since the G of GPL already means GNU?

While the initial "G" in GNU does mean GNU (GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), the "G" of "GPL" stands for "General"—General Public License. The GNU GPLs are so widely used and discussed that one can get away with saying "GPL" to mean one or more versions of the GNU General Public License. 'General' here means not specifically written for a particular GNU program. When GNU started different GNU programs had their own license—GNU Emacs General Public License for GNU Emacs, for example. It's not hard to see how this approach doesn't scale up well. The GNU GPLs are the license for many GNU programs. Today GNU GPL v3 is the latest such license and the license itself and GNU's pages about that license make it clear that the proper full name of this license is "GNU General Public License".

This isn't quite true. People just need to insist on ownership. We are guilty of allowing commercial interests to lull us with making it easy at the cost of ownership.

There are plenty of gratis programs that implement limitations which work against the user over which the user has no control. There used to be a small program for detecting the "click of death" which was said to signal an imminent failure in an Iomega Zip drive (which were once much more popular). The program was written in assembly by a self-described security researcher and the user was allowed to download and run only the compiled executable for Windows but the program cost no money. That program had code in it that checked the date and would not run the program's main function if the program ran after a certain date. Had that program been free software (software the user is free to run, inspect, share, and modify) one could still make use of its routines today across operating systems. This might still be handy to people trying to retrieve data from Zip disks, for example. But the program was proprietary and carried a proprietary dependency (ran only on a proprietary OS).

So this teaches us that DRM (digital restrictions management) is a direct outcome of the power of a proprietor. The commercial factors are side issues; if we had free software to read the books, play the media, and do other things we could use them instead of the proprietary software each DRM implementation depends on and we could let commercial organizations sell us copies of free software and provide support and improved code at a fee. I'd happily pay for commercial support for free software I sometimes need fixed or improved. The real enemy is software non-freedom. And we need to speak out against those who claim that strongly copylefted free software will kill people (as automobile manufacturers have told people).

Today you have hardware that respects your freedom and free distros to choose from. You aren't facing the same situation RMS did when he started GNU. You're not acknowledging this enormous difference. Also, the GNU GPL v2 (a license the FSF wrote and RMS is a chief author of) doesn't "allow" proprietary software drivers into the Linux kernel. Allowing that is a choice of Linux kernel copyright holders who don't sue, encourage other Linux kernel copyright holders not to sue, or pass on copies of that variant of the Linux kernel with the proprietary software intact. No license can do any better because copyright holders always have the final say on whom they'll choose to sue.

Again it's GNU that has a solution to this (which you also don't acknowledge): GNU Linux-libre—a variant of the Linux kernel with the non-free software removed. This project and the essay that started this /. thread fully acknowledge that GNU Linux-libre won't run on all of the hardware Torvalds' variant of the Linux kernel will run on. But that's not the point; the point is keeping users in control of their computers, respecting their software freedom, and showing that one can do computing with a fully-free system running on fully-free hardware. The FSF doesn't "allow binary blobs to be a part of an OS", some distributors of GNU/Linux do that. No FSF-approved free distro includes non-free software and the free distro guidelines go beyond that to push for pointing to only free software. The user is free to add non-free software and/or repos to their system if they wish but an FSF-approved distro won't do that by default.

You claim "the free-software revolution is stalled" but offer no evidence to support the claim. It seems you overlook what the FSF is doing to promote software freedom and misstate the responsibility the FSF has for the Linux kernel project as a whole.

In the early 2000s, there was a GNU project to build a secure online voting system.

The article has nothing to do with online voting. It is talking about more secure and verifiable systems than are currently used at polling stations.

To cite one example from the article:

In a voting system, this means the hardware would prevent, for example, someone entering a voting booth and slipping a malicious memory card into the system and tricking the system into recording 20 votes for one vote cast, as researchers have shown could be done with some voting systems.

I've posted this before, but it's worth saying again.

In the early 2000s, there was a GNU project to build a secure online voting system. They ceased work in 2002, citing the project as being at best difficult and at worst, impossible. They quoted Bruce Schneier, one of the foremost experts in computer security as saying "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers... [B]uilding a secure Internet-based voting system is a very hard problem, harder than all the other computer security problems we've attempted and failed at. I believe that the risks to democacy are too great to attempt it."

