You're unlikely to get the answer you seek because you've framed your question in terms of a movement Stallman is (rightly) opposed to, and in ways that he's already explained many times (even the/. summary points to one of the essays on this) -- why Stallman objects to the open source movement (older essay, newer essay also pointed to in the/. summary). He recommends against using Facebook (and has started every talk in the past year or so with an explanation of why posting pictures of people in Facebook/Instagram is a bad idea). I hope he will point out to you that you don't need these things to avoid "losing connection with the rest of the world" and you should value things the open source movement was designed to never talk about, and privacy these services are designed to deny every user of the web. One can hardly "benefit the users" while advocating against copyleft (as the open source movement does), never talking about software freedom (as the open source movement was designed to do), and maintaining a monstrous search engine (as is at the heart of Facebook). You could have done the slightest bit of research and found any of these things I pointed to.
Slashdot seems to me to be a proponent of the open source movement, the software development methodology that Bradley Kuhn rightly called "greenwashing" (another copy) the free software movement by talking about much the same software and licenses but without the freedom talk in order to placate business interests seeking to proprietarize software. Consider the case in this thread—defending copyleft—this clearly shows the difference between the two movements. The older free software movement wants to preserve software freedom while the younger open source movement was built to not discuss software freedom at all. Kuhn's personal blog post on this topic describes the situation very well and with no punches pulled.
When you come across someone who talks and works to defend software freedom, such as Richard Stallman, in a forum whose participants are (be they a proprietor's shill or genuinely describing their own view) devoted to supporting the kind of power over the user that strongly copylefted licenses, such as the GNU GPLs, were built to withstand you're going to find people using whatever namecalling and misrepresentative tactics they can come up with to try and malign Stallman (as if that would somehow reflect badly on software freedom). The complaints get weaker over time (remember when people used to complain that the GPL wasn't defensible in court?) so the objectors have to find other avenues to try and distract people into not thinking in terms of software freedom. It wouldn't matter if software freedom were proposed and initially championed by someone wholly objectionable; that wouldn't make software freedom a bad thing. Talking about Stallman instead of talking about software freedom is doing that distractionary work because the facts on the ground fail to back the case that we're better off without software freedom.
If the same blob was included in chip's ROM, nobody would think it's different from before right?
Yes, we would think it's different because it is different. When the functionality of that blob is in a ROM chip or circuitry, nobody can update it, including the proprietor, without hardware modification or hardware replacement. When the functionality is in software or any kind of reprogrammable device, the question becomes who is allowed to run, inspect, share, and modify that code. This is an important ethical distinction that the developmental philosophy of the younger open source movement was designed to never raise as an issue because that movement wants to pitch a message of cheap labor to businesses.
All the questions of software freedom enter the picture because you're dealing with software now. All the issues that the open source movement was designed not to raise (older essay on this topic, newer essay on this topic) the older free software movement raised over a decade before the open source movement began.
If this code were distributed as Free Software to its users, this could be great news for all of us (even the majority of computer users who will never fully take advantage of these freedoms because they're never going to become programmers). Programmers can accomplish wonderful practical benefits like putting in interesting features, fixing bugs, learning from the code, all while being friendly with others by giving or selling services based on improving that code, and helping to keep users safe from malware all along the way.
If this code is distributed as non-free user-subjugating software (a.k.a. proprietary software), the proprietor (Intel in this case) is the only party who can inspect, share, and modify that code. And users (regardless of technical ability) are purposefully left out of controlling their own computers, which is unethical.
People should keep that in mind when they argue for non-free browsers over Free Software browsers such as Firefox, GNU IceCat, and others. Being free to control your Internet experience is critical, being free to decide what you want to take in is never totally in your hands when you run non-free (proprietary, user-subjugating) software. The proprietor always has the upper hand even if they don't use that power right away or in ways you don't see or understand.
What you call "the slow way" is called journalism. Journalism, like scientific work or any other work worth doing, takes time to do. There are plenty of examples of independent journalism being done well, some have already been shared in this thread by others. Here are some more that come to mind: Democracy Now!, NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal were both quite well done and worth watching reruns/archives (moreso the Journal), CounterPunch, Harry Shearer's weekly Le Show, and The Real News. All of these focus on issues of importance, get more deeply into those issues via interviews with those who have studied the topic in-depth via investigative journalism and those who work in the field, and leave you with pointers to more information you can study yourself. I'm sure there are so many more examples of this work being done well I didn't list but don't let that stop you from trying various sources and reading books (paper books, not DRM'd proprietary-driven computer-based readers that track you, threaten to cut off your reading, or deny you the other freedoms paper grants). You won't agree with everything you see, hear, and read but the point isn't to manufacture your consent, it's to get you thinking critically about the world outside the allowable limits of debate so often featured in mainstream coverage.
