Why We Shouldn't Begrudge Commercial Open Source Companies

Thinkcloud writes with a followup to recent news that Mozilla is once again looking into a do-not-track mechanism after having previously killed a similar tool, allegedly under pressure from advertisers. Canonical COO Matt Asay wrote in The Register that this is not necessarily the case, nor is Mozilla's decision necessarily the wrong one. "It's quite possible — indeed, probable — that the best way for Mozilla to fulfill its mission is precisely to limit the openness of the web. At least a bit. Why? Because end-users aren't the only ones with rights and needs online, a point Luis Villa elegantly made years ago. It's not a one-way, free-for-all for end-users. Advertisers, developers and enterprises who employ end-users among others all factor into Mozilla's freedom calculus. Or should." OStatic adds commentary that "Like it or not, commercial open source companies are still companies, and the economics of the online world have everything to do with their present and their future.

Comments

Derp!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Derp

Hurrr.

Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

"The do not track mechanism is so simple a grandmother could use it."

As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist and programmer of 20 years (assembly, C) I find this offensive.

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

has more to do with social prototypes than feminist sensitivities.

"dont get yur panties in a wad."

Re:Offensive

[Feminist-Mom]

So it's OK to talk about her "panties" now? Not very civil. And we women just call them underwear nowadays. The 1950s was oh...about 60 years ago.

Re:Offensive

[kurt555gs]

[Like]

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the hairspray affect the WHOOSH sound much as the joke passes over your head?

  I swear the captchas have to be context sensitive, this time it was "collagen".

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist and programmer of 20 years (assembly, C) I find this offensive.

And "who posts on slashdot" too...

You clearly do not fall in the demographic profile implied by that statement (which I can't find in the articles, but I assume is somewhere...).

The reality is >99% grandmothers are like what that statement implies, and not like you.

Just do a survey of 10000 grandmothers, how many will be "programmer of 20 years, assembly and C". If Apple targeted people like you they'd go out of business.

Re:Offensive

[donscarletti]

As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist and programmer of 20 years (assembly, C) I find this offensive.

Welcome to the Internet, where October 2007 was "years ago" and being over 40 and able to program assembly makes you a "greybeard". I am sure those guys at Mozilla are referring to their own grandmother's generation, however, the distinction would be subtle to them.

Re:Offensive

[geekpowa]

"Panties" is current nomenclature in South East Asia; and the term is regularly used to describe underwear of both genders.

The OP comment about "social prototypes" is an interesting and relevant turn of phrase; nothing in what was written was sexist; but seemed to set you off. I thought that divining offensive comments in throw away lines, was 1970s post publication of "The Female Eunuch", which was oh.... about 40 years ago.

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet to see a grandmother with a beard, grey or not. :P

Re:Offensive

[Again]

Welcome to the Internet, where October 2007 was "years ago" and being over 40 and able to program assembly makes you a "greybeard". I am sure those guys at Mozilla are referring to their own grandmother's generation, however, the distinction would be subtle to them.

Dude, I don't even remember 2007 anymore. There's no need for the double quotes around years ago.

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you troll this comment on every article that posts about Grandmas?

I find the fact that you're a feminist offensive. Feminists are the most obnoxious self-centered people I have ever met. i.e. thinking people would care about your opinion. I know no one cares about mine especially so here.

I find the fact that you're 49 year old grandmother to mean that you either got pregnant in school, or your daughter did, maybe one of you should have been taught about safe sex, or you're just lying about your age, a common trait among women. Face it you're old.

I find the fact that you copy-pasta troll offensive. One could say it's so easy a grandma could do it.

Now get off my internet lawn.

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

World War 2 lasted only 6 years and ended 65 years ago, yet we still have to demonize Hitler instead of studying him as just another historical figure. Because God knows there weren't many wars longer than that one! :)
We also must feel very sorry for the poor persecuted jewish people, even though we can clearly see on the news they have since become an agressive demon of their own. All hail the social norm!

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

no, you need a +5 Grammar Tightarse moderation.

Re:Offensive

[espiesp]

You are not looking hard enough.

Re:Offensive

[BZ]

To be fair, you are not the mean, median, or mode grandmother. Nor anywhere within several standard deviations of one...

But yes, the article should probably just have said "just about anyone" instead of "grandmother". I would bet that the average kid using the Web would have a harder time with do not track mechanisms than the average grandmother, if nothing else. For one thing, the kid doesn't even understand what the problem is...

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

noob.

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

show us your pussy.

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

What's her son got to do with this?

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that the leather-skinned, slack-breasted gorgons have always called them "underwear".

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Weren't you the stupid dog that claimed to be a 20 years c++ programmer, and then before that a 20 years antenna designer? how about you STFU, and GTFO. You useless cunt.

Re:Offensive

[mcvos]

Just do a survey of 10000 grandmothers, how many will be "programmer of 20 years, assembly and C". If Apple targeted people like you they'd go out of business.

I think it's time to use great-grandmothers as the stereotype now. While my mother (a 63 year old grandmother) isn't a programmer, she did learn (and forgot) Pascal and Prolog long ago. And she's married to a programmer of 40 years. I have a friend who's mother is both a programmer and a grandmother.

The demographic of programming grandparents is growing rapidly, because second generation nerds are having kids now.

Re:Offensive

[mcvos]

I find the fact that you're 49 year old grandmother to mean that you either got pregnant in school, or your daughter did, maybe one of you should have been taught about safe sex, or you're just lying about your age, a common trait among women. Face it you're old.

Older than you seem to think. It is possible to have graduated from university by the time you're 24. Still too young for kids if you ask me, but it's not all that uncommon, nor nearly as irresponsible as you suggest it is.

Re:Offensive

[Peeteriz]

24-25 is biologically pretty much the later end of optimum time to have first kids - waiting until 30+ for your first kid is due to quite unnatural social pressure and is not really that good to the kid and the family in many different aspects.

Is the poster seriously claiming that a 49 year old grandmother implies some problem with safe sex or lying about age?? It seems really, really ridiculous to me. You could say that about a 35-year old grandmother, but not for this age.

Re:Offensive

[mcvos]

24-25 is biologically pretty much the later end of optimum time to have first kids - waiting until 30+ for your first kid is due to quite unnatural social pressure and is not really that good to the kid and the family in many different aspects.

That's nonsense. 30 is a perfectly fine age for having kids. And recent research showed that women who have kids late end up happier than women who don't have kids at all, who in turn end are still happier than women who have their kids early. And I'd say a happy mom is a pretty big factor in what's good for the family and the children.

Sure, you're biologically perfectly capable of having children when you're 20, but are you psychologically equipped to raise them properly? IMO 24-25 is the early end of the optimum time to have kids.

Re:Offensive

[LaRainette]

The guy your responding too was clearly refering to the biological capabilities and not whether you were fit to be a good parent.
He was saying the social pressure (whether you're fit to be a good parent, whether you have enough money or not ? etc..) had so much influence it was making people have kids older than they would and that it wasn't necessarily a good thing biologically speaking.
Genetic diseases grow more frequent after 25 years old (age of the mother). The age of the father seems to have little importance (which kind of make sense since the spermatozoid is a few days old anyway.

Re:Offensive

[dup_account]

What is missing from his blog is the the difference between respectful use of data and abuse.

I don't mind if a respectful company tracks my data and uses it in a non-abusive manner. But I don't want to see the same ad on 10 sites, or viagra adds, or whatever.

Re:Offensive

[tehcyder]

Hitler is not just another historical figure, he is still a symbol and force for evil amongst twats like you.

Re:Offensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Show us your tits.

Oh, and make me a sandwich.

Re:Offensive

[mcvos]

I know. I'm just pointing out that the psychological ability to raise kids is more important. People have kids because they think it's a nice addition to their lifestyle, or because they think kids are cute, or because they think they're supposed to. What they should be thinking about is whether they're actually ready for that kind of responsibility.

Raising a kid is a bigger responsibility than a job or a mortgage. It's worth taking seriously. And many people under 24 are still working on their own education and building their own life. You need to know how to take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else.

The biological optimum is pretty irrelevant in this medical age.

Re:Offensive

[LaRainette]

Well I wouldn't say irrelevant.
The medical science has advanced but certainly not to the point where genetic diseases are irrelevant. They are actually the hardest to fight along with AIDS and cancer.

Anyway of course it's more important to be prepared to raise kids than to have them at the optimum biological age but your comment about a 49 grand mother being irresponsibly too young is stupid.

TONS of people, actually the huge majority of people, have a job by the age of 24, they are not in college anymore (since most people don't even go to college...) and they can provide for their hypothetical child.
Your comment that supposedly attacks the 49 y o grandma on her self-centeredness only points out your own.
You think because you were still a student @ 24 everyone was but that's only true for a very small fraction of people in the US and an even smaller in the world.

