So Apple fears that the servers it relies on for its business are not fully under Apple's control, as one's computers ought to be fully under the control of those who own the computer. The same would be true even if the servers weren't virtual. As I understand it, this is part of the reason why Google is keen to build their own hardware and takes some interest free software to run that hardware. As Edward Snowden pointed out in his recent LibrePlanet talk this is the same reason privacy-minded people can't use Apple's equipment either. Snowden mentioned this in terms of Microsoft ("I did not use Windows machines when I was in my operational phase because I couldn't trust them. Not because I knew there was a particular backdoor or anything like that but because I couldn't be sure." circa 5m54s or 8m33s in the prerelease video) but the same insecurity stemming from a lack of freedom issue applies to all proprietors, not just Microsoft.
In other words there's quite an irony here: the proprietor is coming to terms with the same lack of freedom it imposes on its customers. Apple's iThings include phones that aren't under the owner's exclusive control allowing someone other than the owner to update software on the device. Some other devices (perhaps Apple's as well) don't allow the computer owner to fully control the cryptographic keys used to sign software installed on the device, so these keys are used to keep the owner locked out of full control (or the proprietor from being fully locked out). The updates can and do come in Apple and non-Apple systems without the owner's consent in the name of "convenience" and "safety" (one must ask whose safety is being assured in this scheme) or (as some proprietor sycophants are sure to point out) keeping non-technical users from messing something up. The technical details of precisely where the non-free software lies (on the main computer, on a modem controller, on some other bit of hardware one uses with the system) are no excuses for not providing documented hardware, a means to install a fully free software system, and thus a means to fully own one's own computer.
There are no configuration changes you can make, programs you can install, or other changes you can make to make proprietary (user-subjugating, nonfree) software trustworthy. It won't matter what the "privacy" settings say you can do; the proprietor has the upper hand and can easily write software to rat you out. Software freedom is a prerequisite for computer privacy and security and all of the other things that go into treating computer users ethically. All computer users deserve software freedom.
Yes, the list of why not to do business with Apple comes from Richard Stallman's personal site stallman.org. There are other articles there too like why not to do business with Amazon, and an updated list of other pointers to political stories.
As to your question: it seems you failed to see that the/. story headline comment already predicted the sycophantic distraction of trying to dilute responsibility with 'what about other manufacturers' excuses. Other manufacturers aren't responsible for Apple's choices, Apple is.
People ought to own the cars they buy including the software in the cars. The published software should have been published as free software in the first place. Stop making excuses against customers stuck with proprietary software. It was Tesla's choice to put that information into the software, but there are more important issues than future products at stake here: It's only a matter of time until we learn of more ripoffs ala VW's recent gaming the environmental reviews. The thing that ties these issues together is that proprietary software makes it all of a piece.
Then you haven't listened to his copyright talks or read any of his articles and stories, so you're really not trying and then get away with flaunting your ignorance of what he says. So I'll point you to some: Copyright vs. The Public talk given at Bern on 2010-02-11 (I imagine a copy of this will show up on https://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/ soon alongside recordings of a lot of his other talks), Reasons not to do business with Amazon, The Danger of E-Books, and his dystopic short story The Right to Read which presciently describes the kinds of anti-reader controls common in proprietary e-books. Your Baen library is not the norm; Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other DRM-laden e-books are sadly the norm. One should address how most readers read e-books to provide an adequate response, not cite the unusual exceptions that respect a reader's privacy and ownership of a copy of the e-book.
As to what you call "childishness", I refer you to "Why Call it the Swindle? because that entire essay addresses your point. Regarding lending, you and another followup poster both missed the point—lending should not require an intermediary, break a reader's privacy, nor set terms on the loan. There's no technical reason why an e-book lending should have one reader reveal to a third party which e-books they are lending to another reader, nor revealing the identities of either side of the loan. And you give away how you miss the point where you try to criticize by saying "even if it is for a lowly 14 days"—if it were really the reader's e-book (like it is with books), the reader/e-book owner should set the terms of the loan for their e-book including the loan period. Giving any intermediary power means tracking and restricting to whom one may lend their e-books, a significant downgrade from books and totally technically unnecessary to boot. These needless restrictions and many others are more than ample reason for renaming Amazon's "Kindle" into Swindle, or pointing out how the Kindle burns your freedoms as well as highlighting that digital restrictions management is anti-reader.
Finally, your use of the word "marketplace" suggests you value market success more than human freedom and people behaving ethically. That's a dangerous value system; I'll point you to the GNU project's commentary on the word "Market" since it's applicable here too, particularly that all DRM schemes are implemented with non-free, user-subjugating, proprietary software.
Just because the proprietor chooses to put malware like hassles, spying functionality, and other things users hate into this variant of Windows doesn't mean another variant is any better. Windows 7 shouldn't get a pass because Windows 10 is too much of a pain to use or becomes untrustworthy. Apple, Google, and Amazon's software aren't on the user's side because those companies are not Microsoft. For all we know these systems have malware working secretly in ways that aren't so obvious. Perhaps a malware mechanism is not so easily identified by locking out so-called "preferences" (they're not really preferences if the user can't really choose how the program works). It's easy for a proprietor to spy on, rat out, and disrupt the user while giving the user the illusion they're in control via configuration choices. What Microsoft has done here with Windows 10 is a matter of degree not of substance.