But the corporate media (including repeaters like/.) are designed to hew closely to the "firehose" reportage which includes drawing conclusions quickly so people stay focused on what's coming next, and anything undesirable that somehow gets reported doesn't stick around in the reported consciousness for long. This is inherently incompatible with real life where, as you say, real change takes far longer to be seen. Adherents to the firehose approach implicitly say their take is a good thing (obviously few would argue they're actively promoting something bad) despite the foreseeable adverse impact on the public's welfare.
So you're switching away from a browser that is still Free Software (which provides the ultimate configurability), the basis of variants (GNU IceCat, for example) that make it more convenient to respect your software freedom by only showing you Free addons by default, for a proprietary browser. And then you're getting lost in the weeds by debating the purported merits of one proprietor over another (Google vs. Opera) where you know so little about both such comparisons pale to what you give up by choosing any proprietary software.
I'd rather keep my software freedom, run more Free Software, and enjoy the wide variety of Free Software addons to help me keep browser privacy (NoScript, Priv3+, disabling Javascript-based clipboard manipulations, browser ID spoofing, and so on).
By which you're referring to "Le Show" which covers items in the news and his very well researched documentary "The Big Uneasy" which shows how the Army Corps of Engineers made Hurricane Katrina far worse than it would have been and evades responsibility throughout. Speaking of showing, Shearer backs up his points by quoting and interviewing experts in the relevant fields of discussion and by quoting published hypocrisy from those in power. That's far more backing for his points than I see you giving your views which purport to know what he thinks. In short, you apparently don't think he's funny or insightful but "without actual good context" for anyone to see your views as anything but a name-calling accusation.
Quite right about how Digital "Rights" Management is a propaganda term designed to frame the issue as though it's okay to take user/reader rights away from them in the switch from one means of seeing media to another. But Mozilla has always framed its work as "open source". So one should expect with "open"ness -- the open source movement is, as Brad Kuhn pointed out recently, the greenwashing movement it was defined to be. The Free Software Foundation has long pointed out how "open source" differs from "free software" (older essay, younger essay). The younger open source movement accepts proprietary software and the older free software movement does not because open source was defined as a proprietor-friendly response to the user freedom-seeking social movement.
I think slavery is a part of the market and this reality is why one can't afford to frame issues in the amoral terms of the marketplace. Looking out for one's own interests necessarily includes building a society that provides for all and defends against exploitations many forms. It's high time we seriously build rules that place a barrier underneath us all the theme of which says 'society won't let you become more destitute than this' and then specifies in detail what that level is.
I disagree; knowing that bad evidence was presented (particularly in life imprisonment and death penalty cases where there is no chance to make amends with those falsely convicted) shows more evidence of why the death penalty was never a good idea. Therefore we don't need more death penalty conclusions such as "Willfully hide exculpatory evidence in a capital murder trial? Death penalty.".
You could host the multimedia files on your own website, which would let you move your domain and/or provider to an amenable ISP whenever needed while retaining the same URLs for your visitors. There are ISPs such as Dreamhost.com that will host email and websites and their accompanying data files at reasonable costs with lots of bandwidth should your show become popular. I don't work for them but I've worked with their hosting and found it to be reasonable.
You could host files on archive.org (the Internet Archive) for no fee which will deliver files to all comers also gratis. I'm not aware of IA discriminating against people doing what you're doing.
You could consider delivering pointers to your shows delivered cooperatively via BitTorrent with magnet URLs posted to popular BitTorrent-based sharing sites so the public can keep your shows downloadable even if you find hosting hard to come by.
You could combine these ideas, they're not mutually exclusive. And I hope you'll consider distributing your multimedia in formats that favor free software such as WebM. Finally, be wary of any provider's changing terms of service should you start talking about something they someday consider important. Commercial organizations and nations don't have permanent friends, they have interests which change.
Burz, I wonder if you'd say the same about all OSS software that's licensed under MIT or BSD but which lacks a patent promise? Because such software would be in an even weaker state from your perspective than Microsoft's OSS.NET.
I don't speak for Burz and I don't argue for anything "OSS", in fact this issue is one reason why looking at this from the perspective of the open source movement is so dangerous. But it seems to me that the FSF has explained this well as they point out in their aforementioned article, Microsoft is "the only major software company that has declared itself the enemy of GNU/Linux and stated its intention to attack our community with patents" which makes Microsoft more of a threat. Also, there's more than one BSD license and it's better to be clear about what you're referring to.
