Then how do you explain the huge failure (failure from the public's perspective not the business perspective) of the mainstream media coverage on the invasion and occupation of Iraq (failures which persist to this day) and the continued narrowing of debate on health care, both of which are incredibly important issues of the day? The failure to adequately report on the war is all too evident (particularly today as the mainstream media ignores an important weekend war panel where soldiers were speaking out); Jeff Greenfield's "analysis" is an example of the failure to convey what Americans want in health care. The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour tried a similar scam years ago with Dr. Steffi Woolhandler when she spoke about single-payer universal health care (if you have access to Lexis-Nexis you can probably get a complete transcript of the charade). There aren't that many news sources, the media ownership is shrinking and they're all multinational corporations with largely compatible ends. Not that you accused anyone of saying so, but one apparently doesn't need any smoke-filled room conspiracy to get them to behave in such a way that they all profoundly misreport. Chomsky's analysis of this (quoted elsewhere in this/. discussion) seems far more accurate to me.
Two things: I accidentally misspelled Seymour Hersh's name. And today's Democracy Now! coverage should be online soon in a variety of formats (high-quality audio, lesser-quality audio, other audio formats, video). All this week DN! promises more coverage from the Winter Soldier II hearings.
The Winter Soldier II hearings ended yesterday. These hearings showcase soldiers telling their stories in their own words. They're riveting listening. The Mainstream media (MSM) wasn't present for them.
The MSM got the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq wrong and have yet to apologize. Reading their coverage it's a wonder anyone can understand how irrational it is to not hold war crime trials. The only Winter Soldier II coverage came from alternative news which uses the Internet extensively: Indymedia and Democracy Now!. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reports that the MSM simply wasn't there. The Washington Post ran something small in their local section because the Winter Soldier hearings happened to occur near their offices. On today's DN! Seymour Hirsch briefly talked about how shameful the MSM war coverage was. He touched on both the run-up lies and Winter Soldier II non-coverage (they'll probably have their coverage, including Hirsch's rebuttal, online later today; check out The Internet Archive for copies of DN! as well).
...a baby killing, tax and spend, socialized medicine advocating, way out on the left wing commie liberal democrat
Don't worry, abortion is a nice wedge issue they can use to distract you from discussing the money issues that affect far more people far more profoundly (including distracting away from corporate crime). It's a good thing that the Republicans are so intent on keeping government small. Imagine how much egg they'd have on their face if they were responsible for creating the Department of Homeland Defense with almost $45B/year budget.
But two issues that really affect Americans in their everyday lives are war and health care. And when it comes to health care the Democrats are just as in favor of the corporatized health care delivery system the US has as the Republicans are. The Democrats of today are running as fast as they can from the universal health care Truman proposed 60 years ago, Americans just can't be allowed to have what Ralph Nader calls "a program with quality and cost controls and an emphasis on prevention". HMOs give to candidates in both parties and that's the way those candidates like it despite that a majority of Americans in CBS and CNN polls say they'd prefer universal health care even if it means higher taxes to pay for it (an oddly supportive notion given that the US spends "twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita."). Kucinich/Conyers' health care plan (HR676) hasn't garnered a lot of cosponsors. I guess it will take a few more million Americans doing without health insurance (and thus making health care significantly more costly as well as making chronic care virtually unavailable until disaster strikes) to change that; over 45 million so far and this figure is going up.
When it comes to the continued occupation of Iraq the Democrats won't stop funding it out of a shared desire to "control [...] our major economic competitors in the world -- Europe and northeast Asia (China and Japan).". Sabre-rattling with Iran is also fodder for both major political parties. War crimes a plenty, according to AWARE (an Illinois-based anti-war group). All this for trillions Americans could have spent on domestic issues, chiefly those of the poor.
Really, the Democrats and Republicans aren't very far apart on these two major issues of the day (both money issues).