I see no evidence that Schneier has changed his mind or that any other comparably qualified expert has suggested he's wrong.

trans content is
1. Overwhelmingly consumed by self-identified straight people.

Why "consumed" as opposed to "viewed"? It's not as if viewing a slideshow of erotic photos of a trans person causes those photos to no longer exist in the same way that food is "consumed".

We _already_ have requestAnimationFrame

Not if the user has chosen to disable script on your site for any of several reasons:

- Wanting to maintain a sense of separation between documents, which ought to be static on the client side (even if they are dynamic on the server side), and applications, which ought to be native and downloadable
- Fear of being tracked, particularly through the subpoena exception in every privacy policy
- Your scripts not having been marked as licensed under a free software license

Emacs has shipped with a systemd unit file since v26.0.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cg...

Stallman abandoned his morals and allowed and it to be used to create all manner of freedom-disrespecting software.

Do your homework. They did think it through. It's essentially an application of Freedom Zero.

Are you drunk? Your comment is not clear and focused.

How is this for clear and focused:

GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 19 November 2007

Premable

...The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.

The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community....

The person seeing a non-existent "spirit of the GPL" is the one who's not focused.

If you want to argue the spirit of the law, you should look into the intentions of the people who created the law, not the final words that came out.

Fine. The intentions, as stated here 12 years ago:

The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.
The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server.

If you picked a non-Affero GPL license, you were warned. You either intended or were willfully blind to the foreseeable result.

End of story.

the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users.

The stated intention is to make sure the users can share and change free software. MariaSQL/MySQL is free software, and so are the changes Amazon made, changes which they've hidden. The intention is clearly that Amazon's users could share and make changes to this hidden code. Therefore you must admit that Amazon is not following the stated intention of the license, they are not following the spirit of the law.

That is an interesting point. MySQL's server license is available at https://github.com/mysql/mysql... . It is a _peculiar_ license. It refers to itself in some places as GPLv2, which seems nonsensical with the various other confusing and inconsistent components outlined in the same license. It also deliberately conflates the phrase "free software" with "open source software".

They are not the same thing, legally nor in common English language. The FSF published a good essay on this at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy... .

The GPL states "You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions..."

How the hell can you violate that by merely using code in any possible way?

They aren't following the spirit of the GPL. ...

Huh?!?! "without conditions is pretty damn explicit.

It's the same cost to Netflix whether I setup four autoatreamers just to make sure that Netflix it's not getting free money, or of my friends or someone else talk to make sure that what I paid for is consumed.

Netflix might run out of shows if you consume them all!

I doubt anyone actually pirated the TV show.
It's far more likely they merely copied it without authorization, i.e. they committed copyright infringement.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

Recursive code filled the memory and caused unintended acceleration.

Yet Emacs, GIMP, and numerous other GNU applications use Lisp languages for user scripting. Lisp languages are based on recursion as a core control structure. Emacs uses Elisp, and GIMP ships with Script-Fu, an implementation of Scheme. A bunch of applications are scriptable in Guile, an implementation of Scheme.

Richard Stallman isn't listed as the author of the "Dating is a free software issues" essay, Molly de Blanc is.

People used to "rant and rave" about how one was "living in a dreamland" to think that they could run a computer with a completely free OS. Fortunately people who fought for software freedom didn't take those criticisms seriously and now we have multiple completely free OSes. It seems that what was readily declared to be fantastic is becoming real thanks to those who push past the objectors and the namecallers. What matters is the substance of what we fight for—lazy convenience accepting whatever someone else wants to do to our computers, or demanding control over our computers and making it possible to do various jobs while retaining our software freedom.

Your content isn't worth the trouble. Toss me an add and let me see the content.

Some sites don't even toss me an ad. They toss me the URL of a third-party proprietary computer program written in JavaScript that surveils my browsing history across multiple websites and uses the battery life and Internet bandwidth that I pay for to choose an ad from one of a dozen or more ad networks. And if I say no to proprietary software or no to surveillance, these sites are incapable of falling back to a publisher-hosted ad like those seen on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs because interest-based ads pay three times the CPM.