EndSoftPatents.org and the FSF both manage to make their points referring to specifics, linking to their sources, and without using the word "Chinese" to denote confusion or incomprehensibility. So it seems to me that EndSoftPatents.org's conclusion, "This patent licence looks fine for users of the code published by Microsoft, but its protections disappear very quickly for those who wish to modify or re-use the code." is entirely sensible and hardly worthy of your offensive dismissal.
Actually, on 2015-03-16 he said he's been using a web browser and Tor. I don't know if the two are related and I don't know when he started using a common browser in a typical fashion.
Looking at the kerfuffle around LLVM/Clang you can find more of the same attitude from RMS—he doesn't have the ego invested in the work as his detractors claim he does (often without examples cited at all, sometimes as with the grandparent poster with wrong examples cited):
For GCC to be replaced by another technically superior compiler that defended freedom equally well would cause me some personal regret, but I would rejoice for the community's advance. The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers -- so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us.
Those aren't the words of someone who places ego above the good of the project or the public. For software freedom seekers, software freedom and defense of software freedom is the goal and good for the public.
Firmware is software and computer users still need software freedom for all published software. This hasn't changed since Richard Stallman reached conclusions about the ethics of software over 30 years ago. Changing what device the software is loaded into or the form it takes when loaded doesn't change any of the underlying issues that all have to do with how people treat each other. This is also not an issue to be properly understood by "open source" focus on convenience, caving into business desires, or developmental methodology.
If you want to say that RMS's position is pedantic, that's fine. Just understand that RMS has slightly different values than open source advocates and he works to keep those values. RMS views open source as dangerous to the freedom to have all changes made available because open source does not make any guarantee about it. Others, like ESR, aren't quite as concerned about that as long as some version of the source is available. Thus, you get open source. Free and open source software are not exactly the same thing though.
Open source advocates think that proprietary software is acceptable and free software advocates don't think proprietary software is ever acceptable, as RMS points out in his essays and talks dating back many years (1, 2). I'd hardly call that difference pedantic—being overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning like a pedant. And the preservation of software freedom copyleft makes real can sometimes be okay to forgo but only after careful consideration. But the open source movement doesn't distinguish among licenses based on copyleft because that would draw attention to the very thing that movement was designed to silence and distract discussion away from talk of—software freedom.
Don't worry, he won't. And this story (like so much of/.) is "hyping empty garbage" (what Glenn Greenwald called Politicoâ(TM)s digital editorial director Blake Hounshell, but applies quite well here). Greenwald explains it all excellently, as per usual.
I'm uninterested in DRM'd e-readers or any e-reader that reveals my location, refuses to let me copy, quote, print, and do other things I do with books. I'm unwilling to sacrifice my rights because some publisher wants a rent scheme on books or wants me to constantly feed them information on my whereabouts, what I'm reading, logging my name with what I read (which even my local library only does as long as the loan), and other privacy violations that simply aren't possible with books. Calling DRM "digital restrictions management" is right and proper because that frames the debate where it belongs—around user's rights.
I'm not so sure that's true because the relevant laws are set such that the penalties are so light for the wealthy violators and virtually non-existant for the most powerful participants in the system. First, the organization with the most patents is not in a position to "feel pain" as you say; IBM's power is (as they've said long ago) in cross-licensing. They said they get an order of magnitude more benefit by leveraging the power the patent scheme was built to exert (which is also part of the problem of calling organizations "patent trolls" as if leveraging that power is somehow not to be expected, or an abuse of an otherwise upright system, when in fact that power is just part of the system operating as designed). As a result, losing patent infringement lawsuits is not common for IBM. Richard Stallman laid out how this works in his patent talks many years ago:
IBM got two kinds of benefit from its 9000 US patents. I believe the number is larger today. These were first, collecting royalties and second, getting access to the patents of others. They said that the latter benefit is an order of magnitude greater. So the benefit that IBM got from being allowed to use the ideas that were patented by others was 10 times the direct benefit IBM could get from licensing patents. What does this really mean?
What is the benefit that IBM gets from this access to the patents of others? It is basically the benefit of being excused from the trouble that the patent system can cause you. The patent system is like a lottery. What happens with any given patent could be nothing, could be a windfall for some patent holder or a disaster for everyone else. But IBM being so big, for them, it averages out. They get to measure the average harm and good of the patent system. For them, the trouble of the patent system would have been 10 times the good. I say would have been because IBM through cross-licensing avoids experiencing that trouble. That trouble is only potential. It doesn't really happen to them. But when they measure the benefits of avoiding that trouble, they estimate it as 10 times the value of the money they collect from their patents.
