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FSF Helps Launch Autonomo.us To Focus On Freedom In Network Services
mako writes "The FSF just announced the results of a meeting it held on software freedom and network services. They are hailing the launch of a new group called Autonomo.us to follow up on these issues and the publication of the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services which lays out a set of recommendations and guidelines for protecting freedom for software as a service." Update 22:07 GMT by SM: Corrected language incorrectly crediting FSF with creating Autonomo.us.
This may be a bit off-topic, but my initial response to the headline was, "That's pretty clever, but I'm surprised someone hadn't already registered it." It seems like every word ending with a "us" got bought a while back when people first figured that whole thing out.
So out of curiousity, I went looking to see what was at some of those websites. They're all ad pages-- nothing is at any of them, really. It's a sad state of affairs with DNS that there has been such a land-grab and so many domains are taken by people whose only intention is to put up some filler ad pages in the hopes that someone might happen along.
Eh, anyway, it's nice to see someone got ahold of one and are using it for something.
Drag your mouse over the text to highlight some, so that you can copy it to your clipboard. No worky. Also, notice that a few bytes of text loads faster than image.
They went to some trouble to make the text still really be there; the images are all loaded by the stylesheet to replace the text. So it's not quite as bad as, say, a typical flash site. But it's still really stupid, and in an unnecessary way. Imagine they had not done this image stuff: the website would be just as good, except also better, with no downside.
Now that I think of it, that's a really good justification. You should write RMS and tell him that loads of people use proprietary software. He'll be relieved to learn that, since a lot of people do it, it must not really self-defeating.
Actually, no, you don't. If the user has a screen bigger or higher res than you expect, then the fonts are rendered incredibly small and unreadable. If the user had a screen smaller or lower res than you expect, then the fonts are rendered large and pixellated. And if the user's RGB subpixels aren't the physically laid out as you predict (i.e. he's using a CRT when you expect an LCD, or using an LCD when you expect CRT), then your sub-pixel anti-aliasing is wrong too, and makes it even harder to read.
If, on the other hand, you send the text instead of the graphics, then you know that the browser will render it in exactly the manner that the user has told his computer that he prefers, and with far greater chances of being configured for the actual hardware present, and best of all: it will render just like everything else that the user looks at all the time. In other words: perfectly, with no surprises at all.
The FSF has been a double-edged sword to the software community for a while.
They help devs who want their work to be no-compensation usable-by-almost-anyone stuff.
And they totally fuck over those using a BSD license (not that anyone using a BSD license didn't know the risks), and they're causing serious trouble using otherwise good software in corporate environments.
Your mistake is in assuming that the user is a passive consumer. This would seem to be just your conforming to the ideas pushed by the proprietary software industry, which has sought for the past four decades to make the users of their products as passive and helpless as possible.
Your other mistake is in assuming that because far less than one percent of users make noises about wanting to modify the source code of whatever, that 99% don't want to.
The interesting thing is, though: why would you want the FSF to not make noises about things like this? Would you perhaps like all users to be passive and helpless? Or is this an "open source"-like compromise proposal, where the FSF makes exceptions to their principles in exchange of vaguely defined and ultimately useless "credibility".
So what you're saying is that despite the lack of any evidence that a significant percentage of users want to modify source code, it might still be true.
I agree, it might, but given the fact that most users don't have the technical skill to modify code and there's no evidence that they wish to start hiring software consultants, I'd say the more probable truth is that they don't care.