Some people have jobs which require opening email attachments from unknown people. Secretaries are often the first point of contact for files sent by the general public. The secretary is often charged with opening the attached file(s) to make sure they're conformant in some organizational sense, then placing a copy of the file somewhere appropriate (such as a file server where other people can further vet the files).
I can easily see a situation where people are asked to upload files via a website to be opened by a committee later. Then everyone on the committee could be running on their machine with an administrative account (common for people who just bought a computer, sometimes having an admin account is viewed as a position of power and privilege).
I'm not saying that any of these problems can't be solved. I'm saying that to frame the issue as strange malcontents trying to take advantage of someone isn't addressing the complexity of the issue at hand.
It seems that this is just another area where overly-capable file formats, proprietary software, and programs that attempt to do too much are all coming together in an unpleasant way...again.
Neither you nor the other objectors in this thread have pointed out exactly why making money from speaking fees is bad. "Being realistic" about the man requires analysis of his message, which I'm not seeing anyone in this thread actually do. Please do cite your sources, provide cogent arguments countering what Doctorow is saying, and be specific. I have done this in my grandparent response to one of the responses to Doctorow.
It's utter nonsense. Doctrow is a self important blowhard who, for reasons unknown, people think is actually relevant.
It's hard to see how your criticism is correct. Doctorow hedges a lot in this essay (one's "favorite medium" will be "devoured, transformed, or destroyed". That covers a lot of possibilities). But even if he's wrong in this essay, your criticism is unjustified and overly harsh: Doctorow is a writer making his money from selling books one can download free, something long thought impossible in the 'why pay for what you can get for free' philosophy. He is walking the talk showing us through his example how one can license liberally, make a living with a huge online component to one's work, and sustain this for years on end. Perhaps there's a message in there for the proprietors of movies, newspapers, TV, and music.
That the Internet can't ever replace newspapers and proper reporting.
One hopes the lecturer didn't conflate such different things as you just did. There's nothing categorically improper about the reporting going on online, and there's nothing categorically proper about reporting in print. Newspapers can switch to online publication and offer the same caliber of reporting they offer now. It's not the quality of reporting that prevents newspaper publishers from losing their print publications. The New York Times, for instance, can continue to lie about the most important issue of the day while punishing authors of far less important articles in ridiculous public displays (Judith Miller versus Jayson Blair) whether they do it in print or online. The medium can change and the reportage can remain the same.
"How many bloggers are embedded in Falujah?"
That doesn't strike me as nearly important as asking: How many reporters are independent? How many are not embedded with the military? How many are failing to present a "difficult public face for [their media organization] in a time of war" or judging their effectiveness by comparing to competitors who are "waving the flag at every opportunity"? Phil Donahue's CNBC show was cancelled for the reasons quoted in these last two quotes, according to a leaked internal memo. I don't recall most of the major news outlets telling us much about the millions on the streets of the world protesting the US invasion of Iraq before it began. I recall them getting head counts wrong and ignoring well-spoken war critics lest their contrary views gain mainstream exposure and thus legitimizing them in the views of those who consume nothing but corporate news. I don't recall good corporate news analysis of the run-up to the war before or after Col. Powell's lies to the UN. Instead, I recall seeing a strong imbalance of views on-air favoring pro-war voices. Some of the most valuable journalism about this war has come from unembedded independent journalists on far less-widely seen shows like "Democracy Now!". It seems to me that the medium isn't the critical factor here, what the news organization says is.
People say that because it's true. To deny someone software freedom is unethical. We want the freedoms of free software because they enable the social solidarity people throughout history need to exist harmoniously, not under a dictator. Society benefits from sharing and cooperation and it is ethical to share and cooperate. Proprietors deny computer users the freedoms they need to behave ethically. It's not a matter of making someone behave ethically, it's about giving people permission to behave ethically and trusting that they will.
All licenses do not say the same thing about how to treat people. Free software licenses allow sharing and modification which is permission to build community. Proprietary licenses forbid these things. The politics of all licenses exist, but you're using the word "politics" to describe something you don't like. The practical problems of non-copylefted free software licenses are also well known. The danger isn't in seeing non-copylefted free software vanish ("BSD/MIT licensed code is in danger of being locked up, never to be seen again, regardless of the wishes of the original coder"), that's a misstatement of the argument. The danger for the user is that they will end up using a proprietary variant of a non-copylefted free software program losing their software freedom. Improvements to the non-free variant do not return to the free variant, so one ends up contributing to one's own competition. The free variant still exists but that variant is less capable and thus less desirable to those who don't value their freedom (which is why we need to teach people to value software freedom for its own sake). Non-free variants might also be better advertised.
I'm told that SumatraPDF is available for Microsoft Windows users. SumatraPDF is licensed under the GNU GPL v2 and it runs with WINE. However I don't choose to use Microsoft Windows or any other proprietary software on my system at home. I use GNU/Linux with free software PDF readers.
