As a brief addendum to my earlier comment, the most powerful reason to reject proprietary software isn't technical it's ethical; it's the most prominent dividing line between the philosophies of the free software and open source movements: how we treat one another matters. Social solidarity matters. Keeping users helpless to aid their fellows and themselves is unethical, and that's what proprietary software does because nobody but the proprietor can tell you how that proprietary program really works or grant you permission to change that program. The open source movement was defined to not raise any ethical challenge to business because that movement's proponents wish to speak to businesses, including those which make and distribute proprietary software. They want to end the conversation at software development methodology and convenience. So when faced with powerful reliable proprietary software, open source proponents will ultimately accept the software and lose their software freedom while a free software activist will reject the program and work toward making a free replacement for that program so nobody is tempted in the future: (from the aforelinked essay)
The main initial motivation for the term "open source software" is that the ethical ideas of "free software" make some people uneasy. That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might prefer to ignore, such as whether their conduct is ethical. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may simply close their minds to it. It does not follow that we ought to stop talking about these things.
However, that is what the leaders of "open source" decided to do. They figured that by keeping quiet about ethics and freedom, and talking only about the immediate practical benefits of certain free software, they might be able to "sell" the software more effectively to certain users, especially business.
This approach has proved effective, in its own terms. The rhetoric of open source has convinced many businesses and individuals to use, and even develop, free software, which has extended our community--but only at the superficial, practical level. The philosophy of open source, with its purely practical values, impedes understanding of the deeper ideas of free software; it brings many people into our community, but does not teach them to defend it. That is good, as far as it goes, but it is not enough to make freedom secure. Attracting users to free software takes them just part of the way to becoming defenders of their own freedom.
Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, some even offering copies gratis. Why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, to value freedom as such rather than the technical and practical convenience of specific free software. To spread this idea, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the "keep quiet" approach to business can be useful for the community, but it is dangerous if it becomes so common that the love of freedom comes to seem like an eccentricity.
That dangerous situation is exactly what we have. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom--usually because they seek to be "more acceptable to business." Software distributors especially show this pattern. Nearly all GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage, rather than a step backwards from freedom.
Proprietary add-on software and partially non-free GNU/Linux distributions find fertile ground because most of our community does not insist on freedom with its software. This is no coincidence. Most GNU/Linux users were introduced to the system by "
Without software freedom you have no idea how or if the permissions you attempt to set are being paid attention to in the way you'd want. Microsoft, for example, was known for having secret APIs to allow their apps to do things their competitors couldn't. There's no technical reason an OS proprietor's secret API couldn't grant them access to anything on the system regardless of your permissions. By contrast, implementing secret APIs in a free software OS isn't viable; any attempt runs the risk of being discovered, edited out, and competing derivatives distributed as an improvement which the community can switch to.
The protection of your data comes from running more free software, not less. Also, I value the software for its freedom, not its features, so I'd rather work to make free software better instead of tossing aside my freedom for something else. In other words, I like powerful reliable programs too, but I'm not going to toss aside my software freedom to get it.
There's no way to know unless you're running free software (software you're free to inspect, share, run, and modify) to do that job.
By the same token, any proprietary software (regardless of its purported task) should be troublesome. Technically there's nothing that prevents a proprietary statistical analysis program from doing things you wouldn't want done without your full consent such as removing programs, altering files, opening a remote access point for someone, or sending information about your computer somewhere.
The faithful are numerous and clear: Apparently setting up a slick-looking website which claims that a program is trustworthy is enough to convince many people that that program won't do something bad. Even amongst what passes for technical conversation on sites like/. the religion goes unquestioned; this view prevails despite that nobody really knows what AVG, Norton, McAfee, and so many other anti-malware programs do. You'd think that at least for security software (such as what's being discussed in this thread) you'd see numerous challenges any proprietary anti-malware software (even though logically and ethically there's no reason to limit software freedom to just security tasks).
I guess it will take some more time and more hard knocks to make people understand that price and freedom aren't the same thing and that freedom encompasses (and is a lot more valuable than) price since, with freedom, all can share as they wish commercially or not. I certainly don't have the time or skill to inspect every program I use, and I certainly don't trust proprietors to tell me the real story on what their programs do. So I'm not going to choose to cut myself off from other people inspecting what they can, improving and sharing along the way.
How sad that you choose to engage in name-calling instead of spelling out your apparent disagreement respectfully. Before you get into that, should you choose to explain your earlier statement, you should keep in mind the remarkable history of achievement and prescience Stallman shares with us. I don't seek perfection in anyone but I can't think of too many people who have given us all so much practical useful stuff and wisdom to think about. Specifcally, it's not every hacker who writes wildly popular licenses (GPL, LGPL), lots of software which is still immeasurably useful today (GDB, GCC, GNU Emacs, and so much more), and encourages us to keep in mind our freedoms to share and modify so that we can work with each other cooperatively and without foreseeable exploitation which pits us against our own work. Short-term and long-term that's impressive work even if you don't like his politics. Is it really that hard to be civil while expressing contrary views?