This is the power of a proprietor at work. The only thing that differs is how much that power is revealed to the user of the proprietary software.
So whether a nonfree OS does this kind of thing now or later doesn't really matter because in all cases the proprietor had the upper hand before, has the upper hand now, and will keep the upper hand for as long as that software is nonfree. All that changes are the details and the revelation to those who look into some of these details.
Nonfree software does not respect your privacy or your work. It doesn't matter who the proprietor is, what OS they're trying to get you to accept, or whether the preferences give users the flexibility users want. This is why Richard Stallman calls proprietary software users "useds".
I haven't forgotten them, but I'm not willing to accept that they should cloud the argument most proprietary software users face today, particularly on trackers (cell phones, mobiles) where nonfreedom is rampant and for which Apple takes full responsibility.
I enjoy CUPS, for instance, now just as I enjoyed it before Apple bought the software and thus took over the copyright from EasySW. But CUPS isn't commonly found on trackers as far as I know. It'll be interesting to note if the contribution to Clang you point out continues when Clang gets to a point where Apple is satisfied with its utility. Brad Kuhn has said he expects that contribution to end once the software is good enough to let Apple remove the GNU Compiler Collection ("GCC", Apple's long-time multi-language compiler) entirely (probably due to Apple's perverse anti-GPL zealotry which is rooted in not getting away with copyright infringement against the Free Software Foundation back when Steve Jobs ran NeXT). We've already entered a time when Apple's compiler basically can't be used in freedom. This is hardly the testament to Apple's contribution to software freedom you tried to make it out to be.
And I know that proprietors and their sycophants in the open source movement are keen to cite marketshare/popularity as an important topic (mainly because they're both eager to distract people away from talking about software freedom where they know they have nothing to offer). So it's ironic to note how unpopular LaunchD, Bonjour, GrandCentralDispatch, and Swift are. LaunchD & Bonjour aren't needed on free systems due to free reimplementations of their functionality elsewhere. Bonjour doesn't even wholly qualify as free software; only some of it is licensed under an Apache license. Your namecalling and bullying attempt at distracting people away from talking about the lack of software freedom for iThing users is falling apart.
If the messenger is insane, it is valid to question the sanity of the message. Not every interlocutor is a sane, rational person: Charles Manson is not going to give you sound advice.
Which is precisely what the grandparent poster didn't do; here's the irony of the challenge facing an ad hominem arguer: To successfully challenge the message one has to point out how the message is not worth taking seriously. The very thing the arguer tries to get us to ignore is the thing that has to be examined and taken down thus justifying future skepticism. I could see where someone's background would justifiably raise suspicion, but not outright dismissal of all claims such as what you propose. You're making the same mistake that poster made; while white knighting for a bad argument you're claiming "Charles Manson is not going to give you sound advice" without telling us exactly which Manson advice we should dismiss. I can only guess you think we should dismiss everything Manson (and thus McAfee) says on any topic but without any examples of why we should follow that advice. And then you post this anonymously, so as to prevent anyone from understand whom they're reading so we won't dismiss what you've said in the past further now that your own argument has failed to convince and raised suspicions of you.
Sadly, as right thinking as your reaction is most/. readers don't agree with your take with regard to Disney's actions here and don't have the guts to admit they don't agree. Their unprincipled obeisance to Disney's power is unlike some posters to the Ars Technica (Condé Nast) forum on this story who object publicly such as user "SmokeTest":
Yeah, because Disney totally can't afford lobbying unless they go to their workers with their hands out, and the state of copyright in the country is incredibly hostile to Disney. Of course they need to go to their lowest paid employees and ask them to fund their effort to further corrupt the laws to line the pockets of the executives with more cash than ever.
This is fucking disgusting. I'm done supporting Disney in any way, forever. Going to be hard not watching the new Star Wars movies in theaters, but man, this shit has got to end.
Power-for-power's-sake supporting/.ers will pay to see the next Star Wars movie, visit Disney theme parks, buy Disney-licensed merchandise of all kinds and thus feed the system that oppresses the world via copyright and TPP. This fight goes far beyond the term of copyright both in who is affected and specific powers multinational corporations seek to gain.
People travel, people change citizenship, and people don't deserve different ethics. The objection shouldn't hinge on whether one likes Apple or not. The argument should hinge on what Apple has done and how it treats its customers. Apple has long been a censor regardless of the country in which it does business, see the section labeled "Apple practices censorship. Here are a few examples.", and given how long it takes to fix security issues it knows are being exploited one can't say the company cares about user's security either, see the section labeled "Apple spies on its users, and helps others spy on them.". If Apple cared about "protect[ing] our customers' personal data" as it claims to Apple wouldn't distribute proprietary, user-subjugating software to its users.