A clear example of how software non-freedom (proprietary, user-subjugating software) hurts users. This is a relatively minor, therefore fortunate, example in that (as far as the Xbox goes) it's chiefly for recreational use and nobody's lives depends on this. But as more important systems take on the same network-bound DRM schemes, people will be needlessly impoverished, needlessly suffer reputation damage, needlessly lose jobs, and even needlessly die from things like this. It's a good thing that medical equipment, for instance, is not networked and under the control of those at the console (we also know this from what ought to be common sense and the stories about CPAP machines ratting out their users to insurance companies and medical organizations).

Technologically speaking, you should be able to host your own server for these games and thus keep playing against opponents without involving a single central authority you can't replace. Software freedom would give you the freedom you need to improve the game to implement this. A single point of failure central authority, however, also puts you at the mercy of that authority when they want to stop you from playing the game (and by "you" I mean cherry-picked individuals, sets of users, or all users—their choice of users)

I'm sure some of this has already happened and it's only a matter of time until there are enough stories we can point to to create an organized map of them like what the GNU Project has done to back up their claim that proprietary software is often malware.

The anonymous post that included "Trust but verify." was right; only software freedom gives us the best known defense against malware. I don't agree with post moderation but if a discussion forum will have such censorious distractions, posts like that deserve far more than 0 points.

Your post, on the other hand, in which you claim that software freedom is "bullshit" ironically highlights how valuable software freedom is: separating functionality into components solves nothing if those components are implemented with non-free (user-subjugating, proprietary) software. Whatever value the separation purports to grant users is entirely lost by not respecting a user's software freedom. In fact we know that proprietary software is often malware.

Vim? Who needs all that unneccesary baggage? Ed, man! !man ed.

Everyone will finally have to move to GNU, I guess.

If a content creator

Why do people use the phrase "content creator" instead of the word "author"? The law uses "author" regardless of the medium of a work. This style guide claims that "content" means that a work's primary "purpose is to fill a box and make money," and "creator" unfairly compares authors to deities to make them worthy of extra privileges under law.

doesn't want you to see it without paying and you don't want to see it with paying, I don't see what the problem is.

The first of two problems is that since the introduction of Flexible Sampling in October 2017, Google Search lists documents but fails to disclose on the search engine result that viewing the document either requires payment, requires execution of third-party proprietary script, or has the side effect of starting the meter running on a site with a metered paywall. Which competing web search engine discloses such?

The second is that if it becomes common for authors to charge $5 for the first article on a website as a matter of course, people are likely to end up having to limit the number of websites they view in order to make the most of the subscriptions that they pay. In turn, people who limit the number of websites they view would in the process limit the number of viewpoints to which they are exposed.

As for the payment processor getting a huge portion, it isn't a blocker because there are already sites funding themselves this way.

What are examples of sites funding themselves through a 50 cent per month subscription?

Online advertising no longer works like that. It is all programmatic.

By "programmatic" do you refer to it having become standard practice to run nonfree scripts on viewers' computers to perform large-scale surveillance of viewer's browsing history across multiple unrelated websites? If so, then perhaps online advertising needs to cease being programmatic in this way.

I couldn't find anything in Google's DFP (most popular ad serving tool) that says "don't show flashing animation".

Is there anything saying "report this ad for standards violations, such as inaccessibility to viewers with a seizure disorder"?

No one sells ads directly on their sites to advertisers, that is not a viable model because advertisers want to get their message out to a variety of sites instead of "sponsoring" one or more pages on a single site.

Publishers of newspapers and magazines never printed ads customized to each individual subscriber, and certainly not to readers who encounter a publication through a newsstand or public library. How did advertisers and publishers survive then?

if they know a user is potentially interested in going to St. Kitt's (because they searched for that island), they want to show that person St. Kitt's ads whether they are on a travel site or on a cooking site.

This is called "data leakage", allowing an advertiser to target high-value sites cheaply by advertising on low-value sites that the same viewer also visits. "Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful" by Don Marti and "WTF is data leakage?" by John McDermott describe problems with this race to the bottom.

There will always be sleazy advertisers out there, looking to game the system.

And you as a publisher are responsible for allowing these sleazy advertisers onto your site via these exchanges, whether or not you have meaningful control of what these exchanges serve. In fact, the lack of meaningful control ideally ought to be a reason not to use a particular exchange.