All they are advocating is that Apple let more developers publish software for the iPhone platform.
More proprietary software for iPhone, which is not good enough for computer users. What Ballmer wants is to use the iPhone to become an iPhone user's new master. To get this, he argues with a tactic that flies over the heads of a lot of/. readers, the problem of the "freedom of choice": merely choosing one over another attempts to place all choices as equals. So once the choices are narrowed to remove software freedom, which is what's really important, one can pick from a choice of masters. Freedom of choice is usually a way to convince people to discard the choices that would most benefit users, and with computer software that is always software freedom—the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify computer programs.
The FSF lays it out quite well in their essay "Freedom or Power?" which speaks to programmers about the social and ethical concerns of software:
Discussions of rights and rules for software have often concentrated on the interests of programmers alone. Few people in the world program regularly, and fewer still are owners of proprietary software businesses. But the entire developed world now needs and uses software, so software developers now control the way the world lives, does business, communicates and is entertained. The ethical and political issues are not addressed by the slogan of "freedom of choice (for developers only)".
If code is law, as Professor Lawrence Lessig (of Stanford Law School) has stated, then the real question we face is: who should control the code you use--you, or an elite few? We believe you are entitled to control the software you use, and giving you that control is the goal of Free Software.
We believe you should decide what to do with the software you use; however, that is not what today's law says. Current copyright law places us in the position of power over users of our code, whether we like it or not. The ethical response to this situation is to proclaim freedom for each user, just as the Bill of Rights was supposed to exercise government power by guaranteeing each citizen's freedoms. That is what the GNU GPL is for: it puts you in control of your usage of the software, while protecting you from others who would like to take control of your decisions.
As more and more users realize that code is law, and come to feel that they too deserve freedom, they will see the importance of the freedoms we stand for, just as more and more users have come to appreciate the practical value of the Free Software we have developed.
I wouldn't steer people to a proprietary reader like foxit. If Adobe's PDF reader software were free software, we could fix it in any way we chose. The JS interpreter could be removed, or a less capable language interpreter could be put in, or a number of other changes could all compete for an audience. We could get the verifiable security one gets with Evince. By moving from one proprietary program to another, one merely moves from one master to another.
I concur. And it's even worse than you describe. As I understand it, not all iTunes is DRM-free. Some tracks that Apple distributes still have DRM and there are plenty of other reasons to reject doing business with Apple including:
and not getting your music under a license that allows sharing even when you pay for the tracks
I'd rather reward distributors that treat me well, like Magnatune.com which never had DRM (and therefore had no two-faced explanation about how they'd like to get away from DRM). Magnatune lets me play and share all tracks from their catalog (they're all under the CC By-NC-SA 1.0 license and I don't have to buy anything to get copies of tracks under this license). Magnatune doesn't treat their artists differently by letting them buy better promotion on Magnatune's website. Magnatune earns my lifetime subscription fee. Apple earns the outrage of my non-technical friends who bought various Apple products and later discovered the lock-in, proprietary, and expensive loss of their rights.
I fail to see how setting up a set of services with strictly enforced rules is any different from what we already have. What does the arrangement you describe have to do with new top-level domain names? There might be plenty of valid reasons to object to new TLDs but yours doesn't strike me as a reason to object to any new TLD.
Is there some reason why anyone should be concerned with what Apple's position is here? If you bought the iPhone, you should own it and it should play whatever you want it to play at any time. It's sad that anyone would raise Apple's perceived position on this as an issue, as if they rightly should be allowed to stop any activity you undertake with your iPhone.
Do you have any evidence to offer to support that? I'm not convinced that only artists which hit it big elsewhere make sales online. Since there are labels like Magnatune that offer much better deals for the artist, I'd be interested in learning how well those artists fare—how much do they make? How many listeners do they get (approximately)? How many more people come see them in live performances after having learned about them from some online distributor?
I'd be surprised if there is survey data to back the idea that you have to be popular via some other promotion scheme to sell tracks online to the extent that you can continue to afford to live on your income from being a musician.
I'm not sure what that proof would be but I am sure there's no need to make such a proof. Believing that this claim needs proof highlights one of the reasons the open source programming methodology is inaccurate and why the GPL is better understood as a free software license, not a license that endorses the open source development methodology.
The GPL was written so computer users would have software freedom. The open source methodology doesn't advocate for software freedom. Software freedom says that it is ethical to share with your neighbor, treat them as equals (limited only by their ability to do work or have it done for them), and build and defend community. The GPL is a kind of legal shield against those who would take our resources and exploit them without sharing with us. Open source methodology says businesses (chiefly) are better off to develop code along the lines open source lays out so they can have programs with fewer bugs, less expensive development (by getting the community to help), and gain these technical advantages faster.
There's nothing wrong with those technical advantages as far as they go. But they don't go very far. They purposefully say nothing about developing and defending community, they purposefully don't encourage you to ask ethical questions such as the most important question anyone can ask: how should we treat other people? And even within their rather limited scope the claims on development you asked about are often simply not the case. Proprietors aren't incompetent and they sometimes write powerful reliable programs without following the open source development methodology.