Copyright holders who license under a free software license gain compliance and social respect for choosing a license that lets us run, share, and modify covered software. There is nothing to gain in saying popular GNU/Linux distributions don't have to comply with licenses but other distributors do. There is also a lot to gain by showing that licensing under a popular free software license (such as the GNU GPL) is enforcible. One such benefit: Every enforcement action taken showing how enforcible the GPL is helps silence critics who claim otherwise.
No it's not a very good solution. VW has behaved in a way that requires punishment (and high fines are a perfectly appropriate way to make them change their behavior and send a message to other manufacturers that the US is serious), and every country should be requiring complete corresponding source code under a free software license from VW and any other automaker that lied, sold equipment under false pretense, or dodged environmental regulation. That will help prevent this particular cheating from recurring. No need to get into the "we're not expert/trustworthy enough to do the right thing with regard to environmental regulation" argument as VW's own behavior shows us what happens when proprietors are trusted with that power.
To do less is to send the opposite message -- your country sucks up to businesses, doesn't value human life and safety, and only seeks punishment on a small scale unlikely to threaten the status quo. I know where the US stood on these issues well before this issue came up, I know where the US stands on these issues today, and I'm not surprised that corruption continues apace. We don't need to champion more behavior likely to continue corruption by calling the decision "very good".
First off, the proper term is GNU/Linux; you're not just being advised to run only the Linux kernel. If the people advising you know what they're talking about, they should be advising you to run a completely free OS -- a free kernel (such as GNU Linux-libre) and free software on top of that. The more free software you can get on your system, the more you can put yourself in control of your computing. And this terminology difference is also apropos because this issue comes down to the very issue being raised in that term "GNU/Linux", namely software freedom -- the developers of the GNU system want to share in the credit so as to remind people to demand software freedom.
A class-action suit won't help Microsoft Windows users if those users accepted terms to allow the proprietor to do this to your computers.
But the heart of the issue remains: it's your computer, you should be allowed to run the software you want with it, and make sure that that software does only what you want. So what you want is software freedom. Not user subjugation to someone else's authority unvetted by you on a level that's as detailed or as abstract as you wish. You can't have that kind of control with nonfree, user subjugating, proprietary software no matter who the proprietor is. No amount of believing otherwise, adding more nonfree software, or changing configuration parameters on nonfree software (such as setting registry values this way or that way) will give you software freedom.
You have no idea when it records; "it records only when recognising voice" is an assertion that goes beyond what you know. Anytime nonfree (user-subjugating, proprietary) software is in control of a computer, that computer is not really under the user's control and we can't tell what it will do or when. That's the power of the proprietor at work.
Trackers (aka cell phones or mobile phones), most people's laptop computers, and now some TVs, all have microphones in them under the control of proprietary software. There's simply no way to tell when the mic is active, where the data is going, or to get consent that the recording only goes where the user wants it to go. Privacy policies change, software updates happen (and sometimes without user control or vetting), and software behavior doesn't always conform to stated policies (not that the user would have any chance to know what proprietary software is doing anyhow). The same applies to cameras, GPS units, tracker/cell phone towers, and more.
Ultimately regardless of whether the policy matches how the software works, when the device is under the control of nonfree software that device is a threat to a user's privacy and users are not in control of the device.
No proprietor can be trusted, that's what the free software movement has been telling us for decades. It's not at all surprising that a company which has been distributing proprietary malware for a long time continues to do so. Only people who think they know an OS by running it for a long time or want to believe that a proprietor-supplied control would truly protect one's privacy from the proprietor would believe otherwise.
Just to be clear: The questioner asked if the "FSF will endorse TPP opponents" and the parent response answered in the affirmative them went on to describe how Richard Stallman (RMS) did this. But RMS is not the FSF and vice versa; RMS endorsing candidates isn't the same as the FSF endorsing candidates. I've never seen the FSF endorse a candidate and I don't know of anything that would lead me to believe the FSF will endorse a candidate for a political race anywhere. I'm pretty sure this separation between himself and the FSF is important to both the FSF and RMS, and why RMS maintains his own website and posts some articles there expressing his own views including the text "This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project." on the front page of stallman.org.
So if "[e]ven when there is a permissive license, it's still incredibly difficult for a new file format to gain any traction" then there there would seem to be nothing lost by licensing the reference implementation under the GNU GPLv3 despite your vague claim that the GPL hinders "broad adoption". You say "If the ultimate goal is to promote this file format, this is not the best way of doing it" but you say nothing about what "the best way" is or what constitutes "best".
"FOSS" means free and open source software, software released under a license approved of by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative; there are many other such licenses. It's unclear what you mean by "FOSS/GPL" as being somehow distinct from the "GPL" (meaning the GNU General Public License), a term used for decades which requires no qualification. Perhaps you're confused by the term "GNU/Linux" which is the GNU operating system in combination with the Linux kernel (as opposed to, GNU/HURD or GNU/kFreeBSD, to name a couple of examples, which are the GNU OS with the HURD or FreeBSD kernels respectively).