Have you seen what the Obfuscated C project can do?

Yes, obfuscated programming contests can serve as important learning tools for those who want to liberate themselves from continued ignorance driven by fear of the unknown.

I wouldn't trust NSA source code beyond 'print "Hello World";' and even that is iffy.

I think it's safe to say you won't be doing anything with the program (as far as you know) but programmers simply can't afford the luxury of being ignorant and non-programmers are not well served by inculcating fear. The result of your suggestion is to maintain a small group of elites who ought to be blindly trusted rather than kept in check through software freedom.

God help anyone who touches it if this release is binary only.

I'm not sure what constitutes 'touching' in this context but disassembling the binary and examining how that works (even running the code once understood on a spare computer or VM, perhaps one that isn't networked) should be encouraged particularly for the purposes of providing a free software replacement. Running the program temporarily might be necessary to provide a free software replacement. One hopes that any release comes with complete corresponding source code and build instructions. But really, there's no more reason to trust the proprietary software people run every day than there is to trust any code from the NSA. Proprietary software is often malware. We have no good reason to trust the NSA nor software proprietors; in fact, the proprietors sometimes work with the NSA (like when Microsoft specifically changed Skype to make it easier to spy upon).

Have you seen what the Obfuscated C project can do?

Yes, obfuscated programming contests can serve as important learning tools for those who want to liberate themselves from continued ignorance driven by fear of the unknown.

I wouldn't trust NSA source code beyond 'print "Hello World";' and even that is iffy.

I think it's safe to say you won't be doing anything with the program (as far as you know) but programmers simply can't afford the luxury of being ignorant and non-programmers are not well served by inculcating fear. The result of your suggestion is to maintain a small group of elites who ought to be blindly trusted rather than kept in check through software freedom.

God help anyone who touches it if this release is binary only.

I'm not sure what constitutes 'touching' in this context but disassembling the binary and examining how that works (even running the code once understood on a spare computer or VM, perhaps one that isn't networked) should be encouraged particularly for the purposes of providing a free software replacement. Running the program temporarily might be necessary to provide a free software replacement. One hopes that any release comes with complete corresponding source code and build instructions. But really, there's no more reason to trust the proprietary software people run every day than there is to trust any code from the NSA. Proprietary software is often malware. We have no good reason to trust the NSA nor software proprietors; in fact, the proprietors sometimes work with the NSA (like when Microsoft specifically changed Skype to make it easier to spy upon).

Only Apple's bosses determine what "Apple's purpose" is. We come to know what Google's main line of business is (spying) because what now know that they have been doing (spying). Now that we know more about what Apple, Microsoft, and other proprietors do we can retroactively say what they've been doing. Snowden and others have provided irrefutable proof that software proprietors don't care about one's privacy and the structure of proprietary software was a long-time clue to those who understand the power of software non-freedom over the user regarding what is possible. Certainly keeping secrets from the user and putting in general-purpose holes into systems for future exploitation are the most practical means by which to do many things against the user's interests including but not limited to not looking out for their privacy. If Apple gets a pass amongst technocrats it's because some technically skilled users are easily distracted by details and not repeatedly taught to look at the bigger picture (software non-freedom is the root of virtually all of these abuses). Here are some more specific examples of these points:

• Apple iTunes flaw went unfixed for years and allowed remote access which enables spying and a lot more. There was also news of a hidden backdoor API in OS X for years which granted root privileges. This too could have enabled spying and a lot more.
• Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month. This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia. The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but no apps are free on an iThing.
• As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions. This particular political slant affects other Apple services.
• There are many more vulnerabilites listed here and here which could be turned into privacy violations depending on how these vulnerabilities or backdoors are used.

download firefox's source code, edit out google, compile, use it.

Precisely: use your software freedom with Firefox—make Firefox do what you want it to do yourself, or ask someone to edit out the stuff you don't like, or pay them to do this on your behalf, or get together with others and pool your development/funding efforts. You have options with free software which you don't have with almost every other major browser because they're all proprietary (Microsoft's, Apple's, Opera's, and most cell phone/tracker browsers). Google Chromium might also be free software. Every time Mozilla does something I think is foolish with Firefox (and this is hardly the first thing they've done with Firefox I don't agree with), Firefox's saving grace remains the same. Firefox has the same advantage to the user that any free software has: you have the freedom to make the software do what you want so the limits on your willingness to do this are up to you.

