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FSF's "Defective By Design" Targets Apple Genius Bars
mjasay writes "At OSCON this year, MySQL's Brian Aker made this bold statement: 'Microsoft is irrelevant ... We're more worried about Apple.' The Free Software Foundation appears to have caught the hint, and has turned its attention to all-things-Apple with a 'denial of service' attack on the Apple Genius Bars. The idea is to completely book all Genius Bars and then ask the 'geniuses,' over and over again, a few questions about Apple's proprietary ways (while, apparently, real customers with support issues are left to flounder). Lost in this anti-Apple fervor, however, is the Free Software Foundation's complete and conscious failure to protect the web. Richard Stallman has long felt that software that doesn't sit on his desktop doesn't affect his freedom, but isn't the opposite true? Why is the FSF focused on Apple when the bigger concern should be Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and other web players, a point made by Tim O'Reilly recently at OSCON?" Defective by Design is just one of many FSF projects, remember; it hardly seems fair to say that the FSF has been ignoring the implications of software as a service.
Having previously worked at an Apple Store several years back (and even if I hadn't). I can tell you most people will probably get a "I'm sorry I can not answer that question. Please call corporate to get answers to your question."
Unless Apple has noticed this and given an internal memo of detailed responses to give out, this is the response you will get even from a store manager or supervisor.
Some geniuses may actually give you their own personal view on things but they wont represent Apple, nor will Apple necessarily stand behind said responses.
The only benefit of this is perhaps making more Apple customers aware of what the issues are, if they happen to overhear the conversation.
If you will be participating in this, I'd recommend staying polite. Being a stuck up customer trying to stick it to the man via a part-time, full-time non-corporate employee is not going to win you many friends or make people willing to listen to your cause.
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The free software movement has never been very good at PR/communication. It's really a testament to the strength of the idea, that it has made the progress it has.
No offense, but it is as though the whole movement has Aspergers syndrome, in the sense that they have zero intuitive understanding of how they will be perceived.
I'm getting really tired of people bashing apple as "locked down" with DRM.
Last time I checked, it was the other guy who spent upwards of a decade re-engineering their entire os with the specific purpose of DRM, causing massive GFX and audio card driver instability and feature stripping which goes on to this day.. but back on topic here: apple isn't "locked down".
Their kernel is OSS, they allow the development of third party "haxies" for their OS and official apps (see chax, synergy, etc), and their unix based system serves as a large "main-stream" market for many products which would otherwise have a much smaller user base.
This is the reason why I use osx.. it combines the benefits of OSS with the benefits of proprietary, while retaining very few of the drawbacks.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
A link that I got in my email, to the full text of what the FSF is doing here.
From TFA:
Because this is the only way to get the entertainment industry to agree to allow its content to be distributed as openly as it has with Apple, and because Apple wants to make sure it makes money.
From the link:
Jobs is the largest individual shareholder at Disney, and he could insist that its films be DRM-free.
From TFA:
As to the third question, no one cares where you go. Get over it.
Anyone who believes this, where are you right now? Boxers or briefs? How long is your penis / how big are your tits?
If you feel uncomfortable sharing these details with me, keep in mind, you at least have some idea who I am. You have no idea who's tracking you at Apple or AT&T.
What's the recourse if this douche is wrong?
The fourth question? It's not a question. At least put a question mark at the end to pretend.
That's only because you didn't read the whole question. Again, from the FSF:
If Jobs really wants to see open formats, why doesn't the iPhone play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora video and FLAC?
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
I think this is kind of an extreme action, and I can't really support it. But then, maybe extreme actions are exactly what's needed. (And maybe that's just Dark Knight rubbing off on me.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well I will. I've sent several donations already this year, but I won't be sending more.
You call this activism? I call it harrasment, immoral, and unethical. I call it rude and stupid.
I like the way you have a double standard for DoS. It is OK in meatspace but wrong in cyberspace.
Maybe Apple should send out an email or just post on their website how the FSF decided to hurt Apple's customers and ask that people not support the FSF in any way.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
needs to learn that there is a difference between being a revolutionary and just being really annoying.
One changes the world, the other just makes people hate you. They seem to be in the camp of people that think that as long as people hate you, you must be doing something right.
Are they heavily involved in promoting Linux?
