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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.
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.
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
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At least we have other Free Software Browsers that don't have any ties or financial interests in advertisement, like Chrome. Oh ... wait ...
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
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! :)
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
Do people who own companies have rights?
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")
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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.
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.
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.
""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.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
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.
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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.
Find free books.
This troll has been appearing a lot recently. There's no mention of that phrase in TFA, not that anyone's actually read it.
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.
> 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. ;)
So what have you done to solve world hunger?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.