I'm not sure exactly what the proof you talk about would look like but the GPL is clearly doing what RMS set out to do with it—give people software they would be free to run, inspect, share, and modify anytime. Also, the GPL doesn't compel anyone to share code—there's nothing requiring the holder of a GPL'd program to share it with others, even if they improve the program themselves and use those improvements. What the GPL says is that you can't withhold improvements you convey to others. This is right in line with defending software freedom. We know that the GPL works to defend freedom because we can point to lots of free software licensed under the GPL and we can point to infringements that were turned around after the infringer was made aware of legal arguments for the GPL. More recently we can look at court cases in various countries around the world where the GPL was confirmed as a defensible software copyright license.
I don't think calling anyone a zealot actually helps you. People who support proprietary software ought to be so labeled, or called "religious" by the same token (another word often used by people who call others they don't agree with "zealots"). The lack of such labeling only highlights which stance is uncritically accepted—a mark of non-thinking on the part of anyone who fails to notice the one-sidedness.
You should name names because that is the only thing which will add enough substance to your argument to give it something to consider.
"You're going to get this mess any time something becomes a platform for political agendas [...]": what part of any license struck you as without political agenda? And why is a lack of political agenda a good thing? It seems to me that proprietor's politics are just as clear as those who want software freedom. They say very different things about how people ought to be treated. How exactly is this a problem?
You spend a lot of time not analyzing any specific arguments. Please be specific in all of your complaints. Otherwise your vague generalizations are meaningless.
I need practical sources of good places to shop.
on
High Tech Misery In China
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I prioritize the safety and health of humans above getting a $5 keyboard on NewEgg.com. I don't share your heartlessness which places profit above humanity. As a detail, it costs surprisingly little to make sure humans have a decent living, health care, potable water, food security, a safe place to live, and other things these keyboard assembly workers lack.
My problem with paying more is that I have no reasonable assurance that the additional money will get to the workers. I don't trust "trickle down" economics but I'm willing to pay more for the products and services I use so that workers get better treatment. If I said to any distributor or manufacturer to charge me more they might do it. But I think they'll keep everything as it is and then pocket the additional money. Not one penny of my money would go toward improving the plight of abused workers anywhere along the chain that gets me my keyboards.
To me, this is the hard part of an ethical sell on the public. Everyone has a pretty good idea of what a safe working environment is (it's why so many are appalled at the conditions described in TFA), and there's lots of people around the world who can go into well-researched detail to explain more on that (such as Charles Kernaghan's exemplary work; see "The Corporation" for more of his work. It's one of the best movies on this and its relationship to the larger picture of the problem with a system based on satisfying profit-seekers at all costs). As a result, when I watch what the corporate media doesn't want me to read or see, I get lots of talk about what to avoid.
But I don't know of a simple, practical, efficient guide for the consumer looking for computer parts. I need to buy a few USB compatible-with-everything keyboards I can plug in and use without any additional software. Furthermore, I need to have a reasonable understanding that these keyboards were manufactured and shipped without abuse to the workers. Where do I get these?
Freedom is still better than non-freedom.
on
Miro 2.0 Launches Today
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I understand and concur about not wanting programs to install stuff you don't want, but I thought I'd mention that this is not as bad as having proprietary software do something similar. With proprietary software you have no option to edit anything to make it work as you wish, or get it edited for you by someone you trust. With FLOSS that option exists even if you choose not to take advantage of it. FLOSS actually respects your ownership by giving you everything you need to make the program behave as you wish. Proprietary software does not respect your position that you own and should control your computer. Whether you are willing to leverage software freedom to your fullest benefit is a completely different issue that is entirely in your control.
As it so happens, the Miro team is a pretty nice and responsive bunch of people so I don't think you'll find Miro doing something so unexpected now.
First, I see you've simply dodged all of the most important points I raised in my post. On the minor technical quibble of what format to submit resumes in, everyone can read a PDF these days. Having served on two hiring committees so far, and being an IT worker, I can safely say that your resume is much easier to handle when it's a PDF containing whatever is needed to properly render the document. OpenOffice.org can generate that PDF natively, including loading your Microsoft Word resume.
Maybe it's not possible to embarrass him because he's doing so well on all the major issues of the day: opposing Iraq invasion, opposing continued Iraq occupation, instantiating impeachment, supporting universal single-payer health care, citing Arms Export and Control Act in voting against House Measure which supported Israeli offensive, being the only repeat Democratic Party peace candidate, and speaking firmly based on ethical and legal grounds the whole way through. These are unarguably international issues of substance (as life and death issues so often are) and he's on the correct side of all of them. I ask you for "substantive issues" because I know/. likes to divert attention away from the important take on issues and dwell endlessly in minor or technical quibbles. I've seen him talk and winced a few times, but never on anything that mattered.