For being moderated as insightful I see a self-contraction, unclear use of confused terminology, and a complaint hinting that something far better should be done without any explanation of what that is.
Even if the software source code isn't necessary for the emissions testing out of the tailpipe it is necessary for car owners to make the car do what they want. This is an opportunity for the public to get the car that is completely under their control. There's plenty of other fraudulent behavior that is under the control of the car software which can't be fixed except by changing the software (radio emissions and input via car remote controls, for example). Car owners deserve to be able to control their owned objects completely while complying with reasonable laws. Therefore we need strongly copylefted free software to achieve this in order to grant and secure the necessary freedoms for the foreseeable future.
We need accountability and prevention. Accountability should come in the form of corporate death penalties (as in the corporation's assets are seized to pay debts and the corporation no longer exists), and prevention in the form of publishing complete corresponding source code to all cars sold in the US as a part of the car. When you buy a car, you should own the car including all software installed on that car. Other countries would be wise to follow suit to protect their citizens and the environment from apparently malevolent multi-year fraudsters who wish to dodge ecological regulations.
The Free Software Foundation was right: all published software must be free. But since this situation highlights how fraud and abuse can be hidden in nonfree software, we can defend ourselves from this with strongly copylefted free software (right now that means AGPL v3 or later). I don't want anyone taking any car in for any work and coming out with nonfree software thus reintroducing this problem. You cannot have safe computer software without software freedom. And a strong copylefted free software license plus multiple freedom-minded contributors who are willing to pursue lawsuits will help defend against proprietary derivatives (as such legal work has done for the Linux kernel). As I said in the recent VW thread on this: I don't care about upstream copyright excuses should VW claim to have built their software on nonfree upstream code. Our individual and collective safety is far too important. This, like virtually everything else we do, is a matter of political will to do the right and just thing.
When people come around to seeing how an increasing dependence on computers (namely, putting computers in everything) means risking our lives, our civil liberties, our health, our freedom to move without being tracked, and more, we can easily justify pushing for more strongly copylefted free software.
I read the "single line of code" editorial as a distraction away from what matters: accountability and prevention.
Accountability can come in the form of lawsuits from affected car owners and those who can show the subsequent environmental harm caused a problem for them. Letting VW negotiate its own fate is ridiculous and, if the government's action with GM is any guide, unlikely to result in more than a slap of the wrist.
Prevention must also be dealt with, and strongly copylefted free software licenses will help here. Whether this was the result of a mistake (VW's years-long negligence) or planning (VW's years-long fraudulence) is a detail as far as prevention goes because either way VW should be freeing the complete source code to the cars and providing complete specifications for any code it cannot provide so as to allow the easiest possible reverse engineering. Any cost of purchasing code for freeing should be borne by VW.
VW is not in a position to dicker here. I don't buy the excuse of uncooperative upstream providers VW depends on for their code and the public shouldn't either. The stakes (our health) are too high to settle for less than complete corresponding source code under a strong copylefted license so that any published improvements are also free. Keep in mind, this is code car owners should have had from day 1 under a free license so they can fully own their own cars, taking code to experts they trust just like many take their car mechanisms to garages they trust to get fixed. Trusting the market got us where we are now, the market apparently will not grant us the freedom to let us help ourselves and our air-breathing neighbors by fixing the defective VW cars already out there since 2009 (over 480,000 of them). Not buying VW reaches the same conclusion. Not recognizing software freedom for its own sake and the preservation of that protection in copyleft will increasingly become a matter of life and death as we entrust more of our daily functions to software.
Hacking free software continues to prove fruitful. In fact, some people use it and rely on it for their freedoms (such as Edward Snowden). But proprietary software is long known to be untrustworthy by default, no matter who the proprietor is or what excuse they (or their water carriers) have for denying users software freedom. So there's no gain to be had in a capitulation view. Privacy and other freedoms are worth fighting for and there's plenty of good to be had in the fight. Some of those fights take the form of saying "no" to a convenience or trend on the grounds that one values one's privacy more.
Based on what evidence do you conclude that "Apple is pushing for user privacy"? Even if the software ran on one's tracker, the transcript or audio of any call could easily be uploaded wherever a proprietary software developer and distributor wants without the user's awareness or informed consent. Voice transcription is an important part of better indexing people's calls, which better serves multiple interests including targetted retrieval of the kind Snowden has told us organizations have been doing for some time now.
Slashdot Mirror
So Apple fears that the servers it relies on for its business are not fully under Apple's control, as one's computers ought to be fully under the control of those who own the computer. The same would be true even if the servers weren't virtual. As I understand it, this is part of the reason why Google is keen to build their own hardware and takes some interest free software to run that hardware. As Edward Snowden pointed out in his recent LibrePlanet talk this is the same reason privacy-minded people can't use Apple's equipment either. Snowden mentioned this in terms of Microsoft ("I did not use Windows machines when I was in my operational phase because I couldn't trust them. Not because I knew there was a particular backdoor or anything like that but because I couldn't be sure." circa 5m54s or 8m33s in the prerelease video) but the same insecurity stemming from a lack of freedom issue applies to all proprietors, not just Microsoft.