I'm not entirely convinced that "no user data was being shared with its partners" until someone looks into the code that implements this promotion—if this markup/style was downloaded ad-hoc, if anything in that code caused Firefox to download something ad-hoc, then the claim is untrue because that data you get had to come from somewhere and there's a privacy problem. But privacy issue or not, this is a mild annoyance.

If you want software that respects your software freedom, you'll want to get off of using Microsoft Windows (because Windows is proprietary, user-subjugating, non-free software) and use the GIMP. Paint.net is non-free software. It's license clearly states "You may not modify, adapt, rent, lease, loan, sell, or create derivative works based upon the Software or any part thereof." which includes free software freedoms—distributing for a fee, making derivative works, and altering the software.

You see Rick Brewster, Paint.NET author, convey the same anti-software freedom sentiment in the Paint.NET blog article referred to in this story alongside Krita, a free software drawing application licensed under the GNU GPL. Consider a quote from Brewster's own blog:

Paint.NET is also not something I want to be chopped up and swept into other projects like Krita. Remember, I make my living off of this — why would I just give away my IP like that? (although, of course, the whole conversation space here is much more complex — please don't assume I'm anti-OSS or something)

If whatever "OSS" refers to (I'm guessing open source software) includes not letting users "chop up" the covered software and include code in other projects, then that's a clear and firm difference between the older free software social movement and the younger, business-centric, reactionary open source developmental methodology. Free software allows the user to do precisely what the Paint.NET license prohibit and what Brewster's comment explains. If Brewster is getting this wrong, and "OSS" doesn't stand for what he prohibits, people should take him to task for misunderstanding what open source software means, and they not allow that name to be conflated with proprietary software. But as of yet, I see no followup posts to his spelling out any misunderstanding of his chosen terms (making Brewster's claim another instance of the pattern I described earlier). Brewster also uses the term "IP" (which I'm assuming means "intellectual property") which is a scam that carries a dangerous assumption and should only be used to point out how bad the phrase is.

If you want software that respects your software freedom, you'll want to get off of using Microsoft Windows (because Windows is proprietary, user-subjugating, non-free software) and use the GIMP. Paint.net is non-free software. It's license clearly states "You may not modify, adapt, rent, lease, loan, sell, or create derivative works based upon the Software or any part thereof." which includes free software freedoms—distributing for a fee, making derivative works, and altering the software.

You see Rick Brewster, Paint.NET author, convey the same anti-software freedom sentiment in the Paint.NET blog article referred to in this story alongside Krita, a free software drawing application licensed under the GNU GPL. Consider a quote from Brewster's own blog:

Paint.NET is also not something I want to be chopped up and swept into other projects like Krita. Remember, I make my living off of this — why would I just give away my IP like that? (although, of course, the whole conversation space here is much more complex — please don't assume I'm anti-OSS or something)

If whatever "OSS" refers to (I'm guessing open source software) includes not letting users "chop up" the covered software and include code in other projects, then that's a clear and firm difference between the older free software social movement and the younger, business-centric, reactionary open source developmental methodology. Free software allows the user to do precisely what the Paint.NET license prohibit and what Brewster's comment explains. If Brewster is getting this wrong, and "OSS" doesn't stand for what he prohibits, people should take him to task for misunderstanding what open source software means, and they not allow that name to be conflated with proprietary software. But as of yet, I see no followup posts to his spelling out any misunderstanding of his chosen terms (making Brewster's claim another instance of the pattern I described earlier). Brewster also uses the term "IP" (which I'm assuming means "intellectual property") which is a scam that carries a dangerous assumption and should only be used to point out how bad the phrase is.

All documentation not only must be referred to in a gender non specific manner

Aha! You're behind the campaign for Info!

Betteridge's law of headlines says the answer is 'No'.

Knowing actual history backs up Betteridge and shows how little 'new' is in the news that asks questions like this.