If you're interested in how MSIE8 was going to turn out, my point was perfectly valid. When I made my post a couple of days ago you had nothing to test with, so discussion about what MSIE8 would do was pointless. You can't test webpages on a discussion of a browser, you need running code to work with.
When it comes to challenging software proprietors you need a better argument than what proprietors offer. Therefore if you want to really pour on the heat the best way to do that is by teaching software freedom. Proprietors can't compete with freedom no matter how reliable and powerful their programs become. If people are consistently taught to evaluate programs by features they'll sometimes fall into the trap of proprietary software (because proprietors aren't all poor programmers). Just as most people who drive aren't mechanics but still care to keep their cars running in a trustworthy way, people need to learn comparable principals about the software they use: when you have software freedom you can get people you trust to hack the code for you on your behalf and end up with a trustworthy, powerful, and reliable program to use.
Merely building on the parent, not objecting: Time will tell but it's times like these that tell us where people's loyalties are. Why are people are so interested in what Microsoft has to say about their vaporware? Lots of people did the same thing when Microsoft announced IE8's allegedly passing Acid2. It's particularly telling to read open source proponents go on about what a meritocracy open source represents in other contexts and yet see so many discussing this vaporware as if it's real. No code, no proof, no credit, no exceptions? Apparently Microsoft gets another pass.
Meanwhile, free software web browsers like Firefox are out there doing the work in a provable way by distributing regular publicly-visible updates (nightly builds in Firefox's case) all the while allowing users to run, share, and modify the work. There's no question what these browsers are capable of and where there's room for improvement, no need to speculate about what might be. And no hindrance finding out what free software browsers are really doing with our data when we run them.
All proprietary software developers are monopolists. You can't get MacOS X from any other developer but Apple. Similarly you can't get Windows from anyone but Microsoft. Sure, many distributors will sell you a copy of either operating system but they are merely passing on a copy of what Apple or Microsoft published. Along the same line, users of non-free operating software are never in a position to fully control their computer. As someone recently pointed out, the users are never in the same class as the proprietor. When you run non-free software you put the monopolists in control.
What I said was perfectly clear. Whether users want to upgrade to an ostensibly (we don't really know, nor are we allowed to check) more secure version of any given proprietary program is their business and a red herring of an issue. But Adobe shouldn't restrict its users from fixing and helping others fix Adobe programs. The way things are now, Adobe's users can only get the improvements Adobe deems necessary on Adobe's schedule and they must also get any downgrades that come along with those fixes. Such is the case for all proprietary software, not just Adobe's, and this poses a real practical problem for ordinary computer users. Therefore the more important issue here is an ethical one: is it right to treat people in this way? This is the kind of issue businesses want to dissuade you from asking, leading you instead to think that the heart of this issue is what you're asking about: some variant on whether or how quickly users will upgrade to the next version of the proprietor's black box software.
So, in other words, the grandparent poster's point is valid and the larger more important issue remains: proprietary derivatives of non-copylefted free software uses the free software community as a market instead of treating us as equals.
The great thing about the BSD license, is that when people do contribute back (and they do, even big companies like Apple), you know its because they *want* to, not because they *have* to.
Nobody "has" to under the GPL; to the degree that what you said is true, the same is true of the GPL. Statements like yours ignore all the choices that lead up to distributing source code. There's nothing in the GPL that compels conveyance. There are only conditions in the GPL that compel source code conveyance with object code conveyance. It's trivially easy to not improve GPL-covered software or not distribute the improved version. The larger issue here is whether the free software community owes Apple anything. We don't. If they want to join us and work with us, great, if not they can write their own software. The GPL helps ensure that when people and organizations convey copies of programs they do so as equals. NeXT (now owned by Apple) already tried distributing GCC derivative software without distributing complete corresponding source code when GCC was under GPLv2. It made NeXT look like an ass and put them at risk of being able to distribute GCC at all. NeXT later rectified the situation by distributing complete corresponding source code in compliance with GPLv2.
At this rate there won't be many safe applications left to use.