With regard to Apple specifically, it's not that difficult to see that they get by in part by violating government-granted monopoly and they're wealthy enough to be able to afford to do it repeatedly. The people who run Apple now ran NeXT years ago. NeXT infringed the FSF's license (GPLv2) in NeXT's initially unauthorized GCC derivative in which NeXT added Objective-C support. NeXT and the FSF settled out of court when the FSF got them to comply with the terms of the GPL (lesson learned here: stand up for your strong copylefted free software licenses and the bullies will meet your terms). Apple would again violate the GPLv2 later by distributing an infringing copy of VideoLAN Client. VLC co-author Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote critically of Apple's choice to let the program through it's app store saying "Those terms are contradicted by the products usage rules of the AppStore through which Apple delivers applications to users of its mobile devices." Apple infringed upon 3 Chinese writer's copyrights and were ordered to pay 730,000 yuan ($118,000), hardly a sum that would stop Apple from doing this again. But the pattern seems clear: Apple violates laws it doesn't like and never really meets a punishment that will make the leaders of the organization question whether to do it again. Apple isn't unique in this but that is a detail; we need punishments for the wealthy and powerful that make them take the law more seriously. But most importantly for endeavors practiced by the general public, such as computer programming, we need to fight in an organized and political way to end software idea patents. Mere patent reform is a delaying tactic that benefits the powerful.
What stands out to me about your post and the grandparent post is how both of you malign someone with no evidence. I'm certainly not taking you seriously about speaking for "many people [in Seattle]" either.
Ah, the flames from someone without much finesse: Premature declaration of failure to discourage further examination ("The masses have spoken..."), misidentification of fault ("If Apple could have continued using gcc...", "[The FSF] should have gone into the hardware business..."), citing trends with no backing and overvaluing business interests ("...then corporations wouldn't have run away from any GPLv3 software..."), and outright lying about intention and execution ("...weighing the costs of the walled garden (censorship etc) vs the benefits (no viruses)...", "...the attempt to take over the Linux kernel by renaming GNU/Linux..."), your post has so much flamebait to choose from it's almost as if you were taking instruction from an open source proponent who is eager to convince licensors to pick non-copylefted software licenses so they see their work become charitable contributions to software proprietors.
If there's so little interest in protecting oneself from international spying, malware, and other forms of user abuse Glenn Greenwald and other journalists would find it hard to get articles on the Snowden revelations published anywhere, world leaders wouldn't be holding meetings about the Snowden revelations, and people/organizations around the world wouldn't care about encryption. Don't confuse a non-technical user's inability to do better than running proprietary apps from a walled garden with not caring about these issues. They get both no software freedom and plenty of malware in their choice. Most computer users are weighing options where freedom is not available; they're suffering from the myth of choice where all of the readily-available options they know about deny them loyal computers.
Speaking of proprietors, Apple is no victim here. Apple wasn't forced to switch to LLVM and Clang, they chose to because they're proprietors eager to rob users of their software freedom in derivative works. If any organization with the means can be accurately accused of not writing their own stuff, it's Apple not writing their own compilers but instead relying on other compilers. This goes back to NeXT which was the first big GPL copyright infringement case (according to Brad Kuhn, former Executive Director of the FSF which holds the copyright on GCC in his discussion on his OggCast "Free as in Freedom"). NeXT got caught distributing a proprietary derivative of GCC which contained code to compile Objective-C. When Jobs spoke with the FSF about the matter, the FSF informed him that they would enforce their license (GPLv2). Jobs never liked that and never forgot. Apple doesn't mind the GPL they just don't like to be in a position of equality with their users unless they can pull out of that relationship when it suits them (see Apple's purchase of Easy SW which originally developed CUPS).
The FSF never tried to "take over the Linux kernel" and isn't doing so now by properly identifying Linux as a part of an operating system. They have said for years and continue to say they would like the GNU Project to get a share of the credit (1, 2). They also acknowledge that there are systems that don't include GNU and therefore should not be called "GNU slash" anything. No doubt, it would be equally unfair and erroneous to call GNU/kFreeBSD or GNU/HURD a "Linux" system when Linux isn't a part of that. This has nothing to do with capability of writing a kernel; a Linux kernel without the blobs is available so there's no pressing need for a fully-free system to have its own original kernel written by the FSF or the GNU Project. The core of the issue was and is
See Brad Kuhn's talk about the future of copyleft (mirror) for the cure to non-copylefted free software—to keep software freedom in derivative works, license with strongly copylefted free software licenses (the AGPL version 3 or later being the best choice now) and then enforce the license.