Are you suggesting that the need to publish this material for wide dissemination is somehow related to the number of people who would read it; if few people are perceived to read the material there is much reduced need to publish the material?
It seems to me that this conflates how many would read this material with who deserves access to this material. These factors strike me as two independent issues. Much like software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify a computer program) being debated in terms of whether most computer users would actually do these things. Users deserve software freedom without regard to how many take advantage of those freedoms.
It's telling that almost all of the examples of what to look out for in this thread feature using proprietary software instead of FLOSS.
In your "well-rounded education" I see you framing the debate as choosing between Microsoft's software and Apple's. Where's the education about software freedom that would teach students not to get caught in any proprietors trap? All proprietors want lock-in, in doesn't matter which proprietor you choose (this too is the catch with freedom of choice; once the choices are narrowed to a choice between masters, you are guaranteed to lose your software freedom). I think much of this discussion suffers from having eliminated so much of what matters about schools and making citizens that it's easy to convince people they can afford to focus on which master they should serve under (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc.).
The grandparent poster's comment makes the same error: "sheltering" from Microsoft Word is a good thing. Most people need a grounding in word processors, not in being branded. They use so little of what any word processor has to offer, it hardly matters what they use insofar as functions go. If they're handing in paper, even moreso. If they're handing in documents, instructors should accept a variety of formats which includes output from software poor students can get gratis, inspect, share, and run as they see fit. No proprietary software offers all of this only free software does.
Others are speaking as if OpenOffice.org is to be feared, thus positioning Microsoft Office as a safer choice. Apparently without regard to how incompatible Microsoft's previous software has been with files generated by still earlier versions of Microsoft programs (such as Microsoft Office 97 not reliably loading files generated by earlier versions of Microsoft Word and Excel), and the pointless (from users' perspective) switch to their so-called "open" format. Schools ought not be a bolster for monopoly abuse and proprietorship.
The most fundamental mission of schools is to teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors, not just basic facts and useful skills. That should be their agenda and they should make choices commensurate with that agenda.
I wouldn't recommend trying to help people not fight the RIAA. The RIAA doesn't behave in the public's interest. Also, as to the other part of your argument, we don't need to take a defeatist attitude fearing what the RIAA might say. The RIAA already complains about widespread illicit copying, the RIAA threatens to sue everyone, and sues many people. Some of the people they sue don't deserve to be sued. The RIAA is reckless and they lie. Clearly we should oppose their efforts by boycott and education.
You could only buy copies of music which you know to be good. This act shares the same outcome as a boycott but is quite different in its intention. Richard Stallman proposed this for MPAA-studio-made movies, recognizing that so few of them are worth seeing at all anyone who was so selective would see very few Hollywood movies.
You could buy tracks from distributors that treat you right, like Magnatune. Artists get half of the cost of each track, artists retain their copyrights (Magnatune licenses from the artist), you can preview Magnatune's entire catalog, you can get audio in a variety of formats, you can share tracks with others, you can include tracks in your other works (subject to the limits of the applicable Creative Commons license), and there's never any DRM to contend with. I don't work for Magnatune; it's remarkable what a great deal Magnatune offers in relation to their competitors.
But you can go beyond believing in market lies (as if you ever had any say in the market) and get into education. Explain to your musician friends that it's remarkably unlikely any unknown musician will become famous. The real choice before the musicians is not whether to sign with an RIAA label, it is how much control will the artist share with the listener. Artists can choose to keep control of their copyrights (songs, recorded performances) and sell their own stuff to the public, or artists can choose to lose those copyrights by signing with a label and going into debt to a label. Musicians should choose to stop trading away what little they have in an attempt to become famous.
Obviously what people are referring to when they say YouTube videos aren't "downloadable" is that YouTube offers no user interface for easily downloading the video. I'm sure plenty of/. readers know of programs that will ferret out and then download an FLV file given a YouTube URL. Most users don't use those programs. They use only the features the site offers to them (even down to using the site's ability to recommend some video to a friend instead of copying and pasting the URL into a new email message).
The lack of download UI, like so many other things, was most likely a conscious choice made by YouTube's initial developers (and now continued by Google) to encourage referrals back to the site rather than allow users to pass around copies of videos independently the site. This helps the site become an intermediary between site users (again, for most users who are not as technically skilled as/. readers) in order to gather interesting and saleable information.
