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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.
You know, this isn't cool - its just damn annoying to anyone who actually *needs* to use the genius bars. This will just cause the general public to hate the FSF.
Cemil.
by large segments of the population. Immature bullshit like this. You have a point, you can advertise it on your web site, but grow the fuck up. Doing shit like this will only turn people AWAY from your message.
Monstar L
(1) Interfere with people who need tech support.
(2) Piss off Apple customers and turn them away from F/OSS.
(3) Absolutely no change in Apple policy.
I'm glad to use F/OSS on my Mac, including a great deal of software produced under the FSF umbrella, and I have released software, developed on the Mac, under the GPL. The success of OS X has created a huge new market for those who develop on Unix-type systems. Braindead stunts like this really don't help.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Whatever happened to the concept of freedom of choice? Some may not like Apple or Microsoft but to act in a manner that denies others freedom to choose the product they want does not make sense.
I would go through the education route - educate people why buying from Apple/Microsoft is bad. Also would teach about the differences of open and proprietary software etc.
Best way to deal with the proprietary companies is by the bottom line of the companies not interfering with individual rights.
Will the FSF complain when Apple releases a software update that makes every Apple machine hit the FSF servers every couple of minutes?
I mean, if you're going to start a DDoS fight, don't complain when someone steps up and gives you the same treatment.
Waste the time of large numbers of people who have nothing to do with making decisions for Apple, and also the time of those people who actually need help with their Apple equipment.
That'll win hearts and minds for sure.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I'm appalled that the FSF could resort to such negative tactics.
They need to be setting a good example if they are to have any chance of convincing people of the importance of free software. This just plays straight into the hands of those that wish to paint free software advocates as over-idealistic zealots with no concern for practicality -- the exact opposite of what a group like the FSF should be doing.
John_Chalisque
While trolling online can be entertaining, trolling IRL sucks. The guys working at these places are probably just trying to get by in this world - they have nothing to do with Apple's corporate decisions. They don't need this kind of harassment. And while they don't need that kind of harassment, the other people who are locked out of actually getting, you know, actual legitimate support REALLY won't appreciate this move - if anything, it'll make them hate the FSF.
While I agree that the concept used here is very silly and could likely do more harm than good, I think perhaps the moniker of "borderline terrorism" is a bit overblown. Perhaps there needs to be a Godwin v2.0 with terrorism as the focal point.
In the past I've supported the FSF. This is not what I expect from such an organization.
Denial of Service attacks (of any kind) should not be perpetrated by honorable people. Does this have the general support of the FSF? What the hell do they think they are playing at?
this is blatant harassment and possibly borderline terrorism.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Want to make Apple irrelevant?
It's fucking simple.
Make something better. Something that users want to use more than Apple products.
DOS attacks on genius bars is pretty infantile. And certainly won't endear the FSF to the people they are trying to reach.
Maybe FSJ was right, they are freetards.
SteveM
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.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Apple does NOT (repeat that, NOT) prevent people from developing open-source applications. The FSF's rant was just that, an uninformed screed directed at a company that doesn't play ball with the FSF's politics.
Proof: Read the first link. I downloaded some source from the 'net, I compiled it, I modified it and compiled it again, then I installed it on my phone and it works just fine.
I had an email exchange with the author of the FSF's rant, and pointed out his errors. I think he and I still disagree, but to not even acknowledge the possibility that FOSS s/w is just fine and peachy on the iphone is intellectually dishonest. Not that that will stop the crazies from apple-hating... [sigh]
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Most of the /. crowd isn't really into free software, they just hate Microsoft. So it's funny watching the responses to this.
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!!
Genius: do you own an Apple Product?
Moron: uh, um, no.
Genius: Next!
or
Genius: do you own an Apple Product?
Moron: yes, here's my iPhone 3G. Why don't you guys support XYZ
Genius: Use the source, put your app on the AppStore
cat
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!
If you can't tell which word is being used improperly in the above sentence, then having it explained to you won't help.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Microsoft "irrelevant"? Those are odd words for a company that still maintains a 90% operating system market share, an equivalent market share percentage for office and productivity software, and what was (till a few weeks ago) the top selling current-gen video game console in the United States.
