FSF, Political Activism or Crossing the Line?

orbitor writes to tell us InfoWorld's Neil McAllister is calling into question some of the recent decisions by the Free Software Foundation. From the article: "All the more reason to be disappointed by the FSF's recent, regrettable spiral into misplaced neo-political activism, far removed from its own stated first principles. In particular, the FSF's moralistic opposition to DRM (digital rights management) technologies, which first manifested itself in early drafts of Version 3 of the GPL (Gnu General Public License), seems now to have been elevated to the point of evangelical dogma."

Comments

Someone needs to read up

[Tom]

If anyone really thinks that DRM is or should be outside the FSF's agenda, he should read The Right to Read.

DRM is exactly the kind of things that caused Stallman to launch the FSF in the first place.

Reply

[Godji]

There's a reply to TFA posted on www.defectivebydesign.org

http://defectivebydesign.org/node/78

Re:Perspective

[pchan-]

You seem to be confused about the intent. This has nothing to do with the market, it has nothing to do with consumers, it has nothing to do with products. The GPL is about software. The intent of the GPL is to keep all GPL'd software available to anyone. The point of the license changes is to insure that the redistribution clause of the GPL is not rendered useless by DRM systems. You can't use the changes I've made to GPL software, even though you have the hardware for it, because I've created DRM software that prevents you from doing so. I've managed to close some GPL code, I've defeated the intent. The v3 license attempts to fix this.

The informed consumers (or lack thereof) is another problem, but not one the GPL can address.

ProDRM - Ignorance = FSF Stance

[Zero__Kelvin]

For starters, market realities right here in the United States put the lie to the FSF's histrionics. Apple's iTunes Store, which sells DRM-encoded music and videos to millions of iPod owners, is going like gangbusters. Clearly, despite DRM's widely discussed inadequacies and regular aggravations, more than a few consumers are willing to put up with it when the price is right. That's just basic free-market economics.

This is one of the more ridiculous assertions I have seen in quite a while. It is akin to saying that the rise of the confederate army "puts the lie" to the Union Army's "histrionics" in regard to its anit-Slavery stance. It is a complete non sequitur to conclude that DRM is not bad just because a large part of the populace ignorantly embraces it. The difference here is that the harm falls on the ignorant as well.

People who think DRM is about protecting artist's rights and guaranteeing fair use while stopping piracy have literally no idea what DRM is, or what its potential for abuse implies. DRM is NOT about what music you can play or what videos you can watch, it is about what software you can run on your hardware!

The evolution of DRM is intended to be as follows:

1) We need to control who accesses our data and how 2) People running "untrusted/unsigned" code can break our algorithms (Think DeCSS) 3) Linux is a DRM circumvention device 4) Congress ... we need to outlaw evil OSS hacker circumvention tools like Linux (look what they did with CSS) 5) Game point and match, Bill "win at all cost but his" Gates

Think about it people! Think! I implore you. You don't think Gates is pro DRM because he cares about making sure artists get paid boatloads of money, do you? Really?