Slashdot Mirror
GNU-Darwin: Three Years of Free Software Activism
JigSaw writes "The GNU-Darwin Distribution is a free BSD operating system and a popular source of free software for Mac OS X and Darwin-x86 users, but it is also a platform for digital activism. Founder Michael L. Love wrote an editorial speaking about the roots, goals, problems and just about everything about GNU-Darwin. Free Software is at the core of GNU-Darwin and also anything political that has an impact on digital and even rights. Is this the first truly politically oriented BSD OS?" Nope.
Problem is that for most people, digital activism amounts to bitching and whining on /. and maybe voting for people who have no chance of winning.
While I seriously doubt a free os will be able to muster the clout to be taken seriously on theri Antiwar stand or for that matter their Anti DMCA stand. Its very good to see people taking a stand and getting out the message.
This does point out the bigger question of why the technical community is not taken seriously on political issues. If you caught the Diane Rehm show this morning, they were doing a piece on voting systems. While they did have a few C.S. people talking about the problems of electronic voting machines, the election officials managed to stonewall and treat their concerns as non issues. The trick for technical people of any stripe is to make certain that the opinion of their community is heared outside their community. GNU/darwin, free BSD, or linux will only serve as a platform for speaking to those allready within a particular community.
The whole article just comes off like a crank piece to me. I'm against the war in Iraq, but if they think blacking out their web site is a real form of anti-war protest, that's pretty pathetic.
Find free books.
Well, I'm not very familiar with Darwin, but now I can say, based on this story, that my mind is pretty closed to it. I would certainly be hard pressed to ever consider it for anything in a production environment.
I don't want politics with my OS. I don't want the distribution site going black because Bush decides to bomb koala bears or even humans for that matter. Call me cold-hearted, but if I'm in a production environment, and I need to deliver a box that's expected to be supported and work as advertised, I don't want to worry if the freaking OS "activists" -- whatever the hell they are, exactly -- are going to pull the Distro (capitalized, no less) because the Malaguan butterfly's habitat is endangered by oil drilling or 250 million U.S. citizens have strong opinions about war.
Screw that. Give me my FreeBSD, which, to my knowledge, is pretty much always available, regardless of what Dan Rather is spewing at any given moment, and give me peace of mind. Hey, I know that's a lot less eloquent than "give me freedom, or give me death", but in my mind, and with some of the pressures I face from clients, I really don't distinguish between the two.
Activists need to shut up and get jobs anyway.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
"In fact, we did blackout the home page as a war protest in March, and we blackened the whole website, after Apple used the DMCA, but we have never actually taken it off line"
/ ne ws/2003/06/22/wzim122.xml
Did they take the site offline when "The war veterans - unleashed by President Robert Mugabe to seize white-owned farms - are not, however, killing only people: they are slaughtering animals on an unprecedented scale."?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=
Did they take the site offline to protest the jailing and torture in china of people who speak out or worship?
Did they take the site offline to protest the actions of the goverment of iran to put down the student lead protest movement that has resulted in thousands being thrown in jail?
No? Why not? Do they only protest against things that are 'in style' and/or 'hip' with their 'progressive' friends?
For example, on the GNU-Darwin site, the developer mentions taking the distro offline as a protest to the war. What purpose did this really server? Do you really think that the leaders of the coalition had any high-level meetings where they said "You know, I really thought this war was a good idea. But the blackout on the GNU-Darwin software site has really made me think twice"? Of course not. What it DID do however was pressure some of the distro's users to get pissed off and write their MP or Congressman and oppose the war because they wanted their distro back damnit! And that was the intention: to force their USERS into taking a specific action.
Yep, there's that freedom they rant about huh? Software blackouts don't mean a thing and the developers/sites that use them should be ashamed of themselves for trying to extort their users in such a way.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
What?
When the maintainer of BSD's ipf pulled a 180 and changed the license to something more restrictive (I'm at a loss for details right now), the OpenBSD people told him to fuck off, and they wrote their own firewall, now known to everyone as pf. Pretty sad that it had to happen, since pf is now regarded as one of the best firewalls around...
How is that sad?
Someone wrote software, and then wouldn't correct a poorly written license. OpenBSD decided that they liked the idea, but disliked the license, wrote it themselves, and published it with a truly free license.
That's a good thing.
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
We have been prepared to take the Distro off-line a couple of times as a form of political action. It is important to realize that the software freedom status of GNU-Darwin was tenuous before the change to the APSL, so we were ready to cut our losses, and remove GNU-Darwin from the internet, if necessary. Now things have improved very much.
Which pretty much sums up why these guys will never be any kind of serious competition for any real free OS. Who the hell would place any faith in this distribution? Doesn't exactly sound like the kind of dependable OS I'd want to put on my critical servers if it's going to come and go depending on the current political situation. And what kind of idiotic form of activism is it that goes out of its way to inconvenience its supporters, rather than the people its protesting against?