There are plenty of free software programs to use. The issue here has to do with proprietary software restrictions on user's freedoms to inspect, share, and modify programs. Just because Adobe is unwilling to modify older versions of their PDF reader doesn't mean their users should be restricted from doing so.
You should address your complaints about how Microsoft isn't violating antitrust by addressing the specific provisions leveraged against the multinational Microsoft corporation. Even in the apparently (given the punishment phase) Microsoft-friendly United States Judge Jackson's findings of fact haven't been seriously questioned. It stands to reason that with such findings on the books, other countries have good reason to at least launch investigations into Microsoft's behavior and see if it comports with their laws; the very action being discussed in this/. thread.
A binary blob that is sent to the card/chip and executed on it? They are cheapskates for not putting a flash ROM in, but to me it's OK... after all, a bunch of the wireless cards that RMS would say are AOK also have proprietary software on them, it's just in a ROM instead of being sent from the main system.
In other words, RMS has a consistent view of software freedom: as long as its your computer, you deserve to control it. It matters not which processor is running a program. Immutable code in ROMs is different precisely because that's not software. That could just as easily be a different kind of hardware doing the same job. But here the wireless hardware is programmable, the firmware sent to it is software. And all the logic of software freedom applies.
I know of no wireless hardware he thinks is "AOK" which uses proprietary firmware. I own an ASUS wireless device that has no firmware on a gNewSense GNU/Linux machine, so I dodge the issue entirely. The device may be buggy but one will have to work around those bugs in a driver or live with them. RMS will use proprietary firmware devices when there's no alternative (see his IBM Thinkpad) but he'll use it to pursue freedom switching to free hardware when he can (changing to the XO), just as he initially developed GNU software on proprietary OSes and switched to a completely free software OS when he could. This is reasonable, the goal is to achieve and defend software freedom. To demand using a free software OS back in 1984 would have meant never getting started at all.
Finally, he wouldn't refer to proprietary software as "closed". The term "closed" denotes a reference to the open source movement of which RMS is not a member (an older essay on the same topic is also available). The open source movement reaches radically different conclusions about proprietary software than the free software movement. It seems fair and reasonable to me that if you're going to talk about his perspective on these issues you should at least say why you're not framing the issue in the way that makes his perspective understandable.
So you identify absentee voting as a problem because it allows someone to bully someone else into voting a certain way, and then you advise we switch all voting to become absentee?
I've not seen any evidence Apple has weighed in on this beyond crippling DTrace. As I understand it, a DTrace user has experimented with the program, determined it to be specifically crippled, and given an educated guess about why it is crippled in that way. However I agree with the bulk of your post; Sadly, there will be a lot of young naive Slashdotters willing to go along with such behavior, even defend the proprietors engaged in that practice (coming up with excuses for the proprietor) as we see in this thread.
It's difficult for some to grasp that a proprietor's (Apple's in this case) interests don't change. With a completely free software system (and yes, I'm not using the term "open source" here to highlight the freedoms the open source movement doesn't want to talk about) this would never be an issue. Someone would release improved versions of any program making it fully traceable and one could get on with studying and improving their entire system as they see fit. Users of non-free software are never going to be in the class that gets the freedom to learn or determine how their own computer works. DRM is simply one modern computer implementation of a class system.
This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test[...]
Using software that is still completely unavailable to anyone outside Microsoft. Thus this qualifies as vaporware and any claim about it is not to be taken seriously. Firefox, by comparison, delivers daily builds and you can use them to verify any claim made about its performance.
I concur. I also like unemployment pay from the government. It's critical to establish a safety net, a floor so people never fall below that floor and enter poverty. I'd gladly pay a high tax rate to establish and maintain these things for flesh and blood people (in other words, not corporations, real people). I don't want people to be homeless, hungry, or go without health care when they need it. Most people in the US agree on health care -- according to Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon citing CBS and CNN national surveys:
CBS's own poll of Americans had found 64 percent supporting the view that the federal government should "guarantee health insurance for all" -- with 60 percent approving of higher taxes to pay for it. A CNN poll found 64 percent American support for the idea that "government should provide a national health insurance program for all Americans, even if this would require higher taxes."