There is no free market with proprietary software because only the proprietor has the freedoms of free software for those programs. Only the proprietor can share copies, modify the software, or inspect what the program is doing. Nobody else is allowed to deal in Apple's MacOS X like Apple can, WordPerfect the way Corel can, or Microsoft Money the way Microsoft can. The proprietor exercises their power under copyright law to restrict you from doing these things. This has nothing to do with one's technical skill, I'm talking about legal permission and technical access to source code under a free software license. One could write alternatives (as some hackers are doing for Microsoft Windows with ReactOS) but the alternative isn't the same software even if it is 100% compatible. Free software, on the other hand, is a free market because everyone is allowed to deal in the software (even commercially) limited only by their abilities and desires. Proprietary software is what proprietors use to avoid a free market, not instantiate one. They don't want competition and they have many weapons in their arsenal to avoid competing on a neutral ground. Furthermore, "protect[ing] his investment" is nowhere near as important as society's need to organize and help one another. It's high time we stopped putting business interests ahead of our own interests as people and citizens. The most viable means to do this with computer software is to support software freedom for its own sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people have jobs which require opening email attachments from unknown people. Secretaries are often the first point of contact for files sent by the general public. The secretary is often charged with opening the attached file(s) to make sure they're conformant in some organizational sense, then placing a copy of the file somewhere appropriate (such as a file server where other people can further vet the files).
I can easily see a situation where people are asked to upload files via a website to be opened by a committee later. Then everyone on the committee could be running on their machine with an administrative account (common for people who just bought a computer, sometimes having an admin account is viewed as a position of power and privilege).
I'm not saying that any of these problems can't be solved. I'm saying that to frame the issue as strange malcontents trying to take advantage of someone isn't addressing the complexity of the issue at hand.
It seems that this is just another area where overly-capable file formats, proprietary software, and programs that attempt to do too much are all coming together in an unpleasant way...again.
Neither you nor the other objectors in this thread have pointed out exactly why making money from speaking fees is bad. "Being realistic" about the man requires analysis of his message, which I'm not seeing anyone in this thread actually do. Please do cite your sources, provide cogent arguments countering what Doctorow is saying, and be specific. I have done this in my grandparent response to one of the responses to Doctorow.
It's hard to see how your criticism is correct. Doctorow hedges a lot in this essay (one's "favorite medium" will be "devoured, transformed, or destroyed". That covers a lot of possibilities). But even if he's wrong in this essay, your criticism is unjustified and overly harsh: Doctorow is a writer making his money from selling books one can download free, something long thought impossible in the 'why pay for what you can get for free' philosophy. He is walking the talk showing us through his example how one can license liberally, make a living with a huge online component to one's work, and sustain this for years on end. Perhaps there's a message in there for the proprietors of movies, newspapers, TV, and music.
One hopes the lecturer didn't conflate such different things as you just did. There's nothing categorically improper about the reporting going on online, and there's nothing categorically proper about reporting in print. Newspapers can switch to online publication and offer the same caliber of reporting they offer now. It's not the quality of reporting that prevents newspaper publishers from losing their print publications. The New York Times, for instance, can continue to lie about the most important issue of the day while punishing authors of far less important articles in ridiculous public displays (Judith Miller versus Jayson Blair) whether they do it in print or online. The medium can change and the reportage can remain the same.
That doesn't strike me as nearly important as asking: How many reporters are independent? How many are not embedded with the military? How many are failing to present a "difficult public face for [their media organization] in a time of war" or judging their effectiveness by comparing to competitors who are "waving the flag at every opportunity"? Phil Donahue's CNBC show was cancelled for the reasons quoted in these last two quotes, according to a leaked internal memo. I don't recall most of the major news outlets telling us much about the millions on the streets of the world protesting the US invasion of Iraq before it began. I recall them getting head counts wrong and ignoring well-spoken war critics lest their contrary views gain mainstream exposure and thus legitimizing them in the views of those who consume nothing but corporate news. I don't recall good corporate news analysis of the run-up to the war before or after Col. Powell's lies to the UN. Instead, I recall seeing a strong imbalance of views on-air favoring pro-war voices. Some of the most valuable journalism about this war has come from unembedded independent journalists on far less-widely seen shows like "Democracy Now!". It seems to me that the medium isn't the critical factor here, what the news organization says is.
People say that because it's true. To deny someone software freedom is unethical. We want the freedoms of free software because they enable the social solidarity people throughout history need to exist harmoniously, not under a dictator. Society benefits from sharing and cooperation and it is ethical to share and cooperate. Proprietors deny computer users the freedoms they need to behave ethically. It's not a matter of making someone behave ethically, it's about giving people permission to behave ethically and trusting that they will.
All licenses do not say the same thing about how to treat people. Free software licenses allow sharing and modification which is permission to build community. Proprietary licenses forbid these things. The politics of all licenses exist, but you're using the word "politics" to describe something you don't like. The practical problems of non-copylefted free software licenses are also well known. The danger isn't in seeing non-copylefted free software vanish ("BSD/MIT licensed code is in danger of being locked up, never to be seen again, regardless of the wishes of the original coder"), that's a misstatement of the argument. The danger for the user is that they will end up using a proprietary variant of a non-copylefted free software program losing their software freedom. Improvements to the non-free variant do not return to the free variant, so one ends up contributing to one's own competition. The free variant still exists but that variant is less capable and thus less desirable to those who don't value their freedom (which is why we need to teach people to value software freedom for its own sake). Non-free variants might also be better advertised.