Ergo they are right and you are wrong.

Re:Offensive

[mcvos]

Anyway of course it's more important to be prepared to raise kids than to have them at the optimum biological age but your comment about a 49 grand mother being irresponsibly too young is stupid.

Not to mention non-existent. Since I never said 49 was irresponsibly too young. That's just something you're making up. I merely said that if you ask me, 24 is (slightly) too young, because a lot of people aren't really ready for it yet, and by 30, most people are a lot better equipped to raise children. Not to mention that a study showed that late mothers tend to be happiers than early mothers.

TONS of people, actually the huge majority of people, have a job by the age of 24, they are not in college anymore (since most people don't even go to college...) and they can provide for their hypothetical child.

Financially maybe, but a lot of 20-somethings are still figuring out their place and direction in life, what they really want, and also like to have some fun, party, travel, learn, develop themselves, etc. A lot of that is cut short by having children.

Your comment that supposedly attacks the 49 y o grandma on her self-centeredness only points out your own.

You realise you're just making stuff up here, right?

that isn't done for first time

[Anonymous Coward]

MySQL tried similar thing

Tracking is evil

[KugelKurt]

Tracking users without their consent is just evil. In no other medium are ad recipients tracked: Not in TV, not in print magazines, not on billboards.
If they are tracked in other marketing efforts (eg. loyalty cards), the consumers gave their consent first.

Re:Tracking is evil

[vxice]

That is more an issue of can't than won't. And there has always been an attempt to track at some level. Nielson, demographic info of subscribers or topic of magazine, geographic location etc.

Re:Tracking is evil

[beakerMeep]

I'm not sure explicit consent is required as much as a singular, easy-to-find method of opting out.

It should be created in a way that doesn't cause websites to freeze or browsers to crash. If a website wants to require tracking in exchange for displaying content, that is their right, however the current state of things web apps just fail and crash and generally don't behave correctly when cookies aren't enabled or JavaScript is disabled.
 
This is the very thing Mozilla (and the W3C) need to lead the charge on. No closed source company is going to push for this. In fact, this seems like part of why Firefox was created. IE had a hegemony on the market and it was harming to end users that they didnt protect privacy, implement standards, and was generally bloaty and insecure. If Mozilla cant hold true to their mission, perhaps it's time to fork it.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm looking for cute geeky *freshman* boys who need a little love and money. Eugene or Portland. Need not be "experienced", but must be under 19 and over 18. The geekier the better. Let's hook up! I'll make it worth your while.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Tracking users without their consent is just evil. In no other medium are ad recipients tracked: Not in TV

-

Yep, your TV. Cable TV, at least. Experian manages your viewing profile for Cox, Comcast, and other cable companies.

Re:Tracking is evil

[AuMatar]

Try of opting in. The default should be privacy, and anyone who wishes to can waive that right.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

If a website wants to require tracking in exchange for displaying content, that is their right...

It's also my right to block their tracking, in the same way that it's my right to block their ads.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I'm not sure explicit consent is required as much as a singular, easy-to-find method of opting out.

A very important addendum to opting out is that it needs to actually be opting out from being tracked.
To the best of my knowledge, all of the various tracker-specific "opt out" methods do not stop them from tracking you.
All they do is stop them from showing you advertisements based on the tracking information that they still collect.
You aren't really opting out from being tracked, you are opting out from being reminded that you are being tracked.

That needs to change.

Re:Tracking is evil

[alvinrod]

That's only because those other mediums couldn't/can't track users like the Internet can. If they could, they'd have already been doing it for ages.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Yvanhoe]

Try noScript.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Kilrah_il]

Everytime we talk about pirating copyright material, people on this site go up in arms about how we are now in the digital age and companies should learn to catch up with the times. "What was fine for older mediums, is no necessarily adequate for the digital age," we say, "Companies should changes their business models accordingly."
Given that, your comparison to older mediums and their inability to track users is irrelevant. I do not say I agree to all this tracking, but comparison to "older business models" is incorrect, by our own standard. And we wouldn't want people to say we practice double-standards here on /., don't we? :)

Re:Tracking is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

If I walked up to you tomorrow and slapped you, what would you do? Would you tell me not to slap you again, or would you propose a national Do Not Slap list so that people who don't want to be slapped had a singular, easy-to-find method of opting out?

If doing something without the user's knowledge or consent is evil, then doing it while providing an easy way of opting out is still evil.

It IS fair to announce it in advance and refuse service to those who don't opt in; for instance, a website could (automatically) tell the browser it intends to track the user, and the browser could then let the user decide whether to agree to that, either by asking or by going by the user's privacy settings. Then the website could either deliver its content when the browser indicated that the user agreed, or it could refuse to provide anything if the user didn't. Users could then vote with their feet and take their money elsewhere if they so desired, and websites with exceedingly bad privacy policies that the market wouldn't bear would eventually go down.

So make no mistake: it IS within the rights of a company to refuse to cater to people that don't agree to its terms. It is NOT within the rights of a company to impose those terms on people who did NOT agree to them. Opt-out is never acceptable.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way I would accept "opting out" instead of "opting in" is if there were a short and clear description at the point of entry.

That obviously will not happen. You won't see a disclaimer of the sorts of:
"This site uses Google Analytics. Your usage of this site is logged and sent to Google. Google stores all your browsing history to select ads you might find useful."

If this doesn't happen then opt-out isn't anything like informed consent.

Re:Tracking is evil

[maxume]

I would want people to realize that there is likely a diversity of opinions about many different issues.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Kilrah_il]

I agree with that, and I wouldn't want to generalize one claim to all possible arguments. However, in these 2 issues I see some parallels that, I believe, allow me to state what I said in my previous post.

Re:Tracking is evil

[cmdr_tofu]

What if you have an employee that you pay to say learn programming languages and write code. The employee tells you they didn't make any progress on projects this week because they spent their time learning. Do you as an employer have a right to know if the user spent 30 hours in non-work related websurfing?

Technically looking over your employee's shoulder is tracking them without consent. However, I agree if an employer wants to track their emplyees they should make a clear a policy saying, "What you do on the work network is your employers business. If you have an expectation of privacy with your use of employer equipment, you should work someplace else, or get a 3G card which you can use in your personal laptop at lunchtime"

Re:Tracking is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Right on Dude, Just because a commercial enterprise makes the choice to include the Internet in it's business model must not give it any 'rights' to track users without the users consent.

Re:Tracking is evil

[GameboyRMH]

I agree, but the do-not-track approach makes exactly as much sense as having computers send a do-not-hack message.

I think the proper approach is to:

1. Strictly limit, control and obfuscate information sites are able to collect about browsers. Sites have no right or need to know what OS you're running or your CPU architecture. They don't need to know exactly what browser you're running down to the build number and branding. They don't need to know your screen resolution, only the window size. Maybe there should be a capability to allow the user to provide this information on a per-request basis. Kill browser profiling like popups were killed.

2. Control locally stored information. The way cookies are handled currently isn't that bad, it's just that the controls only extend to cookies, there needs to be a default maximum lifetime for local storage, and there needs to be a capability for the user to activate a whitelist or blacklist if they please. Flash LSOs and HTML5 local storage need to be handled the same way as cookies. Image caching has now been exploited, but rather than fighting this with specific approaches like Nevercookie which leads to a cat-and-mouse game, the vulnerability has to be eliminated entirely - clear the image cache at the end of every browsing session, and perhaps after a timeout, since "browsing session" is becoming less and less meaningful. Fix the visited link info gathering vulnerability. Once those are taken care of, a comprehensive local storage manager with whitelisting and blacklisting can do the job.

3. The tricky part now is 3rd-party tracking services like Google Analytics. The first two points make this less of a problem by making it more difficult to track individual users, but it's still a problem. Something that controls scripts would needs to be used, but NoScript is far from Average Joe friendly. The only easy way to do this would be to allow users to activate a script blacklisting system to block known tracking services, maybe even enable it by default. This way it isn't up to the tracking services to play nice, which is a total joke, and it would be easy for the community to stay on top of the cat-and-mouse games. Tracking services would quickly put themselves out of business, especially since the value of their information would have been decreased by closing the door on local storage and browser profiling.

And there you go, an easy solution to web privacy even a libertarian should be able to agree with.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Define "consent". Was signing up for a little tag at the customer service desk to get discounts consent to track your every move? (I'm sure it's in the really really fine print). If that's your idea of consent, then ISTM Web companies that put little notices at the bottom of the page in an unreadable font is consent too, I guess. BTW, your premise is also wrong anyway: Did you know most stores use their video cameras to figure out what displays people are looking at the most, and to track eyeball movement? Did you consent to this by walking into the store?