All of the freedom respecting licenses were born into a world of commercial, closed and proprietary licensing for software and services by default. From the 1970s onward, outside of BSD you had to pay somebody for a black box bag of code to run your hardware. All of these boxes included and still include specific instructions that there are no user serviceable parts inside and to which you could not share, loan, resell or even examine.

  Even today licenses like the GPL depend on the severe strength of copyright law. Law that was created purposefully to support those commercial, closed and proprietary licenses to content like Mickey Mouse.

Tivo and other SaaS offerings are not new. Running GPL 3 code on your hosted-service-but-its-new-because-we-call-it-cloud-now offering does not change the obligations to your users. Either you support the Four Freedoms to use, source, modify and share or you don't have a 'free' license. It's just another commercial offering where you might be playing up some 'Open Source' marketing angle.

Snake Oil is as old as oill and snakes. Most the VC money will dry up once the investors figure out these "fake open source" companies have no product, no market and aren't GitHub so Microsoft won't buy them out.

The Open Source Initiative, contrary to some folks here on Slashdot, has expressed its purpose as the preservation of software freedom.

The OSI (for most of its existence) called the efforts of advocating for software freedom "ideological tub-thumping", hardly language I'd associate with preserving software freedom. Every now and then there's also some organization which calls itself an open source distributor that boasts of its association with a proprietor. Like the time Red Hat told us it was "partners" with Microsoft (Canonical did similarly with Microsoft) and did not frame the issue in terms of software freedom but "choice and flexibility" instead—apparently the flexibility to install a GNU/Linux on a Microsoft VM thus allowing the VM owner (Microsoft in this case) to know everything one is doing on that system. This is a position indistinguishable from granting considerable control to a proprietor over the possibly free GNU/Linux system. These are not the choices nor the language I'd expect from people choosing to frame what they're doing in terms that intend to remind people to learn about software freedom or request software freedom for their organizations so that their organizations can retain their own data and fully control what their organization does with their own computers. As the older "Why 'Free Software' is better than "Open Source" essay points out, "This manipulative practice would be no less harmful if it were done using the term 'free software.' But companies do not seem to use the term 'free software' that way; perhaps its association with idealism makes it seem unsuitable. The term 'open source' opened the door for this."

What I see is not precisely the same but much more in keeping with what is described in a GNU Project essay in the section "Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions...but Not Always":

Radical groups in the 1960s had a reputation for factionalism: some organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and the two daughter groups treated each other as enemies despite having similar basic goals and values. The right wing made much of this and used it to criticize the entire left.

Some try to disparage the free software movement by comparing our disagreement with open source to the disagreements of those radical groups. They have it backwards. We disagree with the open source camp on the basic goals and values, but their views and ours lead in many cases to the same practical behavior—such as developing free software.

As a result, people from the free software movement and the open source camp often work together on practical projects such as software development. It is remarkable that such different philosophical views can so often motivate different people to participate in the same projects. Nonetheless, there are situations where these fundamentally different views lead to very different actions.

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. Free software activists and open source enthusiasts will react very differently to that.

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, "You

The Open Source Initiative, contrary to some folks here on Slashdot, has expressed its purpose as the preservation of software freedom.

The OSI (for most of its existence) called the efforts of advocating for software freedom "ideological tub-thumping", hardly language I'd associate with preserving software freedom. Every now and then there's also some organization which calls itself an open source distributor that boasts of its association with a proprietor. Like the time Red Hat told us it was "partners" with Microsoft (Canonical did similarly with Microsoft) and did not frame the issue in terms of software freedom but "choice and flexibility" instead—apparently the flexibility to install a GNU/Linux on a Microsoft VM thus allowing the VM owner (Microsoft in this case) to know everything one is doing on that system. This is a position indistinguishable from granting considerable control to a proprietor over the possibly free GNU/Linux system. These are not the choices nor the language I'd expect from people choosing to frame what they're doing in terms that intend to remind people to learn about software freedom or request software freedom for their organizations so that their organizations can retain their own data and fully control what their organization does with their own computers. As the older "Why 'Free Software' is better than "Open Source" essay points out, "This manipulative practice would be no less harmful if it were done using the term 'free software.' But companies do not seem to use the term 'free software' that way; perhaps its association with idealism makes it seem unsuitable. The term 'open source' opened the door for this."