So you're saying that Microsoft could spend time writing such docs (assuming they don't actually exist) but they're currently getting away with not being compelled to do that. By the way, besides Microsoft's say so do you have any evidence to justify this belief that these docs don't exist? I'm not one to believe an organization that spends so much time being duplicitous and illegally leveraging their monopoly.
Opera is proprietary software, therefore it is untrustworthy by default. The only people who can inspect, modify, and distribute improved versions are the very people you can't trust to work on your behalf—the proprietors. There's nothing they can say to make up for this lack of security because you can't verify their improvements (the source code is not only unavailable to you, the proprietor disallows decompiling the binary and seeing what it's doing, or making changes to suit your needs). To be sure Opera isn't problematic you need Opera to respect your software freedom.
Perhaps by the time your wife tried Photoshop she had already spent time training herself how to use The GIMP, in which case had she been using an illicitly-obtained copy of Adobe Photoshop she'd reject The GIMP.
Your story seems to me to be more about initial exposure, training, and avoidance of cost (free as in cost not free as in freedom) than anything else. It seems to me that where there is no explanation of the ethics of free software, one throws away the one thing free software has over proprietary programs regardless of cost: free software can be dealt with freely, treating people as equals and friends. Free software can be shared (which almost all computer users can do, certainly the number of 12 year olds doing this seems to bother SPA clients) without having to hide one's activities. Proprietary software can only be shared sub rosa. When you share free software, you're sharing software a lot of people can (and do) inspect and modify to remove problems, even if you don't do any of this programming work yourself. When you share proprietary software you could be helping someone install spyware; you'll never really know because proprietary software largely defies inspection. So free software puts you in a position more like you are with your house or your car; if you don't do the work yourself you can get someone else to do what needs to be done. Proprietors often don't take requests and their work is unverifiable even if they claim to have done what you wanted done to a program.
As for making people feel the financial burden of commercial proprietary software, there are plenty of people wealthy enough to pay for it (apparently) including students who can afford the reduced-priced versions of the same program. At this point your rationale runs out of steam.
Finally, The GIMP is commercial software. As long as it is used for business purposes or distributed for a fee, it's commercial software. We can't confuse "commercial" with "proprietary" nor can we dodge the ethical ramifications the open source movement (but not the free software movement) would have us push aside.
Aren't there many proprietary programs that do a wide variety of jobs which require no license key, no activation, and can be installed on as many computers as you can copy the installer file to?
Now that all major browsers have mastered the ACID2 test (at least in some preview versions) [...]
When Firefox makes news on this there are daily builds to test, source code to inspect and compile. One can see the progress first-hand.
There is no build of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 to test. You are accepting something unverifiable as reality and thus talking about these browsers as if they're all on the same level. This suggests a new low: believing the illegal monopolist who tells you that their vaporware behaves in accordance with published publicly-implementable standards.
I don't know what "generic software" is but there's nothing stopping you from paying developers to hack on free software to meet your needs now. What requires "draconian" enforcement isn't just about payment for software licenses, it's about keeping users from doing things neighbors and friends do with each other—sharing. There's no draconian enforcement of free software licenses. Just 2 years ago at the Plone Conference, Eben Moglen, lawyer and longtime GPL enforcer, said much of his GPL enforcement work was done quietly and that Stallman given him a directive of pursuing compliance, "I have a rule. You must never let a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance." (movie in various formats, transcript).
I don't see free software copyright compliance threatening rape (as Stallman says the lobbyists for proprietary software development firms has done in countries outside the US), putting language in free licenses to try and get physical access to your computer to do license enforcement (which is how the BFA justifies raids on their client's customers), or stopping commercial redistribution of the software. Proprietary software developers and their agents do these things.