And that's not counting Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, their development platforms such as Visual Studio and a host of other profitable and well known product lines.
I agree that some of their attempts at breaking into new markets (see Zune, Windows Mobile, Live) have been failures or mixed successes at best, but to regard MSFT as "irrelevant" because headlines about them are not plastering your favorite blogs seems to demonstrate a high disregard for the facts.
does that mean that Apple customers will stop buying Apple? Good!
If you're a Microsoft fanboy, then I have nothing to say to you.
If you're a UNIX/Linux supporter, however, you need to realize how important Apple has been to you. By maintaining a just-large-enough marketshare during the past two decades, Apple has kept alive the idea in the general public that Windows isn't the only possible operating system, keeping the door openn for Linux. Every ad for MacOS is also an ad for "not Windows" and therefore an ad (in part) for Linux and Unix, an ad which the Linux/UNIX community can't afford to run by itself. Everytime a group of Apple fans force a company to support a second operating system in their organization, they make it easier for Linux users to force them to support three.
Apple products aren't perfect, but they are good enough to hold off the behemoth, and that's been worth something.
Seriously. I hereby challenge a representative of the FSF foundation to speak up and tell us if any of the money donated to them has gone to this 'project'. I've donated money to them in the past, but if they think trying to block Apple's customers from getting tech support is helping... well they can do it without my contributions from now on. I donate so that they can help out with lawsuits regarding consumer freedom, not so they can create frustration and suffering among people who just want somebody to diagnose a problem with their laptop.
Congratulations guys. You'll be getting not a cent more from me until it is clear that the money won't be wasted on this kind of asshattery.
Folks,
If you really care about the FSF, you would shut down this project NOW. IANAL, but I am a former anti-trust economist. It is one thing to conduct a protest (such as a picket line) against the policies or actions of a company; it is another thing entirely to interfere with the business of a company (see "illegal restraint of trade"). A court will come down *hard* on the FSF for sponsoring a DOS action on the Genius Bars. The FSF could be fined, enjoined against actions, or both. In addition, the staff of the FSF and individual participants can be fined or jailed. The money that it will cost to defend the FSF against the lawsuits could be better spent on more useful causes. While Apple's lawyers are not the Nazgul, they are not far off the mark either and Apple has shown itself to be willing and able to use them.
Besides, even if consumers are turned off to Apple, where will they go? WinCE? Symbian? PalmOS? Zune?Are *any* of those better? Get real.
For crying out loud folks, this is a true freetard idea at its worst -- an action against a company that alienates the intended audience, accomplishes nothing, and makes the protesters look like unreasonable, wild-eyed radicals.
--Paul
Hey, I have a great idea! Let's protest the fact that a computer company makes computers and software that doesn't fit our ideology by crowding their stores, pissing off a bunch of employees who are paid to answer tech support questions instead of discussing politics, and making customers who need support miserable. That attention will really help us make software free - they'll all quake in fear because of us!
As much as I admire the goal of Free Software and like the tools produced under both Open Source and Free Software terms, that's just plain stupid. What a bunch of douches.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
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.
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.
The question you need to ask, is what does Apple gain by supporting these formats? That is, how many more iPods/iPhones will Apple sell if they add support for Ogg or FLAC?
A very strong argument could be made that the incremental increase in iPod sales would be vanishingly small. (Both the iPod and the iPhone seem to be selling ok without them.)
So Apple gets no real increase in sales while at the same time having to write and maintain the code to support them. And, call me a moron, but that does cost money.
SteveM
It took Android and the jailbreak community to force their hand, make them admit that a web browser was not an SDK.
That's a wild & unsupported claim. A much simpler hypothesis is that the SDK wasn't ready to ship, the App Store wasn't ready to go live, and the browser was just used to placate developers and buy some time.
Your interpretation may make the jailbreak community feel great about themselves, but it fails the law of parsimony, don't you think?
(Occam's Razor)
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
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.
All it takes is...
FSF: "You have bad policies!!!"
Apple: "Please leave the store."
FSF: "No! You have bad policies!!!"