What I see is not precisely the same but much more in keeping with what is described in a GNU Project essay in the section "Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions...but Not Always":

Radical groups in the 1960s had a reputation for factionalism: some organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and the two daughter groups treated each other as enemies despite having similar basic goals and values. The right wing made much of this and used it to criticize the entire left.

Some try to disparage the free software movement by comparing our disagreement with open source to the disagreements of those radical groups. They have it backwards. We disagree with the open source camp on the basic goals and values, but their views and ours lead in many cases to the same practical behavior—such as developing free software.

As a result, people from the free software movement and the open source camp often work together on practical projects such as software development. It is remarkable that such different philosophical views can so often motivate different people to participate in the same projects. Nonetheless, there are situations where these fundamentally different views lead to very different actions.

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. Free software activists and open source enthusiasts will react very differently to that.

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, "You

You seem to be confused about what Free Software is. Please read What is Free Software? Right there as Freedom Zero is that you can run the program for any purpose.

Richard Stallman would tell you that he is not a pacifist (he's told me that). He objects to particular wars, for good reasons, but not all war. Free Software licenses don't prohibit military use, or any other sort of use. Theo's rejection was a personal thing.

Do not use words like crash, hang, bug, or problem, employees are told. Instead say does not respond, stops responding, condition, issue, or situation. Avoid saying incompatible; instead use does not work with.

• Crash: euphemism. Does not respond (to your mouse or keyboard): plain English
• Hang: euphemism. Stops responding: plain English
• Bug: historical jargon. Issue: multidisciplinary indication of something not working the way you expect
• Problem: plain English, includes pejorative judgement (deserved or otherwise). Situation: plain english, can include sequence of steps and description of behavior without judgement.
• Incompatible: plain English, me not like big words. Does not work with: plainer English

It seems like a reasonable way to standardize this kind of language, especially when dealing with people internationally or from various disciplines who might not be familiar with CS jargon. Perhaps they should become familiar with basic jargon before operating a modern pocket supercomputer, but when it's Apple's customer visiting Apple's store and asking Apple's employees for help on Apple's product, it's pretty clear who you'd have to make that case to.

Binary-only software has not place in the UNIX world. [Yet] lots of commercial software in there.

Do you refer to commercial free software, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), or to proprietary software distributed to buyers in source code form? (If "yes", which?) If the latter, how do publishers of said proprietary software protect their work from mass copyright infringement by judgment-proof individuals?

Not dealing in (whether commercially or gratis) proprietary software is always wise. $7,300,000/800,000 people is almost $9.13/person. Nobody who can afford a modern Lenovo computer will find $9.13 very rewarding and Lenovo won't find $7.3M a challenge to pay.

But the structure of proprietary software (being hidden from the user who is legally prohibited from inspecting or editing the software and often prohibited from sharing the software as well) keeps users ignorant of the software they run. Since there's a lot of proprietary malware out there and we can't tell which proprietary software is malware, we are wise to avoid it all. Ethically, all proprietary software operates not in the user's interests. Users aren't well served by software running on their computers which don't respect their software freedom. This is increasingly becoming a health/life or death concern (see a recent story about a CPAP machine hacker, for instance) and have always been an a concern for those motivated by how we ought to treat other people (perhaps the most important consideration we can make in life).

Academic publishers have every right to protect their intellectual property and charge for access.

By "intellectual property", do you refer to patents, trademarks, or trade secrets in addition to copyrights? If so, which? The appropriate policy reasoning is likely to depend on the significant differences among these areas of law. If not, why use the term "intellectual property" instead of "copyright" which is both shorter and more precise?

And why haven't we seen a price war among journals to attract subscribers from other journals?

As for games: grow up already. (sorry for that blunt comment)

How is someone employed as video game programmer (such as myself) expected to reply to this?

Players for rented movies? I have no idea what kind of movies you rent that require a special player.

I can think of Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play. With the death of Blockbuster,* streaming is the only rental left for movies recommended by your friends or by a reviewer that are too old for Redbox and which your local public library happens not to carry.

Last time I rented a movie it was on DVD and there are players for that (e.g. mpv, xine, vlc).