Not hardly. The FSF has been in a snit over Linux's success for at least a decade, so they do all the nit-picking, bitching and moaning that they can about it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Moreover, Apple is one of the few companies where you can actually talk to one of their tech support people face-to-face. This as opposed to Dell or HP, where you typically wait on hold for two hours while your call is transferred to Bangladesh.
Apple "Genuis Bar" is the sort of support system we should be ENCOURAGING.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Yes, Apple's imperfect, it shares the problems of any big software company (and they ARE a software company, they wouldn't be selling all those Macs if they were running Vista), but it's bent over backwards for the open source community... even when its openness made it a target, even when it's been attacked by extreme members of the community.
The iPhone is a nice phone, but that's all it is. A nice phone. It's not the next big platform (look to Android or maybe OpenMoko for that). It's not an open source development platform, but neither are most cellphones.
Ten points of hippie-cred, dudes, but this smells more of Altamont than Woodstock to me.
Not anymore, but not for lack of trying.
This is the proverbial me telling people your sister is a dirty wore, and letting you prove that you don't actually have a sister. Would you care to give a few examples of Apple trying to violate GPL?
RMS has a decent point there.
To me the name really isn't that important. What is important is giving credit where credit is due. I've had people tell me straight faced that Linus Torvalds wrote the entire "Linux Operating System" all the way from the kernel to gcc to bash. This is obviously wrong, and such misinformation comes from lazy journalists and editors who play fast and loose with the facts.
Call the operating system whatever you want, but when I read in articles that "Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system" I cringe a bit. He arguably popularized it more than anyone else, and he created a very important part of it, but he didn't create it any more than Goodyear created my car.
I have to agree with you.
This kind of puerile stunt is simply absurd. Apple can and should sue them over this.
This is specially bad coming from a flagship name list FSF, and can cause serious problems for the opensource/freesoftware initiatives. Who will take us seriously ?
Even if this is not carried out, the FSF should make a public apology over this unfortunate incident.
morcego
Actually, this is a demonstration that there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Sure, the software is free to use, but the cost of it is a bizarre ideological movement that pulls stunts like this, interfering with people's ability to actually get some use out of their computers.
GNU/FSF were fun and useful about 15 years ago, when free software was generally about coders using and sharing each others code. Unfortunately, I think success has spoiled the movement. I'd rather just pay for my software and avoid all the political crap.
Send them an email saying you will no longer donate while such campaigns are run. I did.
Seriously? That's your smoking gun? A completely separate company (as it was then), over fifteen years ago tried and failed to do something that you remember a bit vaguely and don't provide any substantiation for.
And further - that Jobs (as the CEO of NeXT and now of Apple) has nurtured a deep desire to try again, and he's just biding his time until he strikes. Like some evil super-villain in a cartoon.
It's hard to believe someone would stretch that far, but there you go! It's impressive stuff. Not grounded in sanity perhaps, but impressive nonetheless.
> It is the customer's choice to agree to the terms of the apple licenses.
Customer choice is what brought us the Microsoft monopoly.
Is your point here that people should not have the freedom to make choices you personally disagree with, or that you don't trust people to make choices? I'm not sure why it's relevant either, except as a snide non-sequitur.
Are there any licences that provide the same kind of stuff without linking me to them, or should I just change the name of the GPL when I licence my software?
Certainly. Have a browse through http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category. I suggest using the Microsoft Reciprocal License (basically equivalent to the LGPL, and perfectly GPL-compatible), just to piss off the FSF...
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Exactly what I did. And promptly told them to remove me from their mailing lists and cancel any 'benefits' that came from my last donation. I'm done with them.
The people are sort of stuck here. Before most businesses we dealt with every day were large corporations, there could be a fairly equal exchange of ideas between customers and proprietors. A concerned community could make itself heard to businesses that affected it. Apple is a large corporation. They'll spend a lot of advertising money to talk at you in a way that sort of feels personal ("Hey, here's a company that understands me!"), but is limited in substantial message to, "Buy our shit, K?" They even go beyond what most companies do and hire a bunch of people to sit in stores and do face-to-face tech support, which means they're listening to customers, though in a somewhat limited way.