Slashdot Mirror
You're unlikely to get the answer you seek because you've framed your question in terms of a movement Stallman is (rightly) opposed to, and in ways that he's already explained many times (even the /. summary points to one of the essays on this) -- why Stallman objects to the open source movement (older essay, newer essay also pointed to in the /. summary). He recommends against using Facebook (and has started every talk in the past year or so with an explanation of why posting pictures of people in Facebook/Instagram is a bad idea). I hope he will point out to you that you don't need these things to avoid "losing connection with the rest of the world" and you should value things the open source movement was designed to never talk about, and privacy these services are designed to deny every user of the web. One can hardly "benefit the users" while advocating against copyleft (as the open source movement does), never talking about software freedom (as the open source movement was designed to do), and maintaining a monstrous search engine (as is at the heart of Facebook). You could have done the slightest bit of research and found any of these things I pointed to.
Slashdot seems to me to be a proponent of the open source movement, the software development methodology that Bradley Kuhn rightly called "greenwashing" (another copy) the free software movement by talking about much the same software and licenses but without the freedom talk in order to placate business interests seeking to proprietarize software. Consider the case in this thread—defending copyleft—this clearly shows the difference between the two movements. The older free software movement wants to preserve software freedom while the younger open source movement was built to not discuss software freedom at all. Kuhn's personal blog post on this topic describes the situation very well and with no punches pulled.
When you come across someone who talks and works to defend software freedom, such as Richard Stallman, in a forum whose participants are (be they a proprietor's shill or genuinely describing their own view) devoted to supporting the kind of power over the user that strongly copylefted licenses, such as the GNU GPLs, were built to withstand you're going to find people using whatever namecalling and misrepresentative tactics they can come up with to try and malign Stallman (as if that would somehow reflect badly on software freedom). The complaints get weaker over time (remember when people used to complain that the GPL wasn't defensible in court?) so the objectors have to find other avenues to try and distract people into not thinking in terms of software freedom. It wouldn't matter if software freedom were proposed and initially championed by someone wholly objectionable; that wouldn't make software freedom a bad thing. Talking about Stallman instead of talking about software freedom is doing that distractionary work because the facts on the ground fail to back the case that we're better off without software freedom.
Yes, we would think it's different because it is different. When the functionality of that blob is in a ROM chip or circuitry, nobody can update it, including the proprietor, without hardware modification or hardware replacement. When the functionality is in software or any kind of reprogrammable device, the question becomes who is allowed to run, inspect, share, and modify that code. This is an important ethical distinction that the developmental philosophy of the younger open source movement was designed to never raise as an issue because that movement wants to pitch a message of cheap labor to businesses.
All the questions of software freedom enter the picture because you're dealing with software now. All the issues that the open source movement was designed not to raise (older essay on this topic, newer essay on this topic) the older free software movement raised over a decade before the open source movement began.
If this code were distributed as Free Software to its users, this could be great news for all of us (even the majority of computer users who will never fully take advantage of these freedoms because they're never going to become programmers). Programmers can accomplish wonderful practical benefits like putting in interesting features, fixing bugs, learning from the code, all while being friendly with others by giving or selling services based on improving that code, and helping to keep users safe from malware all along the way.
If this code is distributed as non-free user-subjugating software (a.k.a. proprietary software), the proprietor (Intel in this case) is the only party who can inspect, share, and modify that code. And users (regardless of technical ability) are purposefully left out of controlling their own computers, which is unethical.
"Apple bashing"? How inarticulate and ultimately blindly supportive of a known repeat bad actor to keep their customers from controlling the iThings they buy. It's hardly far-fetched to see how the company receives bad press. They've made an ugly history for themselves rife with mistreating workers, users, and harming the environment. They found they could get away with non-freedom in software also exploits app developers "mercilessly" as Richard Stallman put it on his reasons why one shouldn't do business with Apple. Apple also uses digital restrictions management on eBooks which is set up so that those eBooks won't work on jailbroken iThings, stuck users with a U2 album and made it hard to delete, censors bitcoin apps for iThings, deauthorized a Wikileaks access application, banned an erotic novel from iTunes because of its cover, left a security hole in iTunes unfixed for 3 years, and more.
People should keep that in mind when they argue for non-free browsers over Free Software browsers such as Firefox, GNU IceCat, and others. Being free to control your Internet experience is critical, being free to decide what you want to take in is never totally in your hands when you run non-free (proprietary, user-subjugating) software. The proprietor always has the upper hand even if they don't use that power right away or in ways you don't see or understand.