By defining a user's freedom in terms of "programmer interest" ("mainstream" essentially means what this privileged class says it means) you're placing one set of people's priorities above another. The free software movement rejects this because it is interested in equality amongst all computer users—we should all have the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify software and our computers at any time for any reason we deem necessary. Note that they discuss freedom (permission), not skill. What you're willing to spend time learning is a restriction you place upon yourself, a restriction of skill, not freedom, and that ability is no justification for another user's freedom.
I also don't know what you mean when you say that Stallman "wants copyright to be optimal". Two years ago at the FSF member meeting (which anyone can attend, by the way, one need not be an FSF member) I asked Stallman to describe how he would organize copyright and he gave an explanation consistent with what he had said before about granting a blanket non-commercial verbatim copying and distribution permission and then an increasing set of restrictions depending on the type of work (functional works being one such type). The reason everyone should be free to share and modify functional works comes right from his perspective on free software.
RMS wrote a lot of software: he's the initial programmer of GCC, GDB, GNU Emacs, and lots of other software. Judging this by how much software one writes is a great way to dodge the real issues at hand, never having taken these issues of software freedom seriously to begin with. RMS is also the principal author of the GNU General Public Licenses. RMS not only theorizes, he also puts theory into practice, and he has established a track record of seeing restrictions to our freedom well before others.
Torvalds is widely covered when he talks about the GPL. That coverage usually neglects to tell the audience that Torvalds doesn't share the same appreciation of freedom RMS, the GNU Project, and the FSF do. Torvalds may be an excellent programmer, he may make great decisions on a wide range of technical matters that concern Linux kernel development and source code management (not surprising since he's the initial author of the Linux kernel and git), but it should be clear to all by now that when it comes to defending your freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify computer programs, Torvalds is simply not interested.
Please provide specifics instead of pointing me to something vague like a "research class in college". After all, how do you know I won't pick a class where Democracy Now! is used as a source of good journalism? While you're at it, please point me to specific instances of some of these "neutral", "reliable" sources which don't "reek of political bias".
I'd recommend you read the articles at gnu.org/philosophy/ because many of the arguments you raise are discussed there. Most notably the ethics of proprietary software, defining one's work as bringing "value" to "end users", how the GPL creates free software (nobody is ever required to distribute their derivative, and when NeXT tried to distribute a non-free GCC derivative the FSF stepped in and made NeXT comply with the GPL thus causing an increase in the amount of free software), and the myth of the "freedom of choice". You could probably read any of the essays there in any order, but I'd recommend starting at the top and working your way down if you want to understand what the free software movement stands for and why.
If you prefer to watch or listen instead of read, there are a lot of recordings of people (Richard Stallman, Brad Kuhn, Eben Moglen, to name a few) talking about why free software exists.
If you don't want to license under the GPL, that's your power. But it's not a GPL licensor's job to let you get something for nothing by distributing non-free derivatives. Go write your own software and use the power of licensing to set down terms you think find amenable.
I wouldn't mind discussing the issue with you but they do a very good job of covering the basics of why free software exists and I'd be remiss if I didn't point you to good explanations. Sadly Slashdot cuts off discussions after a while, so there's not much time to discuss what they said here. I've got a real email address listed on my Slashdot profile, if you'd care to discuss free software further we could take the discussion there.
Slashdot Mirror
Then how do you explain the huge failure (failure from the public's perspective not the business perspective) of the mainstream media coverage on the invasion and occupation of Iraq (failures which persist to this day) and the continued narrowing of debate on health care, both of which are incredibly important issues of the day? The failure to adequately report on the war is all too evident (particularly today as the mainstream media ignores an important weekend war panel where soldiers were speaking out); Jeff Greenfield's "analysis" is an example of the failure to convey what Americans want in health care. The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour tried a similar scam years ago with Dr. Steffi Woolhandler when she spoke about single-payer universal health care (if you have access to Lexis-Nexis you can probably get a complete transcript of the charade). There aren't that many news sources, the media ownership is shrinking and they're all multinational corporations with largely compatible ends. Not that you accused anyone of saying so, but one apparently doesn't need any smoke-filled room conspiracy to get them to behave in such a way that they all profoundly misreport. Chomsky's analysis of this (quoted elsewhere in this /. discussion) seems far more accurate to me.