In other words there's quite an irony here: the proprietor is coming to terms with the same lack of freedom it imposes on its customers. Apple's iThings include phones that aren't under the owner's exclusive control allowing someone other than the owner to update software on the device. Some other devices (perhaps Apple's as well) don't allow the computer owner to fully control the cryptographic keys used to sign software installed on the device, so these keys are used to keep the owner locked out of full control (or the proprietor from being fully locked out). The updates can and do come in Apple and non-Apple systems without the owner's consent in the name of "convenience" and "safety" (one must ask whose safety is being assured in this scheme) or (as some proprietor sycophants are sure to point out) keeping non-technical users from messing something up. The technical details of precisely where the non-free software lies (on the main computer, on a modem controller, on some other bit of hardware one uses with the system) are no excuses for not providing documented hardware, a means to install a fully free software system, and thus a means to fully own one's own computer.
You can see Edward Snowden's talk for yourself.
There are no configuration changes you can make, programs you can install, or other changes you can make to make proprietary (user-subjugating, nonfree) software trustworthy. It won't matter what the "privacy" settings say you can do; the proprietor has the upper hand and can easily write software to rat you out. Software freedom is a prerequisite for computer privacy and security and all of the other things that go into treating computer users ethically. All computer users deserve software freedom.
Yes, the list of why not to do business with Apple comes from Richard Stallman's personal site stallman.org. There are other articles there too like why not to do business with Amazon, and an updated list of other pointers to political stories.
As to your question: it seems you failed to see that the /. story headline comment already predicted the sycophantic distraction of trying to dilute responsibility with 'what about other manufacturers' excuses. Other manufacturers aren't responsible for Apple's choices, Apple is.
Apple makes so much money yet has such an ugly history of mistreating the people with whom they do business in a variety of ways large and small: Mistreatment of workers who build their products (continuing in 2015 only changing due to activist and journalists compelling them to), copyright infringement, ebooks that won't work on jailbroken iThings, turning a blind eye to environmental degradation, making it needlessly hard for owners to take apart their products, teaching store staff twisted psychological manipulation, avoiding US corporate tax (which is already quite low), and more. Now we can add conspiring to fix prices. Hardly surprising given how unethical, illegal, and pernicious Apple has been.
People ought to own the cars they buy including the software in the cars. The published software should have been published as free software in the first place. Stop making excuses against customers stuck with proprietary software. It was Tesla's choice to put that information into the software, but there are more important issues than future products at stake here: It's only a matter of time until we learn of more ripoffs ala VW's recent gaming the environmental reviews. The thing that ties these issues together is that proprietary software makes it all of a piece.
From http://mamedev.org/?p=422:
From the /. story pointer:
Then you haven't listened to his copyright talks or read any of his articles and stories, so you're really not trying and then get away with flaunting your ignorance of what he says. So I'll point you to some: Copyright vs. The Public talk given at Bern on 2010-02-11 (I imagine a copy of this will show up on https://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/ soon alongside recordings of a lot of his other talks), Reasons not to do business with Amazon, The Danger of E-Books, and his dystopic short story The Right to Read which presciently describes the kinds of anti-reader controls common in proprietary e-books. Your Baen library is not the norm; Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other DRM-laden e-books are sadly the norm. One should address how most readers read e-books to provide an adequate response, not cite the unusual exceptions that respect a reader's privacy and ownership of a copy of the e-book.
As to what you call "childishness", I refer you to "Why Call it the Swindle? because that entire essay addresses your point. Regarding lending, you and another followup poster both missed the point—lending should not require an intermediary, break a reader's privacy, nor set terms on the loan. There's no technical reason why an e-book lending should have one reader reveal to a third party which e-books they are lending to another reader, nor revealing the identities of either side of the loan. And you give away how you miss the point where you try to criticize by saying "even if it is for a lowly 14 days"—if it were really the reader's e-book (like it is with books), the reader/e-book owner should set the terms of the loan for their e-book including the loan period. Giving any intermediary power means tracking and restricting to whom one may lend their e-books, a significant downgrade from books and totally technically unnecessary to boot. These needless restrictions and many others are more than ample reason for renaming Amazon's "Kindle" into Swindle, or pointing out how the Kindle burns your freedoms as well as highlighting that digital restrictions management is anti-reader.
Finally, your use of the word "marketplace" suggests you value market success more than human freedom and people behaving ethically. That's a dangerous value system; I'll point you to the GNU project's commentary on the word "Market" since it's applicable here too, particularly that all DRM schemes are implemented with non-free, user-subjugating, proprietary software.
The Swindle was never a good device to use or own and there remain many reasons not to do business with amazon.com.
Yes, Windows is a non-free operating system as it always was. What inconveniences its proprietor puts in a user's way is up to the proprietor as it always was. You're right to point out free software options, and thanks for doing that! But Windows, Chrome OS, MacOS, GNU/Linux, and some BSD variant are not equivalent alternatives to each other on the grounds of giving users freedom from proprietary oppression. You might as well add the Amazon Swindle to that list too, for all the freedom to read that device gives its users. The details of the lack of freedom differ but it's precisely the same in so far as revealing who has the upper hand. There are variants of GNU/Linux which allow the user to run, inspect, share, and modify the entire OS and recommend only free software be installed on top of that OS.