Re:Tracking is evil

[GameboyRMH]

If Mozilla cant hold true to their mission, perhaps it's time to fork it.

Not a bad idea at this point...in the tech industry it's a natural cycle for David to become the next Goliath, but luckily with FOSS it's easy to reset that cycle at any time. Privacy-oriented forks of Firefox and Chrome would become overnight sensations with the geek community, and the knowledge will trickle down from there (and it really does work to some extent with knowledge, not like money).

Re:Tracking is evil

[Mr. Slippery]

Do you as an employer have a right to know if the user spent 30 hours in non-work related websurfing?

If you are treating your employees as professionals, you judge them on the eventual results.

If you are treating your employees as serfs, then perhaps your track their every movement.

Re:Tracking is evil

[nametaken]

If you mean tracking (not advertising), I'd have to agree. Though in reality they'll just make sure you've somehow agreed to it via some long-winded legalese somewhere and the opt-out mechanism will only be enforced with be a cookie in your browser. Next time you clear cookies or use a different browser (or device), you've effectively opted back in.

This is how tracking opt-out worked with Wide Open West's (Cable ISP) tracking.

Re:Tracking is evil

[cmdr_tofu]

I agree, the results count, but it really does depend. What if you as an employer pay for bandwidth?

Re:Tracking is evil

[Logic Worshipper]

Join Iceweasel?

Re:Tracking is evil

[GameboyRMH]

I was thinking of that, but it might be better to leave Iceweasel and Chromium as just rebranded forks of the official browsers. Privacy-oriented forks would be significantly different.

RMS got this in the 80s

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Richard Stallman was selling tapes of Emacs and GCC back in the 80s and made sure the GPL allowed selling.

Here's his essay about how to do it but at the same time ensure it doesn't end up funding proprietary software:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Re:RMS got this in the 80s

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard Stallman also raped a gnu in the 80s. Maybe we shouldn't be taking his writings so seriously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnu

Re:RMS got this in the 80s

[larry bagina]

it gets worse. There was a richard stallman sex tape making the rounds 4-5 years ago, I think. (for the record, he's straight. or at least bi). It looked like it was from the 80s. Anyhow, point of the story is, he was eating out some chick's asshole (average looking by porn standards, very 80s, giant bush in need of trimming) and he stops, pulls out a chuck of shit/peanuts/corn/whatever, looks at it for a moment, pops it in his mouth, and chews. Then continues french kissing her asshole. Makes that video of him eating his toe jam seem normal in comparison.

Well, at least ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

At least we have other Free Software Browsers that don't have any ties or financial interests in advertisement, like Chrome. Oh ... wait ...

Re:Well, at least ...

[h4rr4r]

You mean KHTML, which webkit and thus chrome descended from.

Re:Well, at least ...

[fishexe]

At least we have other Free Software Browsers that don't have any ties or financial interests in advertisement, like Chrome. Oh ... wait ...

Epiphany?

Re:Well, at least ...

[icebraining]

KHTML isn't a browser.

Re:Well, at least ...

[JabberWokky]

KHTML isn't a browser.

rekonq is, and that's the latest web browser based on the KHTML derived code from KDE. It's basically Chrome with a KDE interface. There are others, like Arora (which is a simple Qt based browser).

Re:Well, at least ...

[Lennie]

The open source browser mostly created by Google is called Chromium. The browser Google delivers to the consumer is Chrome.

Re:Well, at least ...

[Reziac]

[goes off, roots around]
I see this handy feature:
http://rekonq.kde.org/node/43
Can you unload what you just loaded, too?

Well, ok then

[black6host]

the best way for Mozilla to fulfill its mission is precisely to limit the openness of the web. At least a bit. Why? Because end-users aren't the only ones with rights and needs online

Sometimes I think: fine. All the commercial entities can take the net and turn it into nothing but a big shopping mall with everyone's computer being nothing but a terminal with which they can deposit cash into somebody's pocket. Except for me, and others like me who understand what it was like to a run Fidonet node. For the hell of it, and for free. And I'm sure there's plenty of younger folks who just get tired of this stuff as well. Hell, I'm sure they could do it better than we did back in the day......

Now get the hell off my lawn! :)

Re:Well, ok then

[ToasterMonkey]

Sometimes I think: fine. All the commercial entities can take the net and turn it into nothing but a big shopping mall with everyone's computer being nothing but a terminal with which they can deposit cash into somebody's pocket. Except for me, and others like me who understand what it was like to a run Fidonet node. For the hell of it, and for free. And I'm sure there's plenty of younger folks who just get tired of this stuff as well. Hell, I'm sure they could do it better than we did back in the day......

You should go start a new on on port 81. I'm only 2/3 joking.

Re:Well, ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

yes. I got off your lawn and am yelling at you from my lawn. Can you hear me? Great. I remember those times too, now I am 32 drinking budweiser and wonder what the hell those white lines are they are spraying at us up in the sky. are we bugs, or men?

Re:Well, ok then

[Jimmy King]

Get the hell off your lawn? I was hoping to come hang out and have a beer with another ex-BBS sysop. We hadn't gotten fidonet set up on ours when it finally died (a storm killed the modem on the first day of a 2 week vacation of the guy who's house the computer was in... lost just about all of our users), but there was still the paying for phone lines, a computer dedicated to the BBS, door registration, and so on. All with no requirement for users to pay up. Just because it was fun and cool to do.

Man, I miss those days. Simpler times and so much fun.

Re:Well, ok then

[inode_buddha]

In a related way, I've long wondered if its possible to script some history poisoning. Let them read my history all they want. Eventually, some ad company will get all excited about the new "goatse" phenomenon, and go to see what it is.
Mayhap they will be so deeply scarred that they will begin to question themselves and their carrer choices. Eventually they will move on, making room for a fresh young batch of n00bs. Hence, every time I start Firefox, I want the whole history replaced with goatse.

As it is, my hosts file is nearly 300k. And it works beautifully. You can lose 99% of the crap just by sending doubleclick and google-analytics to 127.0.0.1. Not to mention alexa, sextracker, etc... it's a long list.

Re:Well, ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

You should go start a new on on port 81. I'm only 2/3 joking.

You mean port 54 then?

Re:Well, ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, you can come over on my lawn and have a beer :) Fidonet was awesome. Communicating with people around the world, given the other options at the time (there were not many availabl3e to the public) was great. I never charged a dime for keeping my BBS up. Spent a pretty penny but the fact of the matter is I got so into computers I went on to be come a programmer. And made much more back than I put into it. Here, have another beer :)

Re:Well, ok then

[Raenex]

Sometimes I think: fine. All the commercial entities can take the net and turn it into nothing but a big shopping mall [..]

This reminds of a story from 1994: imminent drowning of the net in sticky brown liquid

It's a bit archaic since it talks a lot about Usenet (newsgroups), which has since been taken over by the Web.

Companies have rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies do not have rights. They are not people. ...sorry I was thinking about this from a strict reading of the constitution. Forgot that was thrown out the window by.... conservatives? Damn. Just Damn.

Re:Companies have rights?

[The End Of Days]

Do people who own companies have rights?

Re:Companies have rights?

[Alex Belits]

Right to guaranteed flow of money into those people's pockets, and right to have power over other people are, without any doubt, among those God-given rights.

Fuck you and fuck your disgusting ideology.

Re:Companies have rights?

[fishexe]

Do people who own companies have rights?

Yes. How does that have anything at all to do with companies having rights?

That's like responding to "farm animals don't have rights" by asking, "Do people who own farm animals have rights?"

Re:Companies have rights?

[The End Of Days]

It's pretty straightforward, really. There's this "progressive" tendency to try to paint companies as faceless, soulless lifesuckers draining all that is meaningful from existence when in reality, it's just people trying to get things done to make a living.

I like poking holes in the "progressive" attempts at class welfare.

Re:Companies have rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like poking holes in the "progressive" attempts at class welfare.

Let us know when you think you're actually successful.

We're waiting.

Re:Companies have rights?

[fishexe]

It's pretty straightforward, really. There's this "progressive" tendency to try to paint companies as faceless, soulless lifesuckers draining all that is meaningful from existence when in reality, it's just people trying to get things done to make a living.

I like poking holes in the "progressive" attempts at class welfare.

I think it's more a tendency to paint them as faceless, soulless legal entities, some of which sometimes do the bad shit that they actually do in fact do. You can't really deny, say, that Firestone and Ford intentionally let people die because it was cheaper than issuing recalls or that BP ignored warnings that resulted in that ecologically catastrophic oil spill, or that our elections are basically bought and sold these days by large corporations, so instead you accuse progressives of class warfare.

Not all companies are alike, and no progressive I know would try to depict them as though they were; you, on the other hand, seem to think "just people trying to get things done to make a living" is an infallible universal descriptor for companies.