I also enjoyed the unjustified assumption in the/. summary, "It doesn't seek to identify individuals". This assessment is utterly unverifiable no matter who said it. It could be an outright lie or it could be the truth and the recording is passed to someone for whom that is the case. For all we know, the feed is being recorded and will be fed to some future face identification software which will seek to identify individuals. Or the feed is improperly secured and (contrary to the wishes of the billboard owner) is feeding someone a stream of data right now which will be fed to programs that seek to identify individuals. People do all sorts of interesting things with recordings after they're made. People also inadvertently leak information. It doesn't seem to me beyond the pale that one might seek to identify individuals later when the software to do that job is more reliable.
I can see an argument of no reasonable expectation of privacy when one is in public, but I don't know if that theory would hold water in Japan (either legally or with the Japanese people). As far as the technical requirements for doing exactly what the summary claims isn't happening, I don't buy the/. summary for an instant.
This is probably the big reason that commercial OSs are popular.
All free software OSes are commercial OSes. Perhaps you meant to say "proprietary" instead of "commercial"? They mean completely different things; one is relevant to the issue at hand, the other is not. No matter, making a program proprietary hasn't been shown to make a program popular. I believe bundling some program with a computer makes that program more popular because I believe people tend to use what is put in front of them.
When traditional businessmen hand over information to another company they can accompany that with a contract that can through the legal system leverage some pain against the other business if the information is used against the company rather than for it. How are you going to do that against open-source?
You hire someone and/or contract the service. Software freedom gives you more people and more businesses with whom to do business. In the free software community you can expect more in-depth technical knowledge because users can run, inspect, share, and modify the program. Proprietary software restricts how much most users can fully understand what that program does and how to fix it when it isn't working to your expectations. Proprietary software means you are led into a dual trap as someone hiring someone else to work for you (whether a consultant or hiring someone into a full-time position): only the proprietor can really make changes to the software so only the proprietor can be held to any substantive fix-this-now kind of arrangement, and the proprietor might not be willing to agree to the terms of your contract leaving you with nobody else to work with for your truly pressing technical issues.
I don't recall the FSF or the free software movement ever arguing that more choices are good when those choices include freedom-denying software. I think they're not going to fall for a bad argument that would end up offering freedom-denying software as a recommended option alongside freedom-respecting software as if they're all good choices. That movement and that organization, after all, focus on how to respect and protect all user's software freedoms. Hence it makes sense that they would not offer documentation that presents proprietary software in the same light as software that respects the freedoms they fight for. And all of this only goes for what the GNU Project will endorse, not what you're allowed to talk about.
The opposite is the case for proprietors: I don't think Apple and Microsoft are interested in offering you documentation on how to liberate yourself from their proprietary multimedia codecs, their proprietary office software, their proprietary operating systems, etc. The difference is in what you're free to do: free software systems don't lock you into their software. Proprietors are always looking for ways to lock out competition and lock you into what they offer. There's even proprietary software where the license claims to restrict your speech: at least one version of Microsoft's Frontpage license includes language that says something to the effect of you agree not to use the program to disparage Microsoft.
The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. How will free software activists and open source enthusiasts react to that?
A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.
The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement." If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.
I think you're misreading the FSF's article and overreacting.
I'm not sure what label you're referring to with regard to the free software community and I'm not familiar enough with the HRC or what happened there, so it's hard to respond to that. The labels I see most often are free software and open source and members of these movements get along quite well most of the time, they work together and write a lot of great software. The philosophies of these two movements aren't the same and that difference leads to radically different conclusions when it comes to proprietary software.
Except that, by saying "you can't talk about proprietary software", you're taking away freedom. It's called censorship.
I'm a little lost since I'm not sure how you mean this quote. Exactly who said that quote and where? I didn't find that quote in the grandparent post to which you followed up nor do I recall the FSF ever arguing this. To the contrary, they talk about proprietary software all the time: the problems it poses for society, the conflict between what schools ought to be doing and the message proprietary software sends instead, how to go about working for practical replacements to proprietary software so it isn't a problem (as they've done so many times by encouraging free software replacements or developing and distributing free software replacements directly).
If you're trying to get at some absolutist argument about freedom (so the quote isn't to be taken as someone's direct words but instead a concept) it won't work because some freedoms conflict and you need restrictions on some freedoms to preserve other more important freedoms. Again, I don't recall anyone ever advocating that one can't talk about software freedom outside of very restrictive circumstances (the FSF generally doesn't do this in its works so as to avoid lending legitimacy to proprietary software, but this is highly dependent on context). Restricting some freedoms to preserve other freedoms is an argument FSF speakers have made in talks which I'll try to summarize: we value pedestrians more highly than vehicle drivers so we restrict drivers from driving anywhere they want at any speed. We make them use streets, obey speed limits, and stop at intersections so pedestrians can cross. In the free software community the FSF wrote the GPL to restrict licensing of derivatives in order to preserve the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify for all computer users.