Just because the proprietor chooses to put malware like hassles, spying functionality, and other things users hate into this variant of Windows doesn't mean another variant is any better. Windows 7 shouldn't get a pass because Windows 10 is too much of a pain to use or becomes untrustworthy. Apple, Google, and Amazon's software aren't on the user's side because those companies are not Microsoft. For all we know these systems have malware working secretly in ways that aren't so obvious. Perhaps a malware mechanism is not so easily identified by locking out so-called "preferences" (they're not really preferences if the user can't really choose how the program works). It's easy for a proprietor to spy on, rat out, and disrupt the user while giving the user the illusion they're in control via configuration choices. What Microsoft has done here with Windows 10 is a matter of degree not of substance.
This is the power of a proprietor at work. The only thing that differs is how much that power is revealed to the user of the proprietary software.
So whether a nonfree OS does this kind of thing now or later doesn't really matter because in all cases the proprietor had the upper hand before, has the upper hand now, and will keep the upper hand for as long as that software is nonfree. All that changes are the details and the revelation to those who look into some of these details.
Nonfree software does not respect your privacy or your work. It doesn't matter who the proprietor is, what OS they're trying to get you to accept, or whether the preferences give users the flexibility users want. This is why Richard Stallman calls proprietary software users "useds".
I haven't forgotten them, but I'm not willing to accept that they should cloud the argument most proprietary software users face today, particularly on trackers (cell phones, mobiles) where nonfreedom is rampant and for which Apple takes full responsibility.
I enjoy CUPS, for instance, now just as I enjoyed it before Apple bought the software and thus took over the copyright from EasySW. But CUPS isn't commonly found on trackers as far as I know. It'll be interesting to note if the contribution to Clang you point out continues when Clang gets to a point where Apple is satisfied with its utility. Brad Kuhn has said he expects that contribution to end once the software is good enough to let Apple remove the GNU Compiler Collection ("GCC", Apple's long-time multi-language compiler) entirely (probably due to Apple's perverse anti-GPL zealotry which is rooted in not getting away with copyright infringement against the Free Software Foundation back when Steve Jobs ran NeXT). We've already entered a time when Apple's compiler basically can't be used in freedom. This is hardly the testament to Apple's contribution to software freedom you tried to make it out to be.
And I know that proprietors and their sycophants in the open source movement are keen to cite marketshare/popularity as an important topic (mainly because they're both eager to distract people away from talking about software freedom where they know they have nothing to offer). So it's ironic to note how unpopular LaunchD, Bonjour, GrandCentralDispatch, and Swift are. LaunchD & Bonjour aren't needed on free systems due to free reimplementations of their functionality elsewhere. Bonjour doesn't even wholly qualify as free software; only some of it is licensed under an Apache license. Your namecalling and bullying attempt at distracting people away from talking about the lack of software freedom for iThing users is falling apart.
Which is precisely what the grandparent poster didn't do; here's the irony of the challenge facing an ad hominem arguer: To successfully challenge the message one has to point out how the message is not worth taking seriously. The very thing the arguer tries to get us to ignore is the thing that has to be examined and taken down thus justifying future skepticism. I could see where someone's background would justifiably raise suspicion, but not outright dismissal of all claims such as what you propose. You're making the same mistake that poster made; while white knighting for a bad argument you're claiming "Charles Manson is not going to give you sound advice" without telling us exactly which Manson advice we should dismiss. I can only guess you think we should dismiss everything Manson (and thus McAfee) says on any topic but without any examples of why we should follow that advice. And then you post this anonymously, so as to prevent anyone from understand whom they're reading so we won't dismiss what you've said in the past further now that your own argument has failed to convince and raised suspicions of you.
When one makes an argument like yours and doesn't supply the information we need to justify dismissing someone out of hand, people look into things. For example, people tried arguing this way with Donald Trump, someone whose racist and unfactual screeds have justifiably earned him quite a bit of bad press. But when Trump recently pointed out that in 2003 George W. Bush lied to get the US to invade Iraq, Trump was right and at that time millions of people on the streets of the world in the world's largest anti-war protests knew the Bush government and pro-war sycophants didn't have the evidence they needed to justify war. Trump got booed by seemingly reflexively pro-war Republicans when he pointed out Bush's lies but that didn't make what Trump said in those statements worthless.
Sadly, as right thinking as your reaction is most /. readers don't agree with your take with regard to Disney's actions here and don't have the guts to admit they don't agree. Their unprincipled obeisance to Disney's power is unlike some posters to the Ars Technica (Condé Nast) forum on this story who object publicly such as user "SmokeTest":
Power-for-power's-sake supporting /.ers will pay to see the next Star Wars movie, visit Disney theme parks, buy Disney-licensed merchandise of all kinds and thus feed the system that oppresses the world via copyright and TPP. This fight goes far beyond the term of copyright both in who is affected and specific powers multinational corporations seek to gain.