I'm told that SumatraPDF is available for Microsoft Windows users. SumatraPDF is licensed under the GNU GPL v2 and it runs with WINE. However I don't choose to use Microsoft Windows or any other proprietary software on my system at home. I use GNU/Linux with free software PDF readers.
More proprietary software for iPhone, which is not good enough for computer users. What Ballmer wants is to use the iPhone to become an iPhone user's new master. To get this, he argues with a tactic that flies over the heads of a lot of /. readers, the problem of the "freedom of choice": merely choosing one over another attempts to place all choices as equals. So once the choices are narrowed to remove software freedom, which is what's really important, one can pick from a choice of masters. Freedom of choice is usually a way to convince people to discard the choices that would most benefit users, and with computer software that is always software freedom—the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify computer programs.
The FSF lays it out quite well in their essay "Freedom or Power?" which speaks to programmers about the social and ethical concerns of software:
I wouldn't steer people to a proprietary reader like foxit. If Adobe's PDF reader software were free software, we could fix it in any way we chose. The JS interpreter could be removed, or a less capable language interpreter could be put in, or a number of other changes could all compete for an audience. We could get the verifiable security one gets with Evince. By moving from one proprietary program to another, one merely moves from one master to another.
History says just the opposite. The freedom to share, and the freedom to communicate, are human rights that everyone deserves.
I concur. And it's even worse than you describe. As I understand it, not all iTunes is DRM-free. Some tracks that Apple distributes still have DRM and there are plenty of other reasons to reject doing business with Apple including:
I'd rather reward distributors that treat me well, like Magnatune.com which never had DRM (and therefore had no two-faced explanation about how they'd like to get away from DRM). Magnatune lets me play and share all tracks from their catalog (they're all under the CC By-NC-SA 1.0 license and I don't have to buy anything to get copies of tracks under this license). Magnatune doesn't treat their artists differently by letting them buy better promotion on Magnatune's website. Magnatune earns my lifetime subscription fee. Apple earns the outrage of my non-technical friends who bought various Apple products and later discovered the lock-in, proprietary, and expensive loss of their rights.
I fail to see how setting up a set of services with strictly enforced rules is any different from what we already have. What does the arrangement you describe have to do with new top-level domain names? There might be plenty of valid reasons to object to new TLDs but yours doesn't strike me as a reason to object to any new TLD.
Is there some reason why anyone should be concerned with what Apple's position is here? If you bought the iPhone, you should own it and it should play whatever you want it to play at any time. It's sad that anyone would raise Apple's perceived position on this as an issue, as if they rightly should be allowed to stop any activity you undertake with your iPhone.
Do you have any evidence to offer to support that? I'm not convinced that only artists which hit it big elsewhere make sales online. Since there are labels like Magnatune that offer much better deals for the artist, I'd be interested in learning how well those artists fare—how much do they make? How many listeners do they get (approximately)? How many more people come see them in live performances after having learned about them from some online distributor?
I'd be surprised if there is survey data to back the idea that you have to be popular via some other promotion scheme to sell tracks online to the extent that you can continue to afford to live on your income from being a musician.
I'm not sure what that proof would be but I am sure there's no need to make such a proof. Believing that this claim needs proof highlights one of the reasons the open source programming methodology is inaccurate and why the GPL is better understood as a free software license, not a license that endorses the open source development methodology.
The GPL was written so computer users would have software freedom. The open source methodology doesn't advocate for software freedom. Software freedom says that it is ethical to share with your neighbor, treat them as equals (limited only by their ability to do work or have it done for them), and build and defend community. The GPL is a kind of legal shield against those who would take our resources and exploit them without sharing with us. Open source methodology says businesses (chiefly) are better off to develop code along the lines open source lays out so they can have programs with fewer bugs, less expensive development (by getting the community to help), and gain these technical advantages faster.
There's nothing wrong with those technical advantages as far as they go. But they don't go very far. They purposefully say nothing about developing and defending community, they purposefully don't encourage you to ask ethical questions such as the most important question anyone can ask: how should we treat other people? And even within their rather limited scope the claims on development you asked about are often simply not the case. Proprietors aren't incompetent and they sometimes write powerful reliable programs without following the open source development methodology.
I'm not sure exactly what the proof you talk about would look like but the GPL is clearly doing what RMS set out to do with it—give people software they would be free to run, inspect, share, and modify anytime. Also, the GPL doesn't compel anyone to share code—there's nothing requiring the holder of a GPL'd program to share it with others, even if they improve the program themselves and use those improvements. What the GPL says is that you can't withhold improvements you convey to others. This is right in line with defending software freedom. We know that the GPL works to defend freedom because we can point to lots of free software licensed under the GPL and we can point to infringements that were turned around after the infringer was made aware of legal arguments for the GPL. More recently we can look at court cases in various countries around the world where the GPL was confirmed as a defensible software copyright license.