Two things: I accidentally misspelled Seymour Hersh's name. And today's Democracy Now! coverage should be online soon in a variety of formats (high-quality audio, lesser-quality audio, other audio formats, video). All this week DN! promises more coverage from the Winter Soldier II hearings.
The Winter Soldier II hearings ended yesterday. These hearings showcase soldiers telling their stories in their own words. They're riveting listening. The Mainstream media (MSM) wasn't present for them.
The MSM got the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq wrong and have yet to apologize. Reading their coverage it's a wonder anyone can understand how irrational it is to not hold war crime trials. The only Winter Soldier II coverage came from alternative news which uses the Internet extensively: Indymedia and Democracy Now!. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reports that the MSM simply wasn't there. The Washington Post ran something small in their local section because the Winter Soldier hearings happened to occur near their offices. On today's DN! Seymour Hirsch briefly talked about how shameful the MSM war coverage was. He touched on both the run-up lies and Winter Soldier II non-coverage (they'll probably have their coverage, including Hirsch's rebuttal, online later today; check out The Internet Archive for copies of DN! as well).
Don't worry, abortion is a nice wedge issue they can use to distract you from discussing the money issues that affect far more people far more profoundly (including distracting away from corporate crime). It's a good thing that the Republicans are so intent on keeping government small. Imagine how much egg they'd have on their face if they were responsible for creating the Department of Homeland Defense with almost $45B/year budget.
But two issues that really affect Americans in their everyday lives are war and health care. And when it comes to health care the Democrats are just as in favor of the corporatized health care delivery system the US has as the Republicans are. The Democrats of today are running as fast as they can from the universal health care Truman proposed 60 years ago, Americans just can't be allowed to have what Ralph Nader calls "a program with quality and cost controls and an emphasis on prevention". HMOs give to candidates in both parties and that's the way those candidates like it despite that a majority of Americans in CBS and CNN polls say they'd prefer universal health care even if it means higher taxes to pay for it (an oddly supportive notion given that the US spends "twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita."). Kucinich/Conyers' health care plan (HR676) hasn't garnered a lot of cosponsors. I guess it will take a few more million Americans doing without health insurance (and thus making health care significantly more costly as well as making chronic care virtually unavailable until disaster strikes) to change that; over 45 million so far and this figure is going up.
When it comes to the continued occupation of Iraq the Democrats won't stop funding it out of a shared desire to "control [...] our major economic competitors in the world -- Europe and northeast Asia (China and Japan).". Sabre-rattling with Iran is also fodder for both major political parties. War crimes a plenty, according to AWARE (an Illinois-based anti-war group). All this for trillions Americans could have spent on domestic issues, chiefly those of the poor.
Really, the Democrats and Republicans aren't very far apart on these two major issues of the day (both money issues).
If you're interested in how MSIE8 was going to turn out, my point was perfectly valid. When I made my post a couple of days ago you had nothing to test with, so discussion about what MSIE8 would do was pointless. You can't test webpages on a discussion of a browser, you need running code to work with.
When it comes to challenging software proprietors you need a better argument than what proprietors offer. Therefore if you want to really pour on the heat the best way to do that is by teaching software freedom. Proprietors can't compete with freedom no matter how reliable and powerful their programs become. If people are consistently taught to evaluate programs by features they'll sometimes fall into the trap of proprietary software (because proprietors aren't all poor programmers). Just as most people who drive aren't mechanics but still care to keep their cars running in a trustworthy way, people need to learn comparable principals about the software they use: when you have software freedom you can get people you trust to hack the code for you on your behalf and end up with a trustworthy, powerful, and reliable program to use.