As for the reality of class warfare, progressives have never done anything but fight back against the warmongering class. It's like Warren Buffett says: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Re:Companies have rights?

[ultranova]

It's pretty straightforward, really. There's this "progressive" tendency to try to paint companies as faceless, soulless lifesuckers draining all that is meaningful from existence when in reality, it's just people trying to get things done to make a living.

Companies are faceless and soulless, on the account of being fictional legal entities rather than human (or comparable) beings. They also tend to be the nastier the bigger they become, since any individual person - who, presumably, does have a face and soul - can hide behind the bureaucracy and pretend he didn't really have a choice. As an end result, nobody is responsible for anything but do get the benefits nonetheless; the end result is exactly what you'd expect, and the very definition of psychopathic behaviour.

I like poking holes in the "progressive" attempts at class welfare.

You need to poke harder and aim better, then. Since we're talking about companies, you might start by explaining how Wall-Mart's and McDonald's efforts to remove minimum wage entirely to increase their profits when their employees already subsist on food stamps is not a clear example of class warfare? Or did you mean that you only dislike "progressive" efforts at it, and are okay with the owning class waging war on everyone else?

That's to say, it has been proven without tracking

[ciaran_o_riordan]

That is to say, commercialising a project can be done without spoiling the software.

In the 80s, distributing tapes was one model. Teaching classes is another model (which RMS also did for GCC). In the 90s, service companies sprung up.

Commerce isn't inherently bad. But it's also not inherently necessary.

Advertising funds such a tiny amount of free software development, we shouldn't worry about losing it. There are other business models. Ones which rely on doing something useful which people choose to pay for.

Confusing freedom, privacy, and openness

[Mr. Underbridge]

Is it just me, or is the author completely confusing the notions of privacy online with the open source movement? He mentions the comparison many times, yet the only relevant factor I can see is that Firefox happens to be open-source.

In any event, if Mozilla is caving to the tracking mafia, I will cease to use it. And if Google is behind it, I'll have to rethink their services as well. The notion that I have to tell them everything I do to use online services is preposterous. Get a business model that doesn't depend on spying.

Re:Confusing freedom, privacy, and openness

[jvillain]

No you are right on the money. What a surprise to see Canonical coming along and selling out the opensource world for what, about the billionth time.

Re:Confusing freedom, privacy, and openness

[Kilrah_il]

What you mean is: "Get a business model that allows me to get free content, without advertisement and even if there are ads, do not target them in order to maximize your profits".
I also do not like being tracked online. OTOH, I understand that in order for me to get so much for no money, I have to pay with something else. For me, the price is right. I agree to give up some privacy in order to be able to use a browser, web e-mail, encyclopedia and many more resources for no money. It is not really free, because I give something in return (personal info), but I am willing to pay this price.
If you are unwilling to pay this price (which is your right), then be ready to cough up the dough.

Firefox is an end-user product

[Anonymous Coward]

So Mozilla should follow the needs and desires of end users.

The point would be valid when talking about some open-source product which isn't an end-user product.

Be happy about it because they want to do it?

[interkin3tic]

They're a company not a charity, it will be easier for them to succeed if they "limit the openess of the web," and the have rights too.

That sounds like three (or really two) reasons why commercial open source compaies have interests that may be counter to ours. That does -not- sound like it's a good reason we should be happy about it when those interests conflict, nor do they sound like reasons to get on board with things like advertiser tracking.

Re:Be happy about it because they want to do it?

[alvinrod]

The benefit to open source is that if they get too evil, we can always fork the project and build in the tracking prevention. He'll we don't even have to wait for them to get evil.

Re:Be happy about it because they want to do it?

[mattcasters]

This "burn commercial open source companies on the stake" mantra is getting a bit tiresome.
In the end, these companies are usually very involved in their respective communities and usually invest a lot of money in open source software development.

Just like you might have an annoying hot-shot developer in your community it might be worth the trouble or not. However, just mindlessly bashing all companies just because they might have interests that conflict is just a little over the top.

There's a very simple method to evaluate open source companies: how much code is being released under an open source license? From where I'm looking at it, that's what's important, everything else is BS.

Now obviously, if you see a benevolent company that invests and supports your favorite open source projects with money, man-power, forums, VCS and so on, why would you be critical of that deal just because the company might be making money? If it's mutually beneficial it's a good deal regardless.

Re:Be happy about it because they want to do it?

[nine-times]

Yeah, the thing is that Mozilla has every right to enable tracking of it's users, in much the same way that we have every right to fork the browser or use something else.

The question in both cases is, is it worth it?

Don't trample on MY rights

[Anonymous Coward]

I have every right to protect my privacy. Advertizers have a rigth to advertize but they do NOT need to know details about me. A billboard on the street advertizes without knowing details about the people they advertize to. Yes, I do use AdBlock plus but not because I'm against advertizing - I'm against pushy advertizing - flash that continuously moves, changes in order to get my attention and it's difficult to concentrate on the rest of the page.

Re:Don't trample on MY rights

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not just the annoyance of ads but the crap advertised on them is stuff I don't want and there is a lot of shady ads that link to sites that compromise a Windows OS. One misclick and you could be infected with malware instead of just adware.

Don't make the internet...

[shovas]

Something it wasn't meant to be.

It's not a one-way, free-for-all for end-users.

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. If your model isn't working out for you, try another.

Re:Don't make the internet...

[fishexe]

It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes!

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. If your model isn't working out for you, try another.

I think your analysis is a good general antidote to Internet misconceptions.

Matt Asay

[LingNoi]

Why the hell is the COO of Canonical making news articles, doesn't he have a job to do? That's a serious conflict of interest in my opinion.

Regardless he's completely wrong. He cites Mozilla doing smart business where Ubuntu isn't, catering to the advertising crowd. Well guess what's quickly being replaced by Chrome.

The guy simply doesn't have a clue. He cites Red Hat licensing being better then the company he works for. I really don't understand why Mark would put this guy in such a high position so he can then simply shit on the company.

Re:Matt Asay

[grcumb]

Why the hell is the COO of Canonical making news articles, doesn't he have a job to do? That's a serious conflict of interest in my opinion.

I find the suggestion that public figures and business leaders should have an opinion-ectomy on Day 1 completely absurd.

I realise that I'm in the minority on this, but I don't buy the whole 'never admit weakness' thing. If a football quarterback admits that his team's got a weak mid-field, he's not saying anything people don't already know. He's just being honest about the situation. Saying so won't make it weaker.

(Now if he starts telling secrets, like 'Joe's going in for surgery after Sunday's game...' well, that's a little different.)

Regardless he's completely wrong. He cites Mozilla doing smart business where Ubuntu isn't, catering to the advertising crowd. Well guess what's quickly being replaced by Chrome.

The guy simply doesn't have a clue. He cites Red Hat licensing being better then the company he works for. I really don't understand why Mark would put this guy in such a high position so he can then simply shit on the company.

I won't argue with you whether or not he's right (I agree that he's a bit clueless), but since when did offering a criticism become 'shitting on the company'?

I expect my managers and staff to stand up and say, 'we did this wrong,' or 'they're doing it better than us.' And I have no problem with them saying so in public. Pretending to speak for the company as a whole, pointless bitching and moaning or open subversion might get them a quick ticket out the door, but thoughtful inquiry, analysis and criticism? No problem. I'll be in the front row, applauding.

Re:Matt Asay

[LingNoi]

I find the suggestion that public figures and business leaders should have an opinion-ectomy on Day 1 completely absurd.

There's a difference between having an opinion and broadcasting it in a what is regarded as a news piece.

but thoughtful inquiry, analysis and criticism? No problem. I'll be in the front row, applauding.

Perhaps you could point out the thoughtful analysis on what you yourself describe as opinion because I can't see it.

Re:Matt Asay

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that the dude has an agenda with Mozilla. His tweets are full of stuff like this..

Why we still need a strong Mozilla: to be "the Switzerland of HTML5" http://j.mp/gj6W99

Re:Matt Asay

[Requiem18th]

Probably because Mark is just like him, he is a millionaire after all, went to space, a charitable man doesn't buy space trip, It's pretty clear that Mark wants to Embrace+Extend+Ensomething linux and maybe the whole of open source.

He's not a fool, he saw a chance flying under MS radar. MS ans Apple are too determined to beat Free, why wouldn't they? Free has little over a 1% penetration on the desktop, for all that matters the battle has already been won. But Mark saw potential and decided to used his money to win that market. And winning he has, since Ubuntu has been #1 for several years.

Now, I'm not saying he is a baby eating monster, nor a blood sucking parasite. He has done an invaluable service to the entire FOSS community and he surely considers himself a very nice man, charitable even. But he is clearly a man of compromises.