What you call "the slow way" is called journalism. Journalism, like scientific work or any other work worth doing, takes time to do. There are plenty of examples of independent journalism being done well, some have already been shared in this thread by others. Here are some more that come to mind: Democracy Now!, NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal were both quite well done and worth watching reruns/archives (moreso the Journal), CounterPunch, Harry Shearer's weekly Le Show, and The Real News. All of these focus on issues of importance, get more deeply into those issues via interviews with those who have studied the topic in-depth via investigative journalism and those who work in the field, and leave you with pointers to more information you can study yourself. I'm sure there are so many more examples of this work being done well I didn't list but don't let that stop you from trying various sources and reading books (paper books, not DRM'd proprietary-driven computer-based readers that track you, threaten to cut off your reading, or deny you the other freedoms paper grants). You won't agree with everything you see, hear, and read but the point isn't to manufacture your consent, it's to get you thinking critically about the world outside the allowable limits of debate so often featured in mainstream coverage.
But the corporate media (including repeaters like /.) are designed to hew closely to the "firehose" reportage which includes drawing conclusions quickly so people stay focused on what's coming next, and anything undesirable that somehow gets reported doesn't stick around in the reported consciousness for long. This is inherently incompatible with real life where, as you say, real change takes far longer to be seen. Adherents to the firehose approach implicitly say their take is a good thing (obviously few would argue they're actively promoting something bad) despite the foreseeable adverse impact on the public's welfare.
So you're switching away from a browser that is still Free Software (which provides the ultimate configurability), the basis of variants (GNU IceCat, for example) that make it more convenient to respect your software freedom by only showing you Free addons by default, for a proprietary browser. And then you're getting lost in the weeds by debating the purported merits of one proprietor over another (Google vs. Opera) where you know so little about both such comparisons pale to what you give up by choosing any proprietary software.
I'd rather keep my software freedom, run more Free Software, and enjoy the wide variety of Free Software addons to help me keep browser privacy (NoScript, Priv3+, disabling Javascript-based clipboard manipulations, browser ID spoofing, and so on).
By which you're referring to "Le Show" which covers items in the news and his very well researched documentary "The Big Uneasy" which shows how the Army Corps of Engineers made Hurricane Katrina far worse than it would have been and evades responsibility throughout. Speaking of showing, Shearer backs up his points by quoting and interviewing experts in the relevant fields of discussion and by quoting published hypocrisy from those in power. That's far more backing for his points than I see you giving your views which purport to know what he thinks. In short, you apparently don't think he's funny or insightful but "without actual good context" for anyone to see your views as anything but a name-calling accusation.
Quite right about how Digital "Rights" Management is a propaganda term designed to frame the issue as though it's okay to take user/reader rights away from them in the switch from one means of seeing media to another. But Mozilla has always framed its work as "open source". So one should expect with "open"ness -- the open source movement is, as Brad Kuhn pointed out recently, the greenwashing movement it was defined to be. The Free Software Foundation has long pointed out how "open source" differs from "free software" (older essay, younger essay). The younger open source movement accepts proprietary software and the older free software movement does not because open source was defined as a proprietor-friendly response to the user freedom-seeking social movement.
I think slavery is a part of the market and this reality is why one can't afford to frame issues in the amoral terms of the marketplace. Looking out for one's own interests necessarily includes building a society that provides for all and defends against exploitations many forms. It's high time we seriously build rules that place a barrier underneath us all the theme of which says 'society won't let you become more destitute than this' and then specifies in detail what that level is.
I disagree; knowing that bad evidence was presented (particularly in life imprisonment and death penalty cases where there is no chance to make amends with those falsely convicted) shows more evidence of why the death penalty was never a good idea. Therefore we don't need more death penalty conclusions such as "Willfully hide exculpatory evidence in a capital murder trial? Death penalty.".
You could host the multimedia files on your own website, which would let you move your domain and/or provider to an amenable ISP whenever needed while retaining the same URLs for your visitors. There are ISPs such as Dreamhost.com that will host email and websites and their accompanying data files at reasonable costs with lots of bandwidth should your show become popular. I don't work for them but I've worked with their hosting and found it to be reasonable.
You could host files on archive.org (the Internet Archive) for no fee which will deliver files to all comers also gratis. I'm not aware of IA discriminating against people doing what you're doing.
You could consider delivering pointers to your shows delivered cooperatively via BitTorrent with magnet URLs posted to popular BitTorrent-based sharing sites so the public can keep your shows downloadable even if you find hosting hard to come by.