Merely building on the parent, not objecting: Time will tell but it's times like these that tell us where people's loyalties are. Why are people are so interested in what Microsoft has to say about their vaporware? Lots of people did the same thing when Microsoft announced IE8's allegedly passing Acid2. It's particularly telling to read open source proponents go on about what a meritocracy open source represents in other contexts and yet see so many discussing this vaporware as if it's real. No code, no proof, no credit, no exceptions? Apparently Microsoft gets another pass.
Meanwhile, free software web browsers like Firefox are out there doing the work in a provable way by distributing regular publicly-visible updates (nightly builds in Firefox's case) all the while allowing users to run, share, and modify the work. There's no question what these browsers are capable of and where there's room for improvement, no need to speculate about what might be. And no hindrance finding out what free software browsers are really doing with our data when we run them.
All proprietary software developers are monopolists. You can't get MacOS X from any other developer but Apple. Similarly you can't get Windows from anyone but Microsoft. Sure, many distributors will sell you a copy of either operating system but they are merely passing on a copy of what Apple or Microsoft published. Along the same line, users of non-free operating software are never in a position to fully control their computer. As someone recently pointed out, the users are never in the same class as the proprietor. When you run non-free software you put the monopolists in control.
What I said was perfectly clear. Whether users want to upgrade to an ostensibly (we don't really know, nor are we allowed to check) more secure version of any given proprietary program is their business and a red herring of an issue. But Adobe shouldn't restrict its users from fixing and helping others fix Adobe programs. The way things are now, Adobe's users can only get the improvements Adobe deems necessary on Adobe's schedule and they must also get any downgrades that come along with those fixes. Such is the case for all proprietary software, not just Adobe's, and this poses a real practical problem for ordinary computer users. Therefore the more important issue here is an ethical one: is it right to treat people in this way? This is the kind of issue businesses want to dissuade you from asking, leading you instead to think that the heart of this issue is what you're asking about: some variant on whether or how quickly users will upgrade to the next version of the proprietor's black box software.
So, in other words, the grandparent poster's point is valid and the larger more important issue remains: proprietary derivatives of non-copylefted free software uses the free software community as a market instead of treating us as equals.
Nobody "has" to under the GPL; to the degree that what you said is true, the same is true of the GPL. Statements like yours ignore all the choices that lead up to distributing source code. There's nothing in the GPL that compels conveyance. There are only conditions in the GPL that compel source code conveyance with object code conveyance. It's trivially easy to not improve GPL-covered software or not distribute the improved version. The larger issue here is whether the free software community owes Apple anything. We don't. If they want to join us and work with us, great, if not they can write their own software. The GPL helps ensure that when people and organizations convey copies of programs they do so as equals. NeXT (now owned by Apple) already tried distributing GCC derivative software without distributing complete corresponding source code when GCC was under GPLv2. It made NeXT look like an ass and put them at risk of being able to distribute GCC at all. NeXT later rectified the situation by distributing complete corresponding source code in compliance with GPLv2.
There are plenty of free software programs to use. The issue here has to do with proprietary software restrictions on user's freedoms to inspect, share, and modify programs. Just because Adobe is unwilling to modify older versions of their PDF reader doesn't mean their users should be restricted from doing so.
You should address your complaints about how Microsoft isn't violating antitrust by addressing the specific provisions leveraged against the multinational Microsoft corporation. Even in the apparently (given the punishment phase) Microsoft-friendly United States Judge Jackson's findings of fact haven't been seriously questioned. It stands to reason that with such findings on the books, other countries have good reason to at least launch investigations into Microsoft's behavior and see if it comports with their laws; the very action being discussed in this /. thread.
In other words, RMS has a consistent view of software freedom: as long as its your computer, you deserve to control it. It matters not which processor is running a program. Immutable code in ROMs is different precisely because that's not software. That could just as easily be a different kind of hardware doing the same job. But here the wireless hardware is programmable, the firmware sent to it is software. And all the logic of software freedom applies.