First we had the CEO saying "Ubuntu is not a democracy" and now the COO saying "the web should be less open", it's not a stretch to guess that next year we'll hear "the desktop should be less open".

That's why I switched off Ubuntu a while ago, I don't know exactly what is Mark going to do to monetize Ubuntu. For certain it won't be a show stopper, he knows very well the FOSS community is rebellious and open to challenges, he won't knock himself down from the #1 place he's got right now by doing something drastic and stupid, but expect Ubuntu to start grow more annoying features in the next 2 years.

Re:Matt Asay

[yuhong]

Not the only time this brokenness happened:
http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/370034

Re:Matt Asay

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu *isn't* a democracy. From the very start it was made very clear that Ubuntu has a dictator for life and that beyond that the governance structure was to be a meritocracy.

Can we still begrudge Oracle?

[cblack]

They aren't exactly an open source company, but a company that has bought the prior commercial sponsors of open source packages. In many cases they then proceeded to bungle community interaction and knock some of the appeal off the original technologies among many decision makers.

Nothing Is Free

[Ancantus]

Allow me to be one of the 'younger folk'. I agree that it can get damn annoying sometimes, flash advertisements and popup-spam come to mind. But in the end making, hosting, and maintaining a website does cost money. And no service is free. Instead of paying with your money, you pay for websites with your attention. If the 'cost' of privacy violation is too high (facebook), I wont participate. However if the service provided is useful and the adds/privacy isn't too bad (Google, Slashdot, etc.) I'll participate. I think the Canonical COO has a point, we as end consumers don't usually think about the people who have to fund the hardware that makes the web possible. I certainly hope their is some money to be made in the computer industry, or all this money I paid for college will be moot.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Nursie]

If the ads get too annoying I will tell my computer not to fetch them (blocking tools).

If that's not acceptable to the content providers, they are free not to serve me their content and I'm happy with their decision. It's a deal I'm perfectly happy with and I consider it in no way cutting off my nose to spite my face. The price of the implied contract is too high, neither party wants to enter into it.

I'm prepared to put up with some advertising, just not most of the flash stuff.

Privacy violation and tracking are different and harder to quantify, also harder to catch and track. I think if there are things to be done at the browser level then community editions or additions may be the way to go. I use a cookie prevention mechanism, a flash cookie autoremoval addon and a variety of other things.

Facebook I use. But it's because info I put on there I choose to put on there. Irrelevant crap mostly.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Jimmy King]

There's always money to be had, but everything doesn't always have to be about money. As I say in my post just above to the GP here, I was around in those BBS days he remembers. You can actually do something that provides other people with a service and costs you time and money without trying to make money off of it and just do it because it's fun. Back in the day even actual businesses did that sometimes. There was a great BBS that was completely free run by the newspaper back in my home town. It had a bunch of registered doors, IRC style chat, etc. and no advertising at all, not even for themselves that I can remember. It wasn't about money, tracking users, spreading their name, etc. Just providing something cool and fun for the community.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The price of the implied contract is too high, neither party wants to enter into it.

I think the root of the problem is that we do not have any other currency besides ad impressions. None of the "electronic cash" and micropayment ventures have taken root, so advertising has become the defacto micropayment system.

I think that if we had a practical "electronic cash" system that was reasonably anonymous with effectively no per-transaction cost we would see the end of a lot of advertising on the net. I think that many people would be happy to pay $5-$20 per month for all of the websites that they browse, but right now, advertising is the only form of micropayments that are flexible enough to handle each individual user's personal choice of websites.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[martin-boundary]

But in the end making, hosting, and maintaining a website does cost money.

Sure, about a hundred dollars per year, more or less. That's pocket change for most people in the developed world, less than a year's worth of lattes at starbucks.

Moreover, if you don't insist on being the *only one* making your content available to the public, then you can always find others who are willing to mirror your content for free (that's on the 0.01% chance that your content becomes wildly popular).

There's a reason why sites like Google and Amazon have astronomical hosting costs - they want to keep tight control over the services they offer - so tight that literally the whole world has to point browsers to *their* webservers, so tight that they need armies of engineers to figure out clever ways to solve the self inflicted problem of having the whole net wanting to be served by a single URL.

Be smart. Make interesting content, then put it up on a cheap website, and tell everyone they can mirror it as much as they want to.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[dissy]

But in the end making, hosting, and maintaining a website does cost money. And no service is free.

Bullshit.

I am one of those from the BBS days the GP mentions, and ran a free board with no advertising to the users back in the 80s.

Even today I run an IRC network at a decent expense for servers and time from myself and my other administrator, yet zero cost for our users and no advertising. Purely for the fun of it, because it is what we enjoy doing.

I am far from alone in this.

EFnet is one of the largest IRC networks still to this day run by similar minded people, provided free to the users simply because we enjoy doing so. There are many other networks run exactly the same way, at one point hundreds of networks and thousands of servers and administrators doing the same.

There are even plenty of hobbyist websites with no advertising or banners run the same.
Most all Linux distros are put together and hosted/administered by the same ideals.

Usenet used to be run in a similar fashion not too very long ago, and I have no doubt there are a ton of other services run under the same ideals that I am forgetting or even have no idea about.

Obviously these are in the minority these days, but to say Nothing is free is not at all true.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Kjella]

If that's not acceptable to the content providers, they are free not to serve me their content and I'm happy with their decision. It's a deal I'm perfectly happy with and I consider it in no way cutting off my nose to spite my face. The price of the implied contract is too high, neither party wants to enter into it.

If you look at the escalating war between ads and ad-blockers, it's obvious people want to see sites without ads that the owners don't want to offer without ads. Very few sites allow you to opt out of their advertising, that your ad blocker works is much the same way you can buy a newspaper and have someone go over it with a magic marker blacking out all the ads before you read it. It can be done, but the newspaper producer obviously doesn't want you to. It is rather disingenuous to say that "because they still serve me content even if I block the ads, they're cool with it", when it's pretty much the same as "because the newspaper doesn't prevent me from using a magic marker, the publisher is cool with it."

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Nursie]

Two things make it different -

1. My browser has to request the ads separately, I wish to disable this behaviour. It's nothing like buying a newspaper and blanking bits out. It is (largely) active content that takes my bandwidth and resources to run, as well as annoying me.

2. Some sites already block people that block their ads.

I do agree that it's dubious at best to engage in any sort of arms race here. But here's the thing, at a fundamental level serving a page is something they do, actively, at my request. If they don't want to give me content unless I also get ads or pay them money it's their responsibility to make that happen, not mine. And I will be just as happy if/when they catch on and start checking this stuff.

Besides which, I'm not anti all ads. I leave advertising on for slashdot because it doesn't usually strobe bright colours all over the place, advertise scams or malware, or take over the browser.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[NickFortune]

I think that if we had a practical "electronic cash" system that was reasonably anonymous with effectively no per-transaction cost we would see the end of a lot of advertising on the net.

It'll just become another revenue stream. We'll see a lot more pay-for-access websites that also advertise at you, and also track you.

Think of subscription TV channels. In principle, these should be advert-free since the viewer has already funded the channel. In practice, I don't know a single one that doesn't also show adverts.

I admire your optimism, but I can't say I share it.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Anonymous Coward]

What you mean is that you subsidized it out of your own pocket. Very nice of you, but that doesn't make it free.

So bullshit to you, Mr Cleverpants.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Ash Vince]

Be smart. Make interesting content, then put it up on a cheap website, and tell everyone they can mirror it as much as they want to.

How do you get rewarded for the time you spent making the interesting content? Or do you have to do this only as a hobby and have a real paying job on the side?

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Lennie]

I actually have 4 things to say about ads:
1. ads - I'm kind of ok with that in general, people building websites got to eat
2. tracking, datamining, history sniffing - I'm NOT ok with that
3. busy attention grabbing ads which almost make it impossible to actually read the content - I'm NOT ok with that
4. ads which are related to the content - I'm very much ok with that. This probably makes the most sense, I'll be most likely to click on them

Re:Nothing Is Free

[martin-boundary]

How do you get rewarded for the time you spent making the interesting content? Or do you have to do this only as a hobby and have a real paying job on the side?

Get your priorities straight. You don't care about running websites for the hell of it, you care about making money and you're only tangentially interested in running a website because you think that can make you the money you crave.

Good for you, but it's off the thread topic. The comment I was responding to claimed that running websites for the hell of it was too expensive. It isn't. So if people want to do it today, nothing is stopping them.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[jolyonr]

> If the ads get too annoying I will tell my computer not to fetch them (blocking tools).

The honest thing to do, if you find the ads on a website too annoying, is not to visit that website again. If you continue to want to use the website in question but block the adverts, you're using a service they provide to you (at their cost) without in effect paying for it.