Tivoization is a real and present threat to software freedom. So the FSF improved the GPL and included language which nullifies that threat. The same for the threat posed by the Microsoft-Novell patent deal. Even the way in which Bittorrent distributes software was not well-addressed in GPLv2 so it was better handled in GPLv3. It's right and proper that when you're working to preserve software freedom you react to problems large and small as they arise. I'm guessing GPLv4 will be more of the same: reacting to dangers to software freedom, improving language to allow what may be confused for unintentional copyright infringement (ala Bittorrent where it's possible to inadvertantly distribute binaries without complete corresponding source code or a written promise for said source code), and generally making it easier to correct mistakes and get on with sharing and improving.
My experience with my former radio show and talking to people in person is exactly the opposite. People are interested to hear about software freedom and they become even more interested when proprietary software fails to behave as users would like (which it invariably does both because all complex software is buggy and because DRM cannot be implemented with free software). The kids that frequent sites like/. are all about rejecting anything that illustrates how computers are social and how society can't exist on the narrow commerce-centric definitions you find amongst proprietors and most businesses. But if you speak calmly and rationally to them in person they'll listen and ask questions. Pretty soon you have a conversation going and an opportunity to teach something kids don't learn in schools, unfortunately: social solidarity matters and that's what the free software movement is really all about.
What you're talking about is often erroneously referred to as a "paper trail". That term is harmful because it is too vague. Diebold sells a DRE (direct recording equipment; the computer records and tabulates the votes it collects) which produces a "paper trail": a long receipt-like strip of paper which ostensibly lists all the voters who used that machine since the last session. The problem with this is it is not voter-verified. Only the election judges get to see it and therefore it is entirely useless, truly nothing but a waste of paper.
What voters need is better described as a voter-verified paper ballot. A piece of paper clearly listing their vote(s) which will be, as you said, manually counted by human beings (never computer counted).
Nobody needs election returns faster than humans can count them. Retention enables recounts. We should retain these voter-verified paper ballots at least until the next election, if not as long as possible.
We also need the software the machines run to be completely free software because free software voting machines allow counties to make the changes they need to handle changes in their electorate. If some district wants an election that isn't counted as first-past-the-post, they will need the freedom to change their voting machines to accommodate this. Nobody should have to beg the proprietor for improvements to their voting systems. Counties should be able to get expertise wherever that expertise exists and only a free software voting system enables this.
A few years ago I served on the appointed committee to help the Champaign County board select a voting machine. We saw some voting machines demonstrated for us, tried them out, and decided what to recommend to the elected county board. The entire affair was picking the best of the worst. The allowable range of debate had been narrowed for us before we began when we were informed that we were only allowed to consider equipment approved by the state of Illinois. Toward the end of our tenure we learned that one of the machines we had been allowed to choose (and ultimately did choose, an ES&S optical scan reader/printer machine for preparing ballots) was not yet so approved. That machine has been deployed in at least two elections since we made our recommendation. Voters can optionally use it to fill out the voter-verified paper ballot before depositing their paper ballot into another ES&S machine which counts and stores the ballots.
Re:FLOSS lets you control your destiny.
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GIMP 2.6 Released
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Efficiency is very vague. Your freedom and acknowledgment of getting future bugs fixed or features added isn't addressed by using a proprietary program. It's a shame you don't care about philosophical issues of software when these issues have direct effects on your ability to "get [your] job done" now and in the future.
I'm not familiar with IVTV and I don't know what they told you. But manufacturers do sometimes change chipsets on devices without changing the model number. If that happened, there's nothing anyone but Hauppage can do about this. Complaining at IVTV as you did ("Whatever...") places the blame on the wrong party. You probably feel like you wasted your time investigating this at all, but at least with FLOSS you probably didn't waste your money as well (since so much FLOSS is available gratis).
Well, it's all open source. Since you're such a huge RMS fan, why don't you make it? You can even use his tools and software licenses! Of course, that would take a lot more effort than posting on Slashdot.
If you're not trolling and you're genuinely trying to get other people to do work you want done, you should consider asking people more nicely. Honey attracts more flies than vinegar, as the old saying goes.
Being a fan of RMS is not what's required to properly address RMS' concerns here. Ultimately I think that you're trying to motivate someone who owes you nothing by complaining about them (this makes you seem impolitic), and presenting no clear understanding of the magnitude of the issues in front of us (this makes you seem insensitive). Consider what RMS is talking about and you'll see that the lack of trust is not so easily handled by making a new product. For instance, with email one might want to host their own email service so they're not dependent on a server they don't control. But that requires considerable infrastructure and publicly signing encrypted email isn't (yet?) transparently useful across all of the most widely used email programs. I believe the issues RMS raises aren't new issues per se, but they are mostly new in scale—we've had these problems before but now that a lot more people with a wide range of technical skill are online we face new difficulties addressing all of their needs in ways novices can appreciate and get behind.
Unspent capital is a promise of nothing.
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Now complete the implication: how much of that capital are these people willing to spend on GIMP development (with any developers willing to hack on the GIMP, not only the first GIMP team)? And why haven't they funded CMYK GIMP code so far? The freedom of free software is not a promise that someone will do your work for you. It's a promise that you will have the freedom to do your work. This might mean spending money on development to meet your own needs.