You could combine these ideas, they're not mutually exclusive. And I hope you'll consider distributing your multimedia in formats that favor free software such as WebM. Finally, be wary of any provider's changing terms of service should you start talking about something they someday consider important. Commercial organizations and nations don't have permanent friends, they have interests which change.
EndSoftPatents.org makes multiple relevant points very clear in their warning against relying on Microsoft's "promise" for .NET core listing the limits and foreseeable risks in Microsoft's offer. It seems to me there's enough there to make anyone wary of relying on .NET and instead heed what the Free Software Foundation said in 2009 warning against developing in C#.
You asked:
I don't speak for Burz and I don't argue for anything "OSS", in fact this issue is one reason why looking at this from the perspective of the open source movement is so dangerous. But it seems to me that the FSF has explained this well as they point out in their aforementioned article, Microsoft is "the only major software company that has declared itself the enemy of GNU/Linux and stated its intention to attack our community with patents" which makes Microsoft more of a threat. Also, there's more than one BSD license and it's better to be clear about what you're referring to.
EndSoftPatents.org and the FSF both manage to make their points referring to specifics, linking to their sources, and without using the word "Chinese" to denote confusion or incomprehensibility. So it seems to me that EndSoftPatents.org's conclusion, "This patent licence looks fine for users of the code published by Microsoft, but its protections disappear very quickly for those who wish to modify or re-use the code." is entirely sensible and hardly worthy of your offensive dismissal.
Actually, on 2015-03-16 he said he's been using a web browser and Tor. I don't know if the two are related and I don't know when he started using a common browser in a typical fashion.
Looking at the kerfuffle around LLVM/Clang you can find more of the same attitude from RMS—he doesn't have the ego invested in the work as his detractors claim he does (often without examples cited at all, sometimes as with the grandparent poster with wrong examples cited):
Those aren't the words of someone who places ego above the good of the project or the public. For software freedom seekers, software freedom and defense of software freedom is the goal and good for the public.
Firmware is software and computer users still need software freedom for all published software. This hasn't changed since Richard Stallman reached conclusions about the ethics of software over 30 years ago. Changing what device the software is loaded into or the form it takes when loaded doesn't change any of the underlying issues that all have to do with how people treat each other. This is also not an issue to be properly understood by "open source" focus on convenience, caving into business desires, or developmental methodology.
Open source advocates think that proprietary software is acceptable and free software advocates don't think proprietary software is ever acceptable, as RMS points out in his essays and talks dating back many years (1, 2). I'd hardly call that difference pedantic—being overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning like a pedant. And the preservation of software freedom copyleft makes real can sometimes be okay to forgo but only after careful consideration. But the open source movement doesn't distinguish among licenses based on copyleft because that would draw attention to the very thing that movement was designed to silence and distract discussion away from talk of—software freedom.
Glenn Greenwald asks a more interesting and important question than /. encourages its readers to consider when Greenwald asks "What's Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in its Name?" and then he answers it, "More damage has been inflicted historically by censorship than by the "terrorism" used to justify it.". Considering how little of a threat terrorism is in the US relative to other known dangers ('Terrorism Still Less Deadly in US Than Lack of Health Insurance, Salmonella', 'Gun Murders vs. Terrorism by the Numbers') one has to wonder about other western countries such as France.
Don't worry, he won't. And this story (like so much of /.) is "hyping empty garbage" (what Glenn Greenwald called Politicoâ(TM)s digital editorial director Blake Hounshell, but applies quite well here). Greenwald explains it all excellently, as per usual.
I'm uninterested in DRM'd e-readers or any e-reader that reveals my location, refuses to let me copy, quote, print, and do other things I do with books. I'm unwilling to sacrifice my rights because some publisher wants a rent scheme on books or wants me to constantly feed them information on my whereabouts, what I'm reading, logging my name with what I read (which even my local library only does as long as the loan), and other privacy violations that simply aren't possible with books. Calling DRM "digital restrictions management" is right and proper because that frames the debate where it belongs—around user's rights.