But publishers have to realise they can get what they want without intrusive advertising. It's only an arms race between advertisers to grab your attention if you give in to one advertiser's demands for uber-distracting animated crap, then all the other advertisers on your site will have to do the same. Sometimes you just have to say "No" to an advertising deal in order to do the right thing.

On my website which is supported by advertising, I'm pretty strict about how things work, small JPEG banners only (so no animation, flash, javascript or anything else), served from my server so no 3rd party tracking, and no adverts at all on the most important information pages. I could probably earn double what I earn now if I were to all the more intrusive type of adverts on my site. But only until my audience leave, which won't be long.

When the balance between advertisers and visitors is done right (which is what as a site publisher I've aimed for) you shouldn't get complaints about adverts, and people won't want to block them.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[jolyonr]

I should also point out for the sake of completeness that I do have google ads on my site as well, but to be honest they're proving pretty ineffective as a way of generating revenue, and I'll probably drop them.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Nursie]

Your site sounds fine to me. I'm a reactive ad blocker rather than a proactive one.
Annoy me with flash or sound and I will block ads. It's also quite likely I won't come back to your site.

Make ads in context and inoffensive and I'll leave them be. Here's the problem though - any money you get from me loading the ads is probably pretty inconsequential. And I don't click on them. Ever. I'm generally not interested in new opportunities to hand over my credit card details online.

OK, so 'never' was an exaggeration, but I'd say less than once a year.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[ultranova]

I think that if we had a practical "electronic cash" system that was reasonably anonymous with effectively no per-transaction cost we would see the end of a lot of advertising on the net.

Why would we? Show someone an ad and charge them for the privilege! It's not like a web browser can differentiate between an add and legitimate content, so it'll just end up paying for both.

Business is not based on making some reasonable amount, it's based on fleecing your customers and other victims as much as possible. As long as these people can make a single burnt wooden penny out of advertisements, the Web will be full of them, whether or not you pay in any other form.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Why would we? Show someone an ad and charge them for the privilege!

Because if people are paying they will be ticked off. It's not like a cabletv monopoly where the competition is practically nil.

It's not like a web browser can differentiate between an add and legitimate content

Adblock does a helluva good job already.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[ultranova]

Because if people are paying they will be ticked off. It's not like a cabletv monopoly where the competition is practically nil.

Ads tick people off too, but that doesn't stop almost every web site from having them. Competition is nil if everyone else is doing it, too.

Adblock does a helluva good job already.

Adblock works because ads are typically served from a particular server or directory. It's simply not used enough to make it worth it to defeat simple pattern-matching of the URL which lets it work. Once every ad view actually nets the webpage 1 cent from micropayment, you can bet the beancounters demand obfuscating the source of all content to fight Adblock.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Once every ad view actually nets the webpage 1 cent from micropayment,

You seem to be really confused about how advertising works.

Matt's wrong about FSF

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I think Matt's portrayal of FSF is disingenuous.

He says that pressure from Google convinced FSF to not "close the ASP loophole", but that's not how it was.

FSF wanted to close the ASP loophole (by putting the Affero clause into GPLv3), but many software developers and many companies were against this.

This left FSF with the choice of producing their ideal licence, and few people using it, or producing a licence that was an improvement compared to GPLv2, and more people using it.

The licence exists to give freedom to users and to protect distributors from patent attacks. It can't do these things if no one uses it! So FSF reluctantly left the Affero clause out of GPLv3.

Same goes for the patent clause. FSF could have put a waaay broader patent grant into GPLv3, but then the patent holders simply wouldn't distribute any GPLv3'd software.

Instead, FSF started with GPLv2 and looked at every section where they could get more freedom and more protections for the distributors and the users, while ensuring that it would be used by software projects and that companies would distribute GPLv3 software. That's what it means to be pragmatic.

(Selling out your users is completely different and shouldn't be called "pragmatic")

Re:Matt's wrong about FSF

[fishexe]

He says that pressure from Google convinced FSF to not "close the ASP loophole", but that's not how it was.

Yeah, I have a hard time picturing Stallman's organization bowing to pressure from anyone, especially a major corporation.

Instead, FSF started with GPLv2 and looked at every section where they could get more freedom and more protections for the distributors and the users, while ensuring that it would be used by software projects and that companies would distribute GPLv3 software. That's what it means to be pragmatic.

That sounds more like the FSF I know. I don't often describe them as pragmatic, but given the choice between believing the story that they chose to write a license more devs would use, or believing the story that they bowed to pressure from one big corporation, the former seems about 1000x more plausible.

Re:Matt's wrong about FSF

[Kjella]

This left FSF with the choice of producing their ideal licence, and few people using it, or producing a licence that was an improvement compared to GPLv2, and more people using it.

Not to mention that it isn't an either-or. They DID create both the GPLv3 and the AGPLv3. I also think a large influence was the wish that people continue to use the "or any later version" on GPL code. The more radically you altered it, the more likely people would start creating "GPLv2 only" or "GPLv3 only" code. Anything people would consider a mass relicensing of their code rather that an upgraded GPL would kill all trust in future GPL versions.

Yeah, sure....

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I must be missing the point.... Isn't the openness of the internet leading straight to the tracking of users? Wikileaks is all about openness.. The web is all about getting out and saying what you want. How do you expect to be able to reach such a huge audience, and have the freedom to say anything you want, and not expect people to pay attention to what you say or do in the medium? Freedom used to have meaning in this country because you could stand up and say what you thought. Not because you could say it anonymously. What good is freedom of speech if you have to hide behind a veil of secrecy to use it. I don't care if advertisers want to track me. I do care that people like Assange can do what they do and not be persecuted for it. There's no need to fight for anonymity, there's a huge need to fight for the goddamn freedom of speech and damn well use it.

Re:Yeah, sure....

[ifiwereasculptor]

Anonymity is free speech. Let's be honest: truly free speech will never be a reality. Even if no one can legally convict you for anything you say, that doesn't mean there isn't a social backlash you'll have to face. If you work for a company and feels the need to call your boss a moron, ok. There will be consequences, though, and probably not great ones, from your point of view. Now we might say it's only fair and natural that you have to deal with the consequences of what you say, but if something - anything - makes you afraid to say what you want, then your speech isn't really free, is it? It will cost you something. Why do you think your vote is to be kept undisclosed? Anonymity makes for truly free speech. Free and nonprofitable, as you will gain no personal recognition for what you say, either. Plus appeals to authority would be gone, so whatever opinions you choose to voice would have to stand on their own.

They have legal rights

[judeancodersfront]

as do the people that own them.

Re:They have legal rights

[ifiwereasculptor]

Just like consumers, then?

Re:They have legal rights

[judeancodersfront]

Yep. Both have legal rights.

free vs libre, yet again

[bugi]

Once again, this conflates free as in beer with free as in freedom. Few of us would begrudge others the opportunity to make money. That's not the same thing as parting out our privacy. And if we do as he suggests, adopt the so-called "reasonable" position in the middle, then you can be quite sure our opponents will take that as our position and further demand to meet in the middle.

No thank you. I insist on an open network that values freedom.

Re:free vs libre, yet again

[jbolden]

I don't know that we have more freedom today or less with tracking. More effective and targeting advertising may mean less advertising and less obtrusive advertising. You remember what the web was like in 1998? Or for that matter what television is like today? Untargetted advertising requires far more advertising for the same bang for the buck.

Heck I have mixed feeling about anonymity on the web. In the late 1980s and early 1990s when people all had real name accounts that tied to their workplaces you had a very different internet in terms of what people did or didn't do. The commercial ISPs took away a lot of freedoms that existed then. I figure since you have a low number you might have been around then. Its hard to make a comparison because it was so much smaller. But the point is it that it is not clear to me what the world looks like with more or less tracking.

Freedom? Sure.

[taustin]

Companies have the right to offer their goods and services on the internet. They do not, however, have the right to force me to help them sell it to their customers (the customers here are the advertisers, not the users of Firefox or any other software). It is not my responsibility to help them prop up a broken, evil business model that can only succeed by taking away my choice to be tracked or not.

When advertisers pay me to watch their crap, I might consider it, if the pay is high enough. Until then, it is up to me what I watch and who tracks me watching it.

Re:Freedom? Sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies have the right to offer their goods and services on the internet. They do not, however, have the right to force me to help them sell it to their customers

When they drug you, bind you to a chair, forcibly open your eyes, and make you watch their content, clockwork orange style, you will have my sympathy. Until then, your rant is just silly. "They" can create whatever content they want, and track users any way they want. Don't like it? Don't use it.

It is not my responsibility to help them prop up a broken, evil business model that can only succeed by taking away my choice to be tracked or not.