FLOSS lets you control your destiny.
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GIMP 2.6 Released
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Which is why you get a copy of the FLOSS program to share with others and ask people how much they'd charge to add the functionality you need, right? I'm hoping you're not just treating FLOSS developers as your unpaid workers, bad-mouthing their effort for not meeting your needs while giving them nothing in exchange.
With proprietary software the results are just the opposite: if I ask for features proprietary software doesn't have, I am either told the program won't do that or I don't really need to do that to begin with. Then, should I be foolish enough to get a copy of the proprietary program anyhow, I'm left with software I can't share or modify no matter my programming skill or the skill of the people I would have liked to have shared copies with. In one particular case I recall with Microsoft (I posted about it on/. years ago, but I'm not a/. subscriber so I can't point you to the specific post) I found bugs in their office software. When I contacted them they asked me for a credit card number so I could be charged just to tell them what was broken in their software.
Because all he ever does is criticize. If he knows so much about what's right and wrong in the computer industry, why isn't he the one building what's right?
I think his software hacking bona fides are well in order: being the first developer of gcc, gdb, and GNU Emacs place him in a league far above those who get unwarranted praise for their political opinions and programmatic choices like Linus Torvalds (his use of BitKeeper and misunderstanding of GPLv3 stand out among many technical decisions of merit in developing the Linux kernel). Once you add in writing two of the most widely used free software licenses (GPL and LGPL), Stallman's contributions are simply amazing. I don't know enough about all the projects used in GNU to say that there aren't any which can be used to directly address the problems with so-called "cloud computing" (which he rightly derides), but it's a safe bet that there's something which can contribute significantly. History clearly shows that he does know so much about what is right and wrong and he knows that it is society, not industry, that matters.
Speak for yourself, I am a "web developer" (I fail to see how "programmer" doesn't suffice) and I prefer democratic control of software (software freedom) and letting a thousand flowers bloom. Software freedom can be messy but we're better off having that messiness than allowing any one implementation of something to dictate how things work.
Not your fault, but vapor cars aren't useful.
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DIY Hybrid Car Kit
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Thanks for the list of upcoming EVs and PHEVs. It looks like not many are available now and some of the cars available now are only for the wealthy (anything from Tesla Motors). I'd hardly say that debunks "the most common criticism of electric vehicles": "there's so little out there!" as that list says it does. That list seems to support that criticism quite well. None of this is your fault, as you didn't write the list or the intro hype found on that page as far as I can tell.
Furthermore, the list doesn't contend with on-the-ground realities: plans can be scuttled before or after a fleet of vehicles have been built. I think the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" shows this quite well with a couple of examples (GM's EV1 and the Toyota RAV4EV). Regardless of the reasons why those automakers offered then pulled their cars, consumers don't need their cars taken from them.
Unless the car is available now it's vapor and history shows that if it's not available to own the car can become vapor again even after someone drives it.
No, it's like giving someone a book and then forbidding them from obtaining the knowledge to make their own books or modifying the book you gave them so it can suit their needs.
You seem to misunderstand the point of freedom. Just because most computer users aren't hackers and have no desire to become hackers doesn't mean they should be prohibited from being hackers to the degree they want to be one (not all jobs require serious programming skills, some jobs like translation can be done without editing code at all). Proprietary software always prohibits one from doing what they want with their software, even simple things like sharing a verbatim copy with someone else. Protecting freedom means thinking beyond your immediate desires and your own view of the world, realizing that you can't know what you'll want to do in the future and others want different things than you so you're better off retaining freedoms even if you don't exercise them yourself. In computer software the freedoms you throw away could be the freedoms someone wants when they get software from you.
I wouldn't trade away my freedom of speech even if I happened to agree with what my government was doing and therefore had no need to protest.
As for needing details of food production, you probably need that more than you think. Some people want to know if there is something in the wine that shouldn't be there. This information allows them to find wine that was free of pollutants. Some people care about the plight of the workers and other customers when they buy products, so they will use their consumer power (small as it is) to help shape a better world.
Upload a high-quality MPEG-2 file to The Internet Archive, fill out the form describing the video, and let them create derivative files for you. TV shows do this daily uploading gigabytes without difficulty. You'll end up with files you can link directly to at no charge (use the "download" URLs, don't link to specific servers; download URLs will be redirected as archive.org does their internal bookkeeping). If there are any kinds of videos you want which archive.org doesn't make for you, you can upload those too. BitTorrent doesn't work as well as archive.org because when your video is no longer popular, seeders drop out and make it harder for others to get the video. Also, as more browsers have Ogg Vorbis+Theora built-in, you'll want a copy of your video encoded with Ogg Vorbis+Theora so you can use <video> with the browser's built-in support.
Editorializing from the headline, Roman Phalanx wrote
Now that OLPC has decided to super size their systems to run Windows XP...