People travel, people change citizenship, and people don't deserve different ethics. The objection shouldn't hinge on whether one likes Apple or not. The argument should hinge on what Apple has done and how it treats its customers. Apple has long been a censor regardless of the country in which it does business, see the section labeled "Apple practices censorship. Here are a few examples.", and given how long it takes to fix security issues it knows are being exploited one can't say the company cares about user's security either, see the section labeled "Apple spies on its users, and helps others spy on them.". If Apple cared about "protect[ing] our customers' personal data" as it claims to Apple wouldn't distribute proprietary, user-subjugating software to its users.
Copyright holders who license under a free software license gain compliance and social respect for choosing a license that lets us run, share, and modify covered software. There is nothing to gain in saying popular GNU/Linux distributions don't have to comply with licenses but other distributors do. There is also a lot to gain by showing that licensing under a popular free software license (such as the GNU GPL) is enforcible. One such benefit: Every enforcement action taken showing how enforcible the GPL is helps silence critics who claim otherwise.
No it's not a very good solution. VW has behaved in a way that requires punishment (and high fines are a perfectly appropriate way to make them change their behavior and send a message to other manufacturers that the US is serious), and every country should be requiring complete corresponding source code under a free software license from VW and any other automaker that lied, sold equipment under false pretense, or dodged environmental regulation. That will help prevent this particular cheating from recurring. No need to get into the "we're not expert/trustworthy enough to do the right thing with regard to environmental regulation" argument as VW's own behavior shows us what happens when proprietors are trusted with that power.
To do less is to send the opposite message -- your country sucks up to businesses, doesn't value human life and safety, and only seeks punishment on a small scale unlikely to threaten the status quo. I know where the US stood on these issues well before this issue came up, I know where the US stands on these issues today, and I'm not surprised that corruption continues apace. We don't need to champion more behavior likely to continue corruption by calling the decision "very good".
First off, the proper term is GNU/Linux; you're not just being advised to run only the Linux kernel. If the people advising you know what they're talking about, they should be advising you to run a completely free OS -- a free kernel (such as GNU Linux-libre) and free software on top of that. The more free software you can get on your system, the more you can put yourself in control of your computing. And this terminology difference is also apropos because this issue comes down to the very issue being raised in that term "GNU/Linux", namely software freedom -- the developers of the GNU system want to share in the credit so as to remind people to demand software freedom.
A class-action suit won't help Microsoft Windows users if those users accepted terms to allow the proprietor to do this to your computers.
But the heart of the issue remains: it's your computer, you should be allowed to run the software you want with it, and make sure that that software does only what you want. So what you want is software freedom. Not user subjugation to someone else's authority unvetted by you on a level that's as detailed or as abstract as you wish. You can't have that kind of control with nonfree, user subjugating, proprietary software no matter who the proprietor is. No amount of believing otherwise, adding more nonfree software, or changing configuration parameters on nonfree software (such as setting registry values this way or that way) will give you software freedom.
You have no idea when it records; "it records only when recognising voice" is an assertion that goes beyond what you know. Anytime nonfree (user-subjugating, proprietary) software is in control of a computer, that computer is not really under the user's control and we can't tell what it will do or when. That's the power of the proprietor at work.
Trackers (aka cell phones or mobile phones), most people's laptop computers, and now some TVs, all have microphones in them under the control of proprietary software. There's simply no way to tell when the mic is active, where the data is going, or to get consent that the recording only goes where the user wants it to go. Privacy policies change, software updates happen (and sometimes without user control or vetting), and software behavior doesn't always conform to stated policies (not that the user would have any chance to know what proprietary software is doing anyhow). The same applies to cameras, GPS units, tracker/cell phone towers, and more.
Ultimately regardless of whether the policy matches how the software works, when the device is under the control of nonfree software that device is a threat to a user's privacy and users are not in control of the device.
No proprietor can be trusted, that's what the free software movement has been telling us for decades. It's not at all surprising that a company which has been distributing proprietary malware for a long time continues to do so. Only people who think they know an OS by running it for a long time or want to believe that a proprietor-supplied control would truly protect one's privacy from the proprietor would believe otherwise.
Just to be clear: The questioner asked if the "FSF will endorse TPP opponents" and the parent response answered in the affirmative them went on to describe how Richard Stallman (RMS) did this. But RMS is not the FSF and vice versa; RMS endorsing candidates isn't the same as the FSF endorsing candidates. I've never seen the FSF endorse a candidate and I don't know of anything that would lead me to believe the FSF will endorse a candidate for a political race anywhere. I'm pretty sure this separation between himself and the FSF is important to both the FSF and RMS, and why RMS maintains his own website and posts some articles there expressing his own views including the text "This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project." on the front page of stallman.org.
So if "[e]ven when there is a permissive license, it's still incredibly difficult for a new file format to gain any traction" then there there would seem to be nothing lost by licensing the reference implementation under the GNU GPLv3 despite your vague claim that the GPL hinders "broad adoption". You say "If the ultimate goal is to promote this file format, this is not the best way of doing it" but you say nothing about what "the best way" is or what constitutes "best".