I'm not so sure that's true because the relevant laws are set such that the penalties are so light for the wealthy violators and virtually non-existant for the most powerful participants in the system. First, the organization with the most patents is not in a position to "feel pain" as you say; IBM's power is (as they've said long ago) in cross-licensing. They said they get an order of magnitude more benefit by leveraging the power the patent scheme was built to exert (which is also part of the problem of calling organizations "patent trolls" as if leveraging that power is somehow not to be expected, or an abuse of an otherwise upright system, when in fact that power is just part of the system operating as designed). As a result, losing patent infringement lawsuits is not common for IBM. Richard Stallman laid out how this works in his patent talks many years ago:
With regard to Apple specifically, it's not that difficult to see that they get by in part by violating government-granted monopoly and they're wealthy enough to be able to afford to do it repeatedly. The people who run Apple now ran NeXT years ago. NeXT infringed the FSF's license (GPLv2) in NeXT's initially unauthorized GCC derivative in which NeXT added Objective-C support. NeXT and the FSF settled out of court when the FSF got them to comply with the terms of the GPL (lesson learned here: stand up for your strong copylefted free software licenses and the bullies will meet your terms). Apple would again violate the GPLv2 later by distributing an infringing copy of VideoLAN Client. VLC co-author Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote critically of Apple's choice to let the program through it's app store saying "Those terms are contradicted by the products usage rules of the AppStore through which Apple delivers applications to users of its mobile devices." Apple infringed upon 3 Chinese writer's copyrights and were ordered to pay 730,000 yuan ($118,000), hardly a sum that would stop Apple from doing this again. But the pattern seems clear: Apple violates laws it doesn't like and never really meets a punishment that will make the leaders of the organization question whether to do it again. Apple isn't unique in this but that is a detail; we need punishments for the wealthy and powerful that make them take the law more seriously. But most importantly for endeavors practiced by the general public, such as computer programming, we need to fight in an organized and political way to end software idea patents. Mere patent reform is a delaying tactic that benefits the powerful.
What stands out to me about your post and the grandparent post is how both of you malign someone with no evidence. I'm certainly not taking you seriously about speaking for "many people [in Seattle]" either.
Ah, the flames from someone without much finesse: Premature declaration of failure to discourage further examination ("The masses have spoken..."), misidentification of fault ("If Apple could have continued using gcc...", "[The FSF] should have gone into the hardware business..."), citing trends with no backing and overvaluing business interests ("...then corporations wouldn't have run away from any GPLv3 software..."), and outright lying about intention and execution ("...weighing the costs of the walled garden (censorship etc) vs the benefits (no viruses)...", "...the attempt to take over the Linux kernel by renaming GNU/Linux..."), your post has so much flamebait to choose from it's almost as if you were taking instruction from an open source proponent who is eager to convince licensors to pick non-copylefted software licenses so they see their work become charitable contributions to software proprietors.
If there's so little interest in protecting oneself from international spying, malware, and other forms of user abuse Glenn Greenwald and other journalists would find it hard to get articles on the Snowden revelations published anywhere, world leaders wouldn't be holding meetings about the Snowden revelations, and people/organizations around the world wouldn't care about encryption. Don't confuse a non-technical user's inability to do better than running proprietary apps from a walled garden with not caring about these issues. They get both no software freedom and plenty of malware in their choice. Most computer users are weighing options where freedom is not available; they're suffering from the myth of choice where all of the readily-available options they know about deny them loyal computers.
Speaking of proprietors, Apple is no victim here. Apple wasn't forced to switch to LLVM and Clang, they chose to because they're proprietors eager to rob users of their software freedom in derivative works. If any organization with the means can be accurately accused of not writing their own stuff, it's Apple not writing their own compilers but instead relying on other compilers. This goes back to NeXT which was the first big GPL copyright infringement case (according to Brad Kuhn, former Executive Director of the FSF which holds the copyright on GCC in his discussion on his OggCast "Free as in Freedom"). NeXT got caught distributing a proprietary derivative of GCC which contained code to compile Objective-C. When Jobs spoke with the FSF about the matter, the FSF informed him that they would enforce their license (GPLv2). Jobs never liked that and never forgot. Apple doesn't mind the GPL they just don't like to be in a position of equality with their users unless they can pull out of that relationship when it suits them (see Apple's purchase of Easy SW which originally developed CUPS).
The FSF never tried to "take over the Linux kernel" and isn't doing so now by properly identifying Linux as a part of an operating system. They have said for years and continue to say they would like the GNU Project to get a share of the credit (1, 2). They also acknowledge that there are systems that don't include GNU and therefore should not be called "GNU slash" anything. No doubt, it would be equally unfair and erroneous to call GNU/kFreeBSD or GNU/HURD a "Linux" system when Linux isn't a part of that. This has nothing to do with capability of writing a kernel; a Linux kernel without the blobs is available so there's no pressing need for a fully-free system to have its own original kernel written by the FSF or the GNU Project. The core of the issue was and is
See Brad Kuhn's talk about the future of copyleft (mirror) for the cure to non-copylefted free software—to keep software freedom in derivative works, license with strongly copylefted free software licenses (the AGPL version 3 or later being the best choice now) and then enforce the license.