There's nothing "super" about losing one's software freedom. The XO was originally an educational project where even the computer the kids learn on could be part of the lessons. Switching to proprietary software means placing barriers on that education by telling the user that there are some things you weren't meant to know and shall be forbidden from learning, sharing, or changing to suit your needs. There's nothing good about that for the user, whose concerns outrank any proprietor. It is not society's job to placate software proprietors. The free software movement welcomes businesses that treat us as partners, not as a market to exploit. The free software community certainly gives businesses lots to work with and make money from.
Armed groups of police in the Twin Cities have raided more than a half-a-dozen locations since Friday night in a series of preemptive raids before the Republican convention. The coordinated searches were led by Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher but conducted in coordination with federal agencies.
This should hardly be surprising as federal Senator McCain, President Bush, and Vice President Cheney were all planned to appear for the RNC. It would be unusual if county and citywide police were doing this on their own without any input from any federal agency. As time passes I'm sure we'll learn more about the specific people involved at all levels.
ST. PAUL, MN--Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time. Police violently manhandled Goodman, yanking her arm, as they arrested her. Video of her arrest can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ
Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman's crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.
Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.
Today's DN! (video, audio) has more on these preemptive arrests and detainments including footage of the police action in progress.
Slashdot Mirror
As a brief addendum to my earlier comment, the most powerful reason to reject proprietary software isn't technical it's ethical; it's the most prominent dividing line between the philosophies of the free software and open source movements: how we treat one another matters. Social solidarity matters. Keeping users helpless to aid their fellows and themselves is unethical, and that's what proprietary software does because nobody but the proprietor can tell you how that proprietary program really works or grant you permission to change that program. The open source movement was defined to not raise any ethical challenge to business because that movement's proponents wish to speak to businesses, including those which make and distribute proprietary software. They want to end the conversation at software development methodology and convenience. So when faced with powerful reliable proprietary software, open source proponents will ultimately accept the software and lose their software freedom while a free software activist will reject the program and work toward making a free replacement for that program so nobody is tempted in the future: (from the aforelinked essay)
Without software freedom you have no idea how or if the permissions you attempt to set are being paid attention to in the way you'd want. Microsoft, for example, was known for having secret APIs to allow their apps to do things their competitors couldn't. There's no technical reason an OS proprietor's secret API couldn't grant them access to anything on the system regardless of your permissions. By contrast, implementing secret APIs in a free software OS isn't viable; any attempt runs the risk of being discovered, edited out, and competing derivatives distributed as an improvement which the community can switch to.
The protection of your data comes from running more free software, not less. Also, I value the software for its freedom, not its features, so I'd rather work to make free software better instead of tossing aside my freedom for something else. In other words, I like powerful reliable programs too, but I'm not going to toss aside my software freedom to get it.
There's no way to know unless you're running free software (software you're free to inspect, share, run, and modify) to do that job.
By the same token, any proprietary software (regardless of its purported task) should be troublesome. Technically there's nothing that prevents a proprietary statistical analysis program from doing things you wouldn't want done without your full consent such as removing programs, altering files, opening a remote access point for someone, or sending information about your computer somewhere.
The faithful are numerous and clear: Apparently setting up a slick-looking website which claims that a program is trustworthy is enough to convince many people that that program won't do something bad. Even amongst what passes for technical conversation on sites like /. the religion goes unquestioned; this view prevails despite that nobody really knows what AVG, Norton, McAfee, and so many other anti-malware programs do. You'd think that at least for security software (such as what's being discussed in this thread) you'd see numerous challenges any proprietary anti-malware software (even though logically and ethically there's no reason to limit software freedom to just security tasks).
I guess it will take some more time and more hard knocks to make people understand that price and freedom aren't the same thing and that freedom encompasses (and is a lot more valuable than) price since, with freedom, all can share as they wish commercially or not. I certainly don't have the time or skill to inspect every program I use, and I certainly don't trust proprietors to tell me the real story on what their programs do. So I'm not going to choose to cut myself off from other people inspecting what they can, improving and sharing along the way.
Try reading the headnote of the article I linked to. The issue persists even if it will no longer apply to a dependency Sun's Java software.
How sad that you choose to engage in name-calling instead of spelling out your apparent disagreement respectfully. Before you get into that, should you choose to explain your earlier statement, you should keep in mind the remarkable history of achievement and prescience Stallman shares with us. I don't seek perfection in anyone but I can't think of too many people who have given us all so much practical useful stuff and wisdom to think about. Specifcally, it's not every hacker who writes wildly popular licenses (GPL, LGPL), lots of software which is still immeasurably useful today (GDB, GCC, GNU Emacs, and so much more), and encourages us to keep in mind our freedoms to share and modify so that we can work with each other cooperatively and without foreseeable exploitation which pits us against our own work. Short-term and long-term that's impressive work even if you don't like his politics. Is it really that hard to be civil while expressing contrary views?
Yes, that program would be free but see "Free But Shackled - The Java Trap" for more on why this situation is not desirable.