The only people that have DIRECT CONTROL over Apple's business practices are high up in the company. They talk a lot, but it's hard to make them listen. If you can tie up all the "genius bars" for a day, that might actually make someone notice. It would be pretty hard to do, but if you did, it might at least be acknowledged by someone with DIRECT CONTROL. It might also get noticed by the mainstream media, who would make some ham-fisted attempt to understand what the fuck it is that the FSF was talking about, and might even report on it, leading reasonable folk to wonder, "What was that clueless reporter blathering about," and look up the real info themselves.
Furthermore, as far as the analogy goes, every waiter at those white-only restaurants didn't have DIRECT CONTROL over anything. They probably were upset they weren't going to make any tip money. And I bet plenty of the would-be customers DID NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT EQUALITY, or maybe were even hostile to the cause. The magnitude of what the FSF is concerned with is not as great as the magnitude of what the civil-rights movement did. But some problems really do deserve more press. The recent Microsoft and Yahoo DRM expiration issues point out what a fundamental problem DRM is; a lot of people that use DRM-laden media every day don't understand that their very use of those files is at the whim of a corporation, and that they have no good reason to believe that those files will remain playable perpetually, or that they'll be able to find convenient portable devices to play those files perpetually.
As far as I'm concerned if the FSF can book a significant amount of "genius bar" time, more power to 'em. If they can make a big corporation listen to them even for a little while, that's a step. Almost any message coming from a position of principle, reason, and understanding (an anti-DRM stance is certainly one) is more important than a day's worth of "productivity" for Apple and its customers.
Just because you dislike Apple
Why does it seem evident? Why must I like or dislike Apple any more or less than I dislike Dell or HP? The only difference is that for most Apple supporters any kind of disagreement with Apple is some sort of grave offence only explained with some supposed hate for their brand. Apple to me is nothing more and nothing less than a logo on a piece of plastic, and the thing that matters to me is their policy on DRM and others.
I would find it funny if they did this to Microsoft sure,
Here you have it then. I don't like or dislike Apple any more or less than I like or dislike Microsoft. Actually I'm lying - in general I think that Microsoft always was a bigger danger, and as such it has been the target of *countless* campaigns, from the FSF and others. It seems however that when complaining about Apple suddenly it's a matter of "hate" and other rules apply.
If the FSF thinks that all software should be free then they are morons
That's what the FSF *has always said*, and if anything they are quite vocal about it. I find it interesting that Apple users feel so threatened by that, it's not like they are not using a proprietary operating system. This situation however is solely about DRM - the DRM that smells bad when made by others but suddenly smells like roses when used and propagated by Apple.
This isn't just a "not great" strategy, it is going to waste a lot of people's time.
There are a lot of things in life that waste peoples time. Like trying to get the MS Windows reimbursement when it is bundled. The sheer amount of hours that it takes means that some other poor users have to wait in queue to get support. Does this mean that I should just pay and shut up? I don't think so. Sometimes it is not only inevitable to be inconvenient, it's necessary.
and I'm sorry if you somehow feel your self worth should be lower because you don't have a Mac
I get the humour, although I must say that 1) I have a MacBook in the household and 2) I find it almost comical the projection that Apple users make about "self-worth", like anybody but them actually cares about their brand. Actually, it's part of the lack of substance that I've seen in this threads: no answer to the actual points and questions addressed to the "Genius" about DRM, just a lot of posturing about "self-worth". I must confess that Apple in itself - and Apple users - are indifferent to me... one is a brand, the others are users of proprietary UNIX OS. Nothing more, nothing less.
I do however like that my system has a lot of the security benefits of a Linux based system
That's great. Use it then. The discussion never was about why people like OSX. Windows users have just as valid reasons to use is, as do Linux and BSD users. Nothing new, nothing different. I certainly have nothing against it - it seems like a decent OS to use, but my opinion is irrelevant.
It looks to me however that Apple users like to think of themselves as something other than users of a specific proprietary OS and get nervous when confronted with the fact Apple *is* using and propagating DRM. If, as you said, there is nothing wrong with it, I don't get the defensiveness and lack of addressing of the actual complaints and the side-tracking of the debate to how great OSX is and how Apple has the right to do foo and bar (Apple users in general talk a lot about the rights that Apple has, including being great defenders of EULAs and the like).