If you dislike it, it is your responsibility to not use it. Otherwise, you demonstrate through your actions that you don't care.

Re:Freedom? Sure.

[jbolden]

Since when are company's customer's advertisers when they are offering products? Advertisers are customers for free websites like this one, and vendors to pay ones. I think the least you could do is work your analogy to the point it makes sense and not conflate two different relationships.

Re:That's to say, it has been proven without track

[Penguin Programmer]

Other business models work for certain products. It hasn't been viable to charge money for a browser since the 1990's. No one is going to take a browser training course. No one needs to hire an enterprise browser deployment specialist.

I don't like it, and therefore I ain't gonna.

[Aldenissin]

""Like it or not, commercial open source companies are still companies, and the economics of the online world have everything to do with their present and their future."

  Sure, the economies of the online world have everything to do with their present and future, which is PRECISELY why we can allow them to be spoiled. We have two choices, THE right way (and there is only one when it comes to freedom and openness, with honesty and well, openness), or the wrong way. Compromises are like bad apples, they spoil the whole barrel.

  We can find a solution to anything, but it is not by sacrificing our morals. Don't want to tell me what your doing by tracking me? Not in the spirit of open source; and you can go to hell, where your sins belong.

Re:I don't like it, and therefore I ain't gonna.

[bidule]

We have two choices, THE right way (and there is only one when it comes to freedom and openness, with honesty and well, openness), or the wrong way. Compromises are like bad apples, they spoil the whole barrel.

Truth is a three-edged sword.

Or are you saying you are part of the problem?

Re:I don't like it, and therefore I ain't gonna.

[Aldenissin]

I looked up the phrase three edged sword, and it seems to mean your side, their side, and the truth. Are you implying I have my own side, which isn't the truth? Because, that is the only side I am on. In fact, that was that I was saying, there is only the truth, and anything else is not the truth, i.e. wrong.

Re:I don't like it, and therefore I ain't gonna.

[bidule]

I looked up the phrase three edged sword, and it seems to mean your side, their side, and the truth. Are you implying I have my own side, which isn't the truth?

Mu.

Because, that is the only side I am on. In fact, that was that I was saying, there is only the truth, and anything else is not the truth, i.e. wrong.

False dichotomy.

Truth is a wave function, you never know how it will collapse. There are as many truths as there are observers and if you think you've collapsed it you haven't dug enough. Unless you are omniscient, but then you can force it to collapse to your truth using omnipotence.

Re:I don't like it, and therefore I ain't gonna.

[Aldenissin]

I looked up the phrase three edged sword, and it seems to mean your side, their side, and the truth. Are you implying I have my own side, which isn't the truth?

Mu.

I am still not sure what you mean, and it is not from my lack of wanting to understand... No, that isn't what it means, no there isn't a truth? I presume the latter instead of the former, but please refrain from trying to teach me foreign words that have loose translations at best. I will never get the meaning without knowing the language, i.e. think in that language.

Because, that is the only side I am on. In fact, that was that I was saying, there is only the truth, and anything else is not the truth, i.e. wrong.

False dichotomy.

Truth is a wave function, you never know how it will collapse. There are as many truths as there are observers and if you think you've collapsed it you haven't dug enough. Unless you are omniscient, but then you can force it to collapse to your truth using omnipotence.

No matter the observer, the truth is but the truth. It can only be found through understanding. Even relativity's consequences of speed and relative time differences are not contradictory (lies), just evidence for a deeper understanding of the truth.

Two Edges of a Sword

You see, the observer chooses to be a slave to his lie (confusion), unless he holds judgment (decision) until it is proven and he finds the truth. Even your false dichotomy reference is a lie (misleading and therefore not the truth, and certainly not the third edge of a sword - the less than whole truth concept is a lie). While it is true the statement "If you are not with us, you are against us." often does not equal true, it may be in correct context.

As below illustrates, "If you are not with me (on the truth), then you are against me (and for lies.)" It does not qualify as a "false choice", but rather is indeed a true choice; the anti of a "false dichotomy".

John - Chapter 8

The Children of Abraham

31To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

33They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”

34Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. 35Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37I know you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are ready to kill me, because you have no room for my word. 38I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you do what you have heard from your father.”

39“Abraham is our father,” they answered.

“If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do the things Abraham did. 40As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. 41You are doing the things your own father does.”

“We are not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only Father we have is God himself.”

The Children of the Devil

42Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. 43Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not ho

Re:I don't like it, and therefore I ain't gonna.

[bidule]

31To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Ah! You have found your truth. But others have found a different truth. How minute must the difference be for yours/theirs be false truth, heresy?

Truth is a three-edged sword.

Re:I don't like it, and therefore I ain't gonna.

[Aldenissin]

I have found THE truth. Others have found falsehood if they don't recognize the only truth. It is not my own to claim, it is but what it is, and that is reality and not lies and make believe.

  How minute a difference in two things must there be for one to be false, or even heresy?

  There must only be a difference, as small as you would like. If it is not the same as truth, then it is not truth. Don't you see?

Re:I don't like it, and therefore I ain't gonna.

[bidule]

I have found THE truth. Others have found falsehood if they don't recognize the only truth. It is not my own to claim, it is but what it is, and that is reality and not lies and make believe.

  How minute a difference in two things must there be for one to be false, or even heresy?

  There must only be a difference, as small as you would like. If it is not the same as truth, then it is not truth. Don't you see?

How arrogant!

Listen to the following parable:

Your next-door neighbor had found THE truth. Nobody agreed with him. They say: "He was 6' tall." "No, he is 5' 11" and a quarter." "He had brown eyes." "No, they were dark brown." "Heresy!" Still, they all had found THE truth but missed the forest for the trees. And they all lost THE truth.

Only an omniscient being can know the truth, anyone else just gets approximations. By refusing tolerance, minute errors, you are gripping THE truth so hard that it will escape you.

Re:That's to say, it has been proven without track

[ciaran_o_riordan]

How many programs do you have installed? 100? How many need to sell information about you in order to exist?

Other than your browser, the answer's zero. In my opinion, including the browser, it's still zero.

Re:That's to say, it has been proven without track

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, are you answering both questions? I thought the browser being the OS was an outdated mindset.

Orly? Srsly? Pffft. /me forks FF.

[VortexCortex]

TFA is wrong, Mozilla has not the right or capability to keep me from using FF in any way I want.
I compiled my OS & all the programs on it. Perhaps some FF users imagine themselves under the thumb of Mozilla?

Firefox is open source. If Mozilla refuses to add important features we want, me (or someone like me), will make them available to you in source and binary forms.

Everyone just chill out. If Mozilla is stupid enough to force this crap on its users, competitors will spring up instantly that offer everything Firefox does as well as the privacy tools too (note: there are already forks of FF available, if you care to search).

IMO, Some jag-off is blabbing on the Internet about shit they know nothing about again, BFD. Nothing to see here, move along.

RMS in CORVALLIS

[Frosty Piss]

I was at an Open Source Symposium at Oregon State Uni, and RMS was a guest. Before his time to speak, he sat ni the first row PICKING FLEAS OUT OF HIS BEARD and popping them in his mouth. NO SHIT.

Re:RMS in CORVALLIS

[ifiwereasculptor]

Well, thank god there was no shit. That'd be gross.

Re:RMS in CORVALLIS

[ultranova]

I was at an Open Source Symposium at Oregon State Uni, and RMS was a guest. Before his time to speak, he sat ni the first row PICKING FLEAS OUT OF HIS BEARD and popping them in his mouth. NO SHIT.

So what have you done to solve world hunger?

Iceweasel

[paulproteus]

Mozilla might want to add more tracking of its users.

And some people wonder why Debian wants permission to distribute modified versions of Firefox.

I run Iceweasel.

already trivial to do

[bcrowell]

In May, Mozilla engineer Dan Witte proposed a mechanism that caused cookies to automatically expire when a user closed his or her Web browser. (By comparison, most tracking cookies last for years). It only affected tracking cookies—not cookies that websites use to remember users' passwords or shopping-cart information.

This is already pretty darn easy to accomplish in Firefox. Go it "Edit : Preferences : privacy." Uncheck "accept third-party cookies." Select "Keep until: I close Firefox." Under "exceptions," check "allow" for any sites that you frequently visit and want to stay logged in to between sessions.

I don't mind surrendering a little privacy to corporations if they're willing to pay for it. That's what I'm doing when I use the preferred customer mechanism at the supermarket. That's what I'm doing when I get a magazine subscription for much less than the newsstand price. The problem with online advertisers is that they shoot themselves in the foot with their unrealistic expectations. They expect me to give them my information without any economic reward. They expect me to tolerate animated ads that distract me from the text I'm trying to read. Given that their behavior is so unreasonable, I'm willing to take the time to install adblock plus and configure firefox to reject cookies that aren't on my whitelist.