I don't think calling anyone a zealot actually helps you. People who support proprietary software ought to be so labeled, or called "religious" by the same token (another word often used by people who call others they don't agree with "zealots"). The lack of such labeling only highlights which stance is uncritically accepted—a mark of non-thinking on the part of anyone who fails to notice the one-sidedness.
You should name names because that is the only thing which will add enough substance to your argument to give it something to consider.
"You're going to get this mess any time something becomes a platform for political agendas [...]": what part of any license struck you as without political agenda? And why is a lack of political agenda a good thing? It seems to me that proprietor's politics are just as clear as those who want software freedom. They say very different things about how people ought to be treated. How exactly is this a problem?
You spend a lot of time not analyzing any specific arguments. Please be specific in all of your complaints. Otherwise your vague generalizations are meaningless.
I prioritize the safety and health of humans above getting a $5 keyboard on NewEgg.com. I don't share your heartlessness which places profit above humanity. As a detail, it costs surprisingly little to make sure humans have a decent living, health care, potable water, food security, a safe place to live, and other things these keyboard assembly workers lack.
My problem with paying more is that I have no reasonable assurance that the additional money will get to the workers. I don't trust "trickle down" economics but I'm willing to pay more for the products and services I use so that workers get better treatment. If I said to any distributor or manufacturer to charge me more they might do it. But I think they'll keep everything as it is and then pocket the additional money. Not one penny of my money would go toward improving the plight of abused workers anywhere along the chain that gets me my keyboards.
To me, this is the hard part of an ethical sell on the public. Everyone has a pretty good idea of what a safe working environment is (it's why so many are appalled at the conditions described in TFA), and there's lots of people around the world who can go into well-researched detail to explain more on that (such as Charles Kernaghan's exemplary work; see "The Corporation" for more of his work. It's one of the best movies on this and its relationship to the larger picture of the problem with a system based on satisfying profit-seekers at all costs). As a result, when I watch what the corporate media doesn't want me to read or see, I get lots of talk about what to avoid.
But I don't know of a simple, practical, efficient guide for the consumer looking for computer parts. I need to buy a few USB compatible-with-everything keyboards I can plug in and use without any additional software. Furthermore, I need to have a reasonable understanding that these keyboards were manufactured and shipped without abuse to the workers. Where do I get these?
Fred von Lohmann of the EFF, author of the piece pointed to in this /. thread, also wrote a concise and thorough exposé of the FUD behind another recent Apple dud claim: Apple tried to use the DMCA to shut down the IpodHash project's bluwiki where posters discussed how to let people sync media to the latest versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch. /. talked about this case at the time, but links to von Lohmann's article and /. discussion aren't in the /. headline summary, so I thought I'd bring them to your attention here. von Lohmann's article is critical reading if you want a better understanding of how this proprietor and the DMCA actually work.
I understand and concur about not wanting programs to install stuff you don't want, but I thought I'd mention that this is not as bad as having proprietary software do something similar. With proprietary software you have no option to edit anything to make it work as you wish, or get it edited for you by someone you trust. With FLOSS that option exists even if you choose not to take advantage of it. FLOSS actually respects your ownership by giving you everything you need to make the program behave as you wish. Proprietary software does not respect your position that you own and should control your computer. Whether you are willing to leverage software freedom to your fullest benefit is a completely different issue that is entirely in your control.
As it so happens, the Miro team is a pretty nice and responsive bunch of people so I don't think you'll find Miro doing something so unexpected now.
First, I see you've simply dodged all of the most important points I raised in my post. On the minor technical quibble of what format to submit resumes in, everyone can read a PDF these days. Having served on two hiring committees so far, and being an IT worker, I can safely say that your resume is much easier to handle when it's a PDF containing whatever is needed to properly render the document. OpenOffice.org can generate that PDF natively, including loading your Microsoft Word resume.
Maybe it's not possible to embarrass him because he's doing so well on all the major issues of the day: opposing Iraq invasion, opposing continued Iraq occupation, instantiating impeachment, supporting universal single-payer health care, citing Arms Export and Control Act in voting against House Measure which supported Israeli offensive, being the only repeat Democratic Party peace candidate, and speaking firmly based on ethical and legal grounds the whole way through. These are unarguably international issues of substance (as life and death issues so often are) and he's on the correct side of all of them. I ask you for "substantive issues" because I know /. likes to divert attention away from the important take on issues and dwell endlessly in minor or technical quibbles. I've seen him talk and winced a few times, but never on anything that mattered.
Are you suggesting that the need to publish this material for wide dissemination is somehow related to the number of people who would read it; if few people are perceived to read the material there is much reduced need to publish the material?
It seems to me that this conflates how many would read this material with who deserves access to this material. These factors strike me as two independent issues. Much like software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify a computer program) being debated in terms of whether most computer users would actually do these things. Users deserve software freedom without regard to how many take advantage of those freedoms.
It's telling that almost all of the examples of what to look out for in this thread feature using proprietary software instead of FLOSS.