[Apple guy calls security - they show up 3 minutes later]
Security: "You are coming with us."
FSF: "Fine. I'll leave."
Security: "You don't have the freedom of that option. The police are on their way to arrest you for being a public nuisance."
FSF: "Can I call my mom?"
THE END
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
It's absolutely right that people should be polite, and we emphasized that in the handout and instructions we wrote for this. Being a jerk to someone just showing up to work after a late night at the bar doesn't help anyone. And many of the Geniuses are probably at least sympathetic to us, and they probably think the Genius name is pretty funny too -- everyone has to make a living.
Our goal is to communicate a message to Apple, and we use the communications channels that Apple has provided in order to do this. It's interesting that people criticize making life difficult for the employees when we are doing something that disagrees with Apple, but not of the pro-Apple crowd. What about the 500 people waiting outside to get in when the new store opened? I bet that "made life difficult" for the employees too. Besides, isn't a day full of conversations about DRM going to be a pretty easy day for the Geniuses? They don't have to debug anything, or deal with people who are furious about not knowing how to use their computer, or about some legitimate data loss :).
Organizations and companies are set up to deflect and channel criticism. If we don't use the tools we have -- our voices, our dollars, and our ability to organize with others -- nothing will ever get changed. Organizing a concerted effort to deliver a direct message in a respectful but firm way seems like something consumers are supposed to do when they don't like what a big company is doing. I'm honestly interested to hear all the alternative suggestions out there for communicating this message to Apple. We can't just send letters to generic customer service addresses and wait quietly. We can't just stop buying Apple products but not say why. I think we're past that point -- Apple said they agreed with us a year and a half ago and yet now they are pushing more DRM than ever.
As for taking time away from Apple customers who need tech support, that is indeed regrettable but it's also inevitable. Time is a zero-sum game and Apple only has so much of it. Any customer going to the store takes time away from another. The 500 people waiting outside the store stopped me from getting in to have the conversation I wanted to have too. The question is, who is responsible for this? If Apple stuck to what they said they were going to do about DRM, or if they spent a little more money on their support services and some executives took a slight pay cut, this wouldn't be an issue. Pointing the finger at people using the option as provided to ask salient questions about the way Apple technology functions of Apple employees tasked with answering these questions is not the right answer.
So, yes -- we hope and expect that everyone will be polite, but firm. I am sorry for the inconvenience caused to other customers but in consolation I can offer the statement that if we succeed, there will be far fewer agonizing and annoying DRM-induced computer catastrophes for all of us to deal with.
No, the Geniuses aren't customer service, they're tech support (usually high-level tech support at that, with loads of certifications of every piece of hardware Apple has made in the past 10 years). Granted, they *do* deal with customer service issues but they will put those off to customer service specialists over the phone if it takes longer than a few minutes to resolve because that isn't their area of extensive training.
I only offer this correction because (probably like most people) I assumed anyone physically working in a retail space would be pretty low-level, with the occasional fluke of someone overqualified. I was pretty surprised to find out just how much training and technical experience the typical Apple Genius has.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
You seem to have implicitly invented a useful word (and derivatives).
Adsperger (n): Someone who advertises or engages in publicity without any understanding of how the ads will be perceived.
Adspergize (v, transitive.): To alienate a readership through poor understanding of their response.
Adsperg (n): An advert that annoys the reader not from deliberate intent, but from an inability to understand the likely range of responses to the ad.
To a lesser extent, we all act in a similar manner at times, being offensive in public. This post could well annoy people with Aspergers Syndrome. Well, I can be an insensitive clod at times, and do suspect I have a touch of AS.
Oh well. "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn." Welcome to slashdot.
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.
Perhaps when the original poster correctly quotes ``A Prince's Bride" then perhaps they'll be taken seriously.
Swing and a miss.
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.
Er, you might want to check that. Darwin hasn't been open source in a long time.
Yeah, not since OS X version 10.5.4 ...
Oh wait, that's the current version.
The source, PPC and Intel (gasp! that's unpossible!) for Darwin can be found at Apple - Darwin - Releases
Perhaps you just need a bit more practice with this new "Google" thing. I'm sure you would have found it on your next search.
SteveM