I also enjoyed the unjustified assumption in the /. summary, "It doesn't seek to identify individuals". This assessment is utterly unverifiable no matter who said it. It could be an outright lie or it could be the truth and the recording is passed to someone for whom that is the case. For all we know, the feed is being recorded and will be fed to some future face identification software which will seek to identify individuals. Or the feed is improperly secured and (contrary to the wishes of the billboard owner) is feeding someone a stream of data right now which will be fed to programs that seek to identify individuals. People do all sorts of interesting things with recordings after they're made. People also inadvertently leak information. It doesn't seem to me beyond the pale that one might seek to identify individuals later when the software to do that job is more reliable.
I can see an argument of no reasonable expectation of privacy when one is in public, but I don't know if that theory would hold water in Japan (either legally or with the Japanese people). As far as the technical requirements for doing exactly what the summary claims isn't happening, I don't buy the /. summary for an instant.
All free software OSes are commercial OSes. Perhaps you meant to say "proprietary" instead of "commercial"? They mean completely different things; one is relevant to the issue at hand, the other is not. No matter, making a program proprietary hasn't been shown to make a program popular. I believe bundling some program with a computer makes that program more popular because I believe people tend to use what is put in front of them.
You hire someone and/or contract the service. Software freedom gives you more people and more businesses with whom to do business. In the free software community you can expect more in-depth technical knowledge because users can run, inspect, share, and modify the program. Proprietary software restricts how much most users can fully understand what that program does and how to fix it when it isn't working to your expectations. Proprietary software means you are led into a dual trap as someone hiring someone else to work for you (whether a consultant or hiring someone into a full-time position): only the proprietor can really make changes to the software so only the proprietor can be held to any substantive fix-this-now kind of arrangement, and the proprietor might not be willing to agree to the terms of your contract leaving you with nobody else to work with for your truly pressing technical issues.
I don't recall the FSF or the free software movement ever arguing that more choices are good when those choices include freedom-denying software. I think they're not going to fall for a bad argument that would end up offering freedom-denying software as a recommended option alongside freedom-respecting software as if they're all good choices. That movement and that organization, after all, focus on how to respect and protect all user's software freedoms. Hence it makes sense that they would not offer documentation that presents proprietary software in the same light as software that respects the freedoms they fight for. And all of this only goes for what the GNU Project will endorse, not what you're allowed to talk about.
The opposite is the case for proprietors: I don't think Apple and Microsoft are interested in offering you documentation on how to liberate yourself from their proprietary multimedia codecs, their proprietary office software, their proprietary operating systems, etc. The difference is in what you're free to do: free software systems don't lock you into their software. Proprietors are always looking for ways to lock out competition and lock you into what they offer. There's even proprietary software where the license claims to restrict your speech: at least one version of Microsoft's Frontpage license includes language that says something to the effect of you agree not to use the program to disparage Microsoft.
Your way of looking at things, where a program's freedom doesn't matter and we should judge by function for a particular task, gets to the heart of the big difference between the open source and free software movements:
I think you're misreading the FSF's article and overreacting.
I'm not sure what label you're referring to with regard to the free software community and I'm not familiar enough with the HRC or what happened there, so it's hard to respond to that. The labels I see most often are free software and open source and members of these movements get along quite well most of the time, they work together and write a lot of great software. The philosophies of these two movements aren't the same and that difference leads to radically different conclusions when it comes to proprietary software.
I'm a little lost since I'm not sure how you mean this quote. Exactly who said that quote and where? I didn't find that quote in the grandparent post to which you followed up nor do I recall the FSF ever arguing this. To the contrary, they talk about proprietary software all the time: the problems it poses for society, the conflict between what schools ought to be doing and the message proprietary software sends instead, how to go about working for practical replacements to proprietary software so it isn't a problem (as they've done so many times by encouraging free software replacements or developing and distributing free software replacements directly).
If you're trying to get at some absolutist argument about freedom (so the quote isn't to be taken as someone's direct words but instead a concept) it won't work because some freedoms conflict and you need restrictions on some freedoms to preserve other more important freedoms. Again, I don't recall anyone ever advocating that one can't talk about software freedom outside of very restrictive circumstances (the FSF generally doesn't do this in its works so as to avoid lending legitimacy to proprietary software, but this is highly dependent on context). Restricting some freedoms to preserve other freedoms is an argument FSF speakers have made in talks which I'll try to summarize: we value pedestrians more highly than vehicle drivers so we restrict drivers from driving anywhere they want at any speed. We make them use streets, obey speed limits, and stop at intersections so pedestrians can cross. In the free software community the FSF wrote the GPL to restrict licensing of derivatives in order to preserve the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify for all computer users.
Tivoization is a real and present threat to software freedom. So the FSF improved the GPL and included language which nullifies that threat. The same for the threat posed by the Microsoft-Novell patent deal. Even the way in which Bittorrent distributes software was not well-addressed in GPLv2 so it was better handled in GPLv3. It's right and proper that when you're working to preserve software freedom you react to problems large and small as they arise. I'm guessing GPLv4 will be more of the same: reacting to dangers to software freedom, improving language to allow what may be confused for unintentional copyright infringement (ala Bittorrent where it's possible to inadvertantly distribute binaries without complete corresponding source code or a written promise for said source code), and generally making it easier to correct mistakes and get on with sharing and improving.