Re:already trivial to do

[marcosdumay]

"Go it "Edit : Preferences : privacy." Uncheck "accept third-party cookies." Select "Keep until: I close Firefox." Under "exceptions," check "allow" for any sites that you frequently visit and want to stay logged in to between sessions."

Instead, configure cookies only until you close Firefox, and install the Cookie Monster extension. That way, whitelisting a site is done with just a click.

Bullshit. We are ALL "end users".

[gig]

Every Web user is an equal to every other Web user. We all have the exact same rights. We are all "end users". Everything the browser vendor does should be for the user of that browser.

Troll Alert

[alvinrod]

This troll has been appearing a lot recently. There's no mention of that phrase in TFA, not that anyone's actually read it.

Zminus 2, Troll)

[Anonymous Coward]

our abilit7 to

Pretentious twat

[Hognoxious]

To be fair, you are not the mean, median, or mode grandmother. Nor anywhere within several standard deviations of one...

To be fair, you are not a statistician.

All those buzzwords you used in your failed attempt to look smart refer to measurable numeric characteristics - height, weight, income - of sets of objects.

So you can say that the mean income of Lalaland is so many dollars. You can say that Mr X earns the median Lalaland salary of Y dollars. But saying Mr X is the mode of Lalaland is just retarded.

Re:Pretentious twat

[BZ]

> To be fair, you are not a statistician.

No, but I am a mathematician and physicist by training with some so-so knowledge of statistics (not enough to do original research, but enough to do error analysis on my experiments, say).

> All those buzzwords you used in your failed attempt to look smart refer to measurable
> numeric characteristics

Yes, and "computed experience" is not all that hard to define (in various ways, agreed) and then measure. And given pretty much any reasonable definition and measurement technique my statement would be true. Now you can accuse me of being insufficiently pedantic in that I didn't define such a measurement technique, but that's where the fact that in this case it really doesn't matter much comes in.

> But saying Mr X is the mode of Lalaland is just retarded.

When measuring somewhat imprecise quantities (like "computer experience"; this is less applicable to salaries) it's common to deal with the imprecision by binning (e.g. instead of asking people for the exact to-the-second amount of time they've programmed in C, whicih they couldn't tell you if they tried, you ask them for the number of years, possibly with some predefined non-single-year ranges). At which point it does in fact make sense to speak of the mode of the resulting distribution.

But as an aside, you could in fact talk about the modal salary. It's just not a very useful measure when binned at the 1 cent level, so no one does.

Again, I could have been more pedantic and said "The amount of computer experience you have is likely several standard deviations away from any of the mean, median, or mode amounts of computer experience in the population of grandmothers in the United States in the year 2010." But _that_ would have sounded pretentious. ;)

Opposite point?

[fishexe]

Because end-users aren't the only ones with rights and needs online, a point Luis Villa elegantly made years ago. It's not a one-way, free-for-all for end-users. Advertisers, developers and enterprises who employ end-users among others all factor into Mozilla's freedom calculus. Or should.

It seems like Luis Villa elegantly made just about the opposite point: in a world where GPL and other things intended to help end-users are increasingly playing into the hands of intermediate users, we should bring the rights back to the end-users. "I remain interested in the problem, though, since in the end I'm much more interested in the freedoms of users than the freedoms of sysadmins." Nowhere in Villa's article does he even mention the needs of advertisers, developers, or employers of end-users (thought he does mention how user-consumers and user-deployers were previously connected by their employers). Almost seems like Matt Asay knows we won't buy what he's saying unless he puts his words in another's mouth.

Fucking morons

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what they are. Who wrote that piece of shit? Goddamn imbeciles. I don't owe the advertisers ANYTHING. Fuck off!

Re:Fucking morons

[exa]

To kill an advertiser is saintly. To hell with advertisement!

Re:That's to say, it has been proven without track

[hughperkins]

They should give concerts and sell t-shirts!

Actually, selling t-shirts isn't a bad idea. Works for xkcd and smbc, I think, and it doesn't look like they sell them already.

author's definition

[jbolden]

Sam Dean, who wrote the original article for OStatic was a bit incorrect in his definitions, "Like it or not, commercial open source companies are still companies, and the economics of the online world have everything to do with their present and their future" which got quoted in the summary on /. But if you read the article by " commercial open source companies" he means advertisers not companies releasing open source software to sell a support agreement or a commercial licensed version or ..... The point about economics and the web and Mozilla are all valid points. But of course no one would call advertisers " commercial open source companies", which makes it confusing. Thought I should clarify what was meant.

False dichotomy fail.

[Mr. Underbridge]

What you mean is: "Get a business model that allows me to get free content, without advertisement and even if there are ads, do not target them in order to maximize your profits".

Actually I don't, and if you don't mind I'll write my own lines.

I also do not like being tracked online. OTOH, I understand that in order for me to get so much for no money, I have to pay with something else.

Yep. Very much like ad-driven content on TV. Critical difference: *My TV doesn't spy on me.*

I'm fine with ads. Counter to your incorrect assertion, I don't even use ad block. I'm fine with targeted ads based on what a company is able to learn about me from my interactions *with them*. What I don't want them doing is spying on what I do online when I'm not using their service.

Put simply, I don't want any organization - commercial, governmental, etc - being able to put together a cohesive dossier covering the entirety of my online activity.

Re:False dichotomy fail.

[Kilrah_il]

First of all, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. What I meant is that the consequence of what you said, is what wrote in my OP. If I came out a bit condescending, my apologies.
I agree that there is a difference between ads and tracking behavior, however my main point stands: Everyone of us gets to choose what trade-off he accepts for the services he uses.
I use free services knowing that they track what I do. OTOH, since I don't want them to know everything about me, I choose what information I divulge. If you read all my posts on /. you will find only a few bits of information about me (which country I live in, my occupation and one or two of my hobbies). The same policy I have in every site I visit.
If someone goes on Facebook and writes everything they do, including their name, social status and underwear color - surprise, someone will collect this info.
I know that not all the information gathered about me is explicit. Google also collects which sites I visit from their search results, etc. I personally don't mind it. If you do, don't log-in, don't use their services or use anonymous browsing (It's built into every browser today and there are also non-mainstream solutions for this).

At least we can be comforted that many major companies tell you in their TOS that they collect info about you, although sadly not all of them. This is something that should be remedied before all else, IMHO.

Re:False dichotomy fail.

[Mr. Underbridge]

If I came out a bit condescending, my apologies.

No worries.

however my main point stands: Everyone of us gets to choose what trade-off he accepts for the services he uses.

Ah, but do we? Can I turn on cookies but prevent sites from using each others' cookies? I'm fine with that trade-off on a company-by-company basis. I'm not fine with every website knowing everywhere I've ever been. And I don't want to make a decision between giving every site my full identity *or* turning off cookies altogether, making the web a pain in the ass to use.

If someone goes on Facebook and writes everything they do, including their name, social status and underwear color - surprise, someone will collect this info.

Correct, which is why my facebook profile is very generic. That's also not my beef. My issue is that if I go to xyz.com and look at widgets, then when I go to abc.org, I see ads for the same widgets. I don't like that.

Google also collects which sites I visit from their search results, etc. I personally don't mind it.

I don't either. Again, I don't mind you using what you learn about me from my interaction with your service. What I don't want is a site scanning my hard drive and opening every cookie they find.

Fuck that.

[euxneks]

A corporation is there to serve my interests, if I have interest in it. They are a fictional entity created for monetary gain. They are NOT equivalent to a person, and NEVER should they be. When corporations start defining what we the people can do then they are overstepping their boundaries. I firmly believe the internet is there for the sole purpose of serving its users, nothing more.

About time

[uigrad_2000]

Lynx had this feature back in 1997, and it was enabled by default. When you first visited a site that had cookies, it would ask you if you wanted to add that site to the white list. ((A) to accept cookies 'always')

I'm pretty sure that Netscape also had white lists for cookies, the last time I checked.

I'm not really bothered..

[Rexdude]

I have a licensed copy of Admuncher for Windows - it sits quietly in the system tray and silently filters all HTTP traffic on my PC. Back in the day, I could use an IE based browser like Maxthon and fearlessly surf the web because all crap got filtered. Then I switched to Firefox in 2004 when it was still called Phoenix.
Now I use Adblock Plus and Cookie Safe as the second layer of protection. My cookie permissions are set to deny all by default. Only sites that require authentication are allowed to set cookies.
And as a final resort, I use an adblocking hosts file for the rare item that does get through.

This setup has worked for me for the last 7 years- and the result is I have an extreme aversion to surfing the net on anyone else's PC - with banners and other crap crawling all over the pages.