"FOSS" means free and open source software, software released under a license approved of by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative; there are many other such licenses. It's unclear what you mean by "FOSS/GPL" as being somehow distinct from the "GPL" (meaning the GNU General Public License), a term used for decades which requires no qualification. Perhaps you're confused by the term "GNU/Linux" which is the GNU operating system in combination with the Linux kernel (as opposed to, GNU/HURD or GNU/kFreeBSD, to name a couple of examples, which are the GNU OS with the HURD or FreeBSD kernels respectively).
For being moderated as insightful I see a self-contraction, unclear use of confused terminology, and a complaint hinting that something far better should be done without any explanation of what that is.
Even if the software source code isn't necessary for the emissions testing out of the tailpipe it is necessary for car owners to make the car do what they want. This is an opportunity for the public to get the car that is completely under their control. There's plenty of other fraudulent behavior that is under the control of the car software which can't be fixed except by changing the software (radio emissions and input via car remote controls, for example). Car owners deserve to be able to control their owned objects completely while complying with reasonable laws. Therefore we need strongly copylefted free software to achieve this in order to grant and secure the necessary freedoms for the foreseeable future.
We need accountability and prevention. Accountability should come in the form of corporate death penalties (as in the corporation's assets are seized to pay debts and the corporation no longer exists), and prevention in the form of publishing complete corresponding source code to all cars sold in the US as a part of the car. When you buy a car, you should own the car including all software installed on that car. Other countries would be wise to follow suit to protect their citizens and the environment from apparently malevolent multi-year fraudsters who wish to dodge ecological regulations.
The Free Software Foundation was right: all published software must be free. But since this situation highlights how fraud and abuse can be hidden in nonfree software, we can defend ourselves from this with strongly copylefted free software (right now that means AGPL v3 or later). I don't want anyone taking any car in for any work and coming out with nonfree software thus reintroducing this problem. You cannot have safe computer software without software freedom. And a strong copylefted free software license plus multiple freedom-minded contributors who are willing to pursue lawsuits will help defend against proprietary derivatives (as such legal work has done for the Linux kernel). As I said in the recent VW thread on this: I don't care about upstream copyright excuses should VW claim to have built their software on nonfree upstream code. Our individual and collective safety is far too important. This, like virtually everything else we do, is a matter of political will to do the right and just thing.
When people come around to seeing how an increasing dependence on computers (namely, putting computers in everything) means risking our lives, our civil liberties, our health, our freedom to move without being tracked, and more, we can easily justify pushing for more strongly copylefted free software.
I read the "single line of code" editorial as a distraction away from what matters: accountability and prevention.
Accountability can come in the form of lawsuits from affected car owners and those who can show the subsequent environmental harm caused a problem for them. Letting VW negotiate its own fate is ridiculous and, if the government's action with GM is any guide, unlikely to result in more than a slap of the wrist.
Prevention must also be dealt with, and strongly copylefted free software licenses will help here. Whether this was the result of a mistake (VW's years-long negligence) or planning (VW's years-long fraudulence) is a detail as far as prevention goes because either way VW should be freeing the complete source code to the cars and providing complete specifications for any code it cannot provide so as to allow the easiest possible reverse engineering. Any cost of purchasing code for freeing should be borne by VW.
VW is not in a position to dicker here. I don't buy the excuse of uncooperative upstream providers VW depends on for their code and the public shouldn't either. The stakes (our health) are too high to settle for less than complete corresponding source code under a strong copylefted license so that any published improvements are also free. Keep in mind, this is code car owners should have had from day 1 under a free license so they can fully own their own cars, taking code to experts they trust just like many take their car mechanisms to garages they trust to get fixed. Trusting the market got us where we are now, the market apparently will not grant us the freedom to let us help ourselves and our air-breathing neighbors by fixing the defective VW cars already out there since 2009 (over 480,000 of them). Not buying VW reaches the same conclusion. Not recognizing software freedom for its own sake and the preservation of that protection in copyleft will increasingly become a matter of life and death as we entrust more of our daily functions to software.
Hacking free software continues to prove fruitful. In fact, some people use it and rely on it for their freedoms (such as Edward Snowden). But proprietary software is long known to be untrustworthy by default, no matter who the proprietor is or what excuse they (or their water carriers) have for denying users software freedom. So there's no gain to be had in a capitulation view. Privacy and other freedoms are worth fighting for and there's plenty of good to be had in the fight. Some of those fights take the form of saying "no" to a convenience or trend on the grounds that one values one's privacy more.
Based on what evidence do you conclude that "Apple is pushing for user privacy"? Even if the software ran on one's tracker, the transcript or audio of any call could easily be uploaded wherever a proprietary software developer and distributor wants without the user's awareness or informed consent. Voice transcription is an important part of better indexing people's calls, which better serves multiple interests including targetted retrieval of the kind Snowden has told us organizations have been doing for some time now.