My experience with my former radio show and talking to people in person is exactly the opposite. People are interested to hear about software freedom and they become even more interested when proprietary software fails to behave as users would like (which it invariably does both because all complex software is buggy and because DRM cannot be implemented with free software). The kids that frequent sites like /. are all about rejecting anything that illustrates how computers are social and how society can't exist on the narrow commerce-centric definitions you find amongst proprietors and most businesses. But if you speak calmly and rationally to them in person they'll listen and ask questions. Pretty soon you have a conversation going and an opportunity to teach something kids don't learn in schools, unfortunately: social solidarity matters and that's what the free software movement is really all about.
What you're talking about is often erroneously referred to as a "paper trail". That term is harmful because it is too vague. Diebold sells a DRE (direct recording equipment; the computer records and tabulates the votes it collects) which produces a "paper trail": a long receipt-like strip of paper which ostensibly lists all the voters who used that machine since the last session. The problem with this is it is not voter-verified. Only the election judges get to see it and therefore it is entirely useless, truly nothing but a waste of paper.
What voters need is better described as a voter-verified paper ballot. A piece of paper clearly listing their vote(s) which will be, as you said, manually counted by human beings (never computer counted).
Nobody needs election returns faster than humans can count them. Retention enables recounts. We should retain these voter-verified paper ballots at least until the next election, if not as long as possible.
We also need the software the machines run to be completely free software because free software voting machines allow counties to make the changes they need to handle changes in their electorate. If some district wants an election that isn't counted as first-past-the-post, they will need the freedom to change their voting machines to accommodate this. Nobody should have to beg the proprietor for improvements to their voting systems. Counties should be able to get expertise wherever that expertise exists and only a free software voting system enables this.
A few years ago I served on the appointed committee to help the Champaign County board select a voting machine. We saw some voting machines demonstrated for us, tried them out, and decided what to recommend to the elected county board. The entire affair was picking the best of the worst. The allowable range of debate had been narrowed for us before we began when we were informed that we were only allowed to consider equipment approved by the state of Illinois. Toward the end of our tenure we learned that one of the machines we had been allowed to choose (and ultimately did choose, an ES&S optical scan reader/printer machine for preparing ballots) was not yet so approved. That machine has been deployed in at least two elections since we made our recommendation. Voters can optionally use it to fill out the voter-verified paper ballot before depositing their paper ballot into another ES&S machine which counts and stores the ballots.
Efficiency is very vague. Your freedom and acknowledgment of getting future bugs fixed or features added isn't addressed by using a proprietary program. It's a shame you don't care about philosophical issues of software when these issues have direct effects on your ability to "get [your] job done" now and in the future.
I'm not familiar with IVTV and I don't know what they told you. But manufacturers do sometimes change chipsets on devices without changing the model number. If that happened, there's nothing anyone but Hauppage can do about this. Complaining at IVTV as you did ("Whatever...") places the blame on the wrong party. You probably feel like you wasted your time investigating this at all, but at least with FLOSS you probably didn't waste your money as well (since so much FLOSS is available gratis).
If you're not trolling and you're genuinely trying to get other people to do work you want done, you should consider asking people more nicely. Honey attracts more flies than vinegar, as the old saying goes.
Actually, RMS' software is all free software. The programs I named are each very complex programs anyone would be proud to have developed if any one of them were all they wrote. People use lots of free software programs, particularly server-side, even though they have no idea that they're using them. There's a difference between the philosophies of the two movements that sometimes result in distinct results.
Being a fan of RMS is not what's required to properly address RMS' concerns here. Ultimately I think that you're trying to motivate someone who owes you nothing by complaining about them (this makes you seem impolitic), and presenting no clear understanding of the magnitude of the issues in front of us (this makes you seem insensitive). Consider what RMS is talking about and you'll see that the lack of trust is not so easily handled by making a new product. For instance, with email one might want to host their own email service so they're not dependent on a server they don't control. But that requires considerable infrastructure and publicly signing encrypted email isn't (yet?) transparently useful across all of the most widely used email programs. I believe the issues RMS raises aren't new issues per se, but they are mostly new in scale—we've had these problems before but now that a lot more people with a wide range of technical skill are online we face new difficulties addressing all of their needs in ways novices can appreciate and get behind.
Now complete the implication: how much of that capital are these people willing to spend on GIMP development (with any developers willing to hack on the GIMP, not only the first GIMP team)? And why haven't they funded CMYK GIMP code so far? The freedom of free software is not a promise that someone will do your work for you. It's a promise that you will have the freedom to do your work. This might mean spending money on development to meet your own needs.
Which is why you get a copy of the FLOSS program to share with others and ask people how much they'd charge to add the functionality you need, right? I'm hoping you're not just treating FLOSS developers as your unpaid workers, bad-mouthing their effort for not meeting your needs while giving them nothing in exchange.