How well do these play Blu-ray Disc? Or are they for DVD only?

income tax: if you *really* need that and there's no web-based service

The web-based services use proprietary JavaScript and service as a software substitute.

you can keep a virtualized Windows 7 VM around

That will work for 14 more months. What should one buy 14 months later once extended support (that is, security updates) for Windows 7 ends?

* Apart from one Blockbuster store in Oregon, which I presume is operated to keep the trademark registration alive.

As for games: grow up already. (sorry for that blunt comment)

How is someone employed as video game programmer (such as myself) expected to reply to this?

Players for rented movies? I have no idea what kind of movies you rent that require a special player.

I can think of Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play. With the death of Blockbuster,* streaming is the only rental left for movies recommended by your friends or by a reviewer that are too old for Redbox and which your local public library happens not to carry.

Last time I rented a movie it was on DVD and there are players for that (e.g. mpv, xine, vlc).

How well do these play Blu-ray Disc? Or are they for DVD only?

income tax: if you *really* need that and there's no web-based service

The web-based services use proprietary JavaScript and service as a software substitute.

you can keep a virtualized Windows 7 VM around

That will work for 14 more months. What should one buy 14 months later once extended support (that is, security updates) for Windows 7 ends?

* Apart from one Blockbuster store in Oregon, which I presume is operated to keep the trademark registration alive.

Good point. I was remembering the first draft before they decided to keep the Affero license separate.

The important issue is putting people in a position where they get to control their own computers, not what's convenient for people to find has already been programmed for them. It's important not to conflate these issues or let anyone reframe the question away from control over one's computer into far less significant conveniences. In fact, control over one's own computers was the point of a previous poster ("I see no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to keep using old software as long as I want to"). The convenience of finding nonfree software that appears to do what you want is a trap because you are prevented from knowing all of what it can do, even people talented and willing to vet the program for you can't help you. We see proprietors leverage that power against their users all the time (so many /. stories are easily and rightly reduced to "another example of the power of a software proprietor and computer users who don't understand that power"). In the free world this is never a show-stopper problem because it comes down to limits you impose on yourself—your willingness to and talent in vetting a nonfree program is irrelevant—you aren't allowed to do these things no matter how willing or able you are due to an unjust power someone else asserts over you. If you're not willing or able to vet a free program you have options you might be unwilling to try to use to benefit your situation (including asking a friend, hiring someone, asking the community, learning to program). Socially we don't accept that array of choices as reason to frame the issue as you're trying to frame this issue where there's no clear difference between nonfreedom and freedom.

This is how things have always been in the free world: the users can singularly or collectively decide how much they're willing to offer and under what terms to get someone to do programming work. Thanks to software freedom, anyone with a copy of free software also has the freedom to get someone to improve that program for them, for any definition of "improve". The rest are details to be negotiated in a work contract such as how much to pay, who will do the work, contact points for progress updates, and when the work is due. It doesn't matter how old the software is or if there are newer programs one could use to do the same job. One retains control of their own computer and this extends to groups of people working together as you describe. These are enormous benefits to software freedom (but even that word is too weak to describe freedom)—self-determination and cooperation with one's community are freedoms we rightly cherish. None of this activity rejects commercialization but also doesn't make commercial concerns primary. Proprietary software is radically different: the proprietor is a monopoly. There is no competition thus no negotiating with more amenable parties should one find the price too high or if the proprietor is uncooperative. The proprietor also denies the user the freedom to do any of this work for themselves by themselves.

It's not clear that the Mac Mini is aimed at the consumer

How I'm supposed to feel about that depends on what you meant by "consumer", which isn't quite clear. Which of these did you mean?

This is what they are referring to. Code like (from that link):

void
foo (int n)
{

  struct S { int x[n]; };
}

Would the fix be replacing that with a pointer and calling malloc()?

This is what they are referring to. Code like (from that link):

void
foo (int n)
{
  struct S { int x[n]; };
}

Please read the second paragraph on this page, especially the last sentence of the paragraph: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

On the flip side, I'm convinced that our society is moving towards a society of content creators and consumers. This isn't bad.

Two questions:

1. Why use those words, which FSF considers loaded, instead of "authors" and "viewers"?
2. In the scenario that you imagine "isn't bad", are the authors and viewers the same person? Or are there measurable advantages of an entry barrier for viewers to join a small set of people allowed to be authors?