In your "well-rounded education" I see you framing the debate as choosing between Microsoft's software and Apple's. Where's the education about software freedom that would teach students not to get caught in any proprietors trap? All proprietors want lock-in, in doesn't matter which proprietor you choose (this too is the catch with freedom of choice; once the choices are narrowed to a choice between masters, you are guaranteed to lose your software freedom). I think much of this discussion suffers from having eliminated so much of what matters about schools and making citizens that it's easy to convince people they can afford to focus on which master they should serve under (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc.).
The grandparent poster's comment makes the same error: "sheltering" from Microsoft Word is a good thing. Most people need a grounding in word processors, not in being branded. They use so little of what any word processor has to offer, it hardly matters what they use insofar as functions go. If they're handing in paper, even moreso. If they're handing in documents, instructors should accept a variety of formats which includes output from software poor students can get gratis, inspect, share, and run as they see fit. No proprietary software offers all of this only free software does.
Others are speaking as if OpenOffice.org is to be feared, thus positioning Microsoft Office as a safer choice. Apparently without regard to how incompatible Microsoft's previous software has been with files generated by still earlier versions of Microsoft programs (such as Microsoft Office 97 not reliably loading files generated by earlier versions of Microsoft Word and Excel), and the pointless (from users' perspective) switch to their so-called "open" format. Schools ought not be a bolster for monopoly abuse and proprietorship.
The most fundamental mission of schools is to teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors, not just basic facts and useful skills. That should be their agenda and they should make choices commensurate with that agenda.
I wouldn't recommend trying to help people not fight the RIAA. The RIAA doesn't behave in the public's interest. Also, as to the other part of your argument, we don't need to take a defeatist attitude fearing what the RIAA might say. The RIAA already complains about widespread illicit copying, the RIAA threatens to sue everyone, and sues many people. Some of the people they sue don't deserve to be sued. The RIAA is reckless and they lie. Clearly we should oppose their efforts by boycott and education.
You could only buy copies of music which you know to be good. This act shares the same outcome as a boycott but is quite different in its intention. Richard Stallman proposed this for MPAA-studio-made movies, recognizing that so few of them are worth seeing at all anyone who was so selective would see very few Hollywood movies.
You could buy tracks from distributors that treat you right, like Magnatune. Artists get half of the cost of each track, artists retain their copyrights (Magnatune licenses from the artist), you can preview Magnatune's entire catalog, you can get audio in a variety of formats, you can share tracks with others, you can include tracks in your other works (subject to the limits of the applicable Creative Commons license), and there's never any DRM to contend with. I don't work for Magnatune; it's remarkable what a great deal Magnatune offers in relation to their competitors.
But you can go beyond believing in market lies (as if you ever had any say in the market) and get into education. Explain to your musician friends that it's remarkably unlikely any unknown musician will become famous. The real choice before the musicians is not whether to sign with an RIAA label, it is how much control will the artist share with the listener. Artists can choose to keep control of their copyrights (songs, recorded performances) and sell their own stuff to the public, or artists can choose to lose those copyrights by signing with a label and going into debt to a label. Musicians should choose to stop trading away what little they have in an attempt to become famous.
Obviously what people are referring to when they say YouTube videos aren't "downloadable" is that YouTube offers no user interface for easily downloading the video. I'm sure plenty of /. readers know of programs that will ferret out and then download an FLV file given a YouTube URL. Most users don't use those programs. They use only the features the site offers to them (even down to using the site's ability to recommend some video to a friend instead of copying and pasting the URL into a new email message).
The lack of download UI, like so many other things, was most likely a conscious choice made by YouTube's initial developers (and now continued by Google) to encourage referrals back to the site rather than allow users to pass around copies of videos independently the site. This helps the site become an intermediary between site users (again, for most users who are not as technically skilled as /. readers) in order to gather interesting and saleable information.
There is no free market with proprietary software because only the proprietor has the freedoms of free software for those programs. Only the proprietor can share copies, modify the software, or inspect what the program is doing. Nobody else is allowed to deal in Apple's MacOS X like Apple can, WordPerfect the way Corel can, or Microsoft Money the way Microsoft can. The proprietor exercises their power under copyright law to restrict you from doing these things. This has nothing to do with one's technical skill, I'm talking about legal permission and technical access to source code under a free software license. One could write alternatives (as some hackers are doing for Microsoft Windows with ReactOS) but the alternative isn't the same software even if it is 100% compatible. Free software, on the other hand, is a free market because everyone is allowed to deal in the software (even commercially) limited only by their abilities and desires. Proprietary software is what proprietors use to avoid a free market, not instantiate one. They don't want competition and they have many weapons in their arsenal to avoid competing on a neutral ground. Furthermore, "protect[ing] his investment" is nowhere near as important as society's need to organize and help one another. It's high time we stopped putting business interests ahead of our own interests as people and citizens. The most viable means to do this with computer software is to support software freedom for its own sake.