With proprietary software the results are just the opposite: if I ask for features proprietary software doesn't have, I am either told the program won't do that or I don't really need to do that to begin with. Then, should I be foolish enough to get a copy of the proprietary program anyhow, I'm left with software I can't share or modify no matter my programming skill or the skill of the people I would have liked to have shared copies with. In one particular case I recall with Microsoft (I posted about it on /. years ago, but I'm not a /. subscriber so I can't point you to the specific post) I found bugs in their office software. When I contacted them they asked me for a credit card number so I could be charged just to tell them what was broken in their software.
I think his software hacking bona fides are well in order: being the first developer of gcc, gdb, and GNU Emacs place him in a league far above those who get unwarranted praise for their political opinions and programmatic choices like Linus Torvalds (his use of BitKeeper and misunderstanding of GPLv3 stand out among many technical decisions of merit in developing the Linux kernel). Once you add in writing two of the most widely used free software licenses (GPL and LGPL), Stallman's contributions are simply amazing. I don't know enough about all the projects used in GNU to say that there aren't any which can be used to directly address the problems with so-called "cloud computing" (which he rightly derides), but it's a safe bet that there's something which can contribute significantly. History clearly shows that he does know so much about what is right and wrong and he knows that it is society, not industry, that matters.
Speak for yourself, I am a "web developer" (I fail to see how "programmer" doesn't suffice) and I prefer democratic control of software (software freedom) and letting a thousand flowers bloom. Software freedom can be messy but we're better off having that messiness than allowing any one implementation of something to dictate how things work.
Thanks for the list of upcoming EVs and PHEVs. It looks like not many are available now and some of the cars available now are only for the wealthy (anything from Tesla Motors). I'd hardly say that debunks "the most common criticism of electric vehicles": "there's so little out there!" as that list says it does. That list seems to support that criticism quite well. None of this is your fault, as you didn't write the list or the intro hype found on that page as far as I can tell.
Furthermore, the list doesn't contend with on-the-ground realities: plans can be scuttled before or after a fleet of vehicles have been built. I think the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" shows this quite well with a couple of examples (GM's EV1 and the Toyota RAV4EV). Regardless of the reasons why those automakers offered then pulled their cars, consumers don't need their cars taken from them.
Unless the car is available now it's vapor and history shows that if it's not available to own the car can become vapor again even after someone drives it.
No, it's like giving someone a book and then forbidding them from obtaining the knowledge to make their own books or modifying the book you gave them so it can suit their needs.
You seem to misunderstand the point of freedom. Just because most computer users aren't hackers and have no desire to become hackers doesn't mean they should be prohibited from being hackers to the degree they want to be one (not all jobs require serious programming skills, some jobs like translation can be done without editing code at all). Proprietary software always prohibits one from doing what they want with their software, even simple things like sharing a verbatim copy with someone else. Protecting freedom means thinking beyond your immediate desires and your own view of the world, realizing that you can't know what you'll want to do in the future and others want different things than you so you're better off retaining freedoms even if you don't exercise them yourself. In computer software the freedoms you throw away could be the freedoms someone wants when they get software from you.
I wouldn't trade away my freedom of speech even if I happened to agree with what my government was doing and therefore had no need to protest.
As for needing details of food production, you probably need that more than you think. Some people want to know if there is something in the wine that shouldn't be there. This information allows them to find wine that was free of pollutants. Some people care about the plight of the workers and other customers when they buy products, so they will use their consumer power (small as it is) to help shape a better world.
Upload a high-quality MPEG-2 file to The Internet Archive, fill out the form describing the video, and let them create derivative files for you. TV shows do this daily uploading gigabytes without difficulty. You'll end up with files you can link directly to at no charge (use the "download" URLs, don't link to specific servers; download URLs will be redirected as archive.org does their internal bookkeeping). If there are any kinds of videos you want which archive.org doesn't make for you, you can upload those too. BitTorrent doesn't work as well as archive.org because when your video is no longer popular, seeders drop out and make it harder for others to get the video. Also, as more browsers have Ogg Vorbis+Theora built-in, you'll want a copy of your video encoded with Ogg Vorbis+Theora so you can use <video> with the browser's built-in support.
Editorializing from the headline, Roman Phalanx wrote
There's nothing "super" about losing one's software freedom. The XO was originally an educational project where even the computer the kids learn on could be part of the lessons. Switching to proprietary software means placing barriers on that education by telling the user that there are some things you weren't meant to know and shall be forbidden from learning, sharing, or changing to suit your needs. There's nothing good about that for the user, whose concerns outrank any proprietor. It is not society's job to placate software proprietors. The free software movement welcomes businesses that treat us as partners, not as a market to exploit. The free software community certainly gives businesses lots to work with and make money from.
Democracy Now! reports that federal agencies were involved:
This should hardly be surprising as federal Senator McCain, President Bush, and Vice President Cheney were all planned to appear for the RNC. It would be unusual if county and citywide police were doing this on their own without any input from any federal agency. As time passes I'm sure we'll learn more about the specific people involved at all levels.
Also, Amy Goodman, host of DN!, and two DN! producers, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, were illegally arrested and detained. Goodman was arrested while trying to free Kouddous and Salazar. From the article:
Today's DN! (video, audio) has more on these preemptive arrests and detainments including footage of the police action in progress.