I know of no wireless hardware he thinks is "AOK" which uses proprietary firmware. I own an ASUS wireless device that has no firmware on a gNewSense GNU/Linux machine, so I dodge the issue entirely. The device may be buggy but one will have to work around those bugs in a driver or live with them. RMS will use proprietary firmware devices when there's no alternative (see his IBM Thinkpad) but he'll use it to pursue freedom switching to free hardware when he can (changing to the XO), just as he initially developed GNU software on proprietary OSes and switched to a completely free software OS when he could. This is reasonable, the goal is to achieve and defend software freedom. To demand using a free software OS back in 1984 would have meant never getting started at all.
Finally, he wouldn't refer to proprietary software as "closed". The term "closed" denotes a reference to the open source movement of which RMS is not a member (an older essay on the same topic is also available). The open source movement reaches radically different conclusions about proprietary software than the free software movement. It seems fair and reasonable to me that if you're going to talk about his perspective on these issues you should at least say why you're not framing the issue in the way that makes his perspective understandable.
So you identify absentee voting as a problem because it allows someone to bully someone else into voting a certain way, and then you advise we switch all voting to become absentee?
I've not seen any evidence Apple has weighed in on this beyond crippling DTrace. As I understand it, a DTrace user has experimented with the program, determined it to be specifically crippled, and given an educated guess about why it is crippled in that way. However I agree with the bulk of your post; Sadly, there will be a lot of young naive Slashdotters willing to go along with such behavior, even defend the proprietors engaged in that practice (coming up with excuses for the proprietor) as we see in this thread.
It's difficult for some to grasp that a proprietor's (Apple's in this case) interests don't change. With a completely free software system (and yes, I'm not using the term "open source" here to highlight the freedoms the open source movement doesn't want to talk about) this would never be an issue. Someone would release improved versions of any program making it fully traceable and one could get on with studying and improving their entire system as they see fit. Users of non-free software are never going to be in the class that gets the freedom to learn or determine how their own computer works. DRM is simply one modern computer implementation of a class system.
The /. summary says:
Using software that is still completely unavailable to anyone outside Microsoft. Thus this qualifies as vaporware and any claim about it is not to be taken seriously. Firefox, by comparison, delivers daily builds and you can use them to verify any claim made about its performance.
I concur. I also like unemployment pay from the government. It's critical to establish a safety net, a floor so people never fall below that floor and enter poverty. I'd gladly pay a high tax rate to establish and maintain these things for flesh and blood people (in other words, not corporations, real people). I don't want people to be homeless, hungry, or go without health care when they need it. Most people in the US agree on health care -- according to Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon citing CBS and CNN national surveys:
So you're saying that Microsoft could spend time writing such docs (assuming they don't actually exist) but they're currently getting away with not being compelled to do that. By the way, besides Microsoft's say so do you have any evidence to justify this belief that these docs don't exist? I'm not one to believe an organization that spends so much time being duplicitous and illegally leveraging their monopoly.
Opera is proprietary software, therefore it is untrustworthy by default. The only people who can inspect, modify, and distribute improved versions are the very people you can't trust to work on your behalf—the proprietors. There's nothing they can say to make up for this lack of security because you can't verify their improvements (the source code is not only unavailable to you, the proprietor disallows decompiling the binary and seeing what it's doing, or making changes to suit your needs). To be sure Opera isn't problematic you need Opera to respect your software freedom.
Perhaps by the time your wife tried Photoshop she had already spent time training herself how to use The GIMP, in which case had she been using an illicitly-obtained copy of Adobe Photoshop she'd reject The GIMP.
Your story seems to me to be more about initial exposure, training, and avoidance of cost (free as in cost not free as in freedom) than anything else. It seems to me that where there is no explanation of the ethics of free software, one throws away the one thing free software has over proprietary programs regardless of cost: free software can be dealt with freely, treating people as equals and friends. Free software can be shared (which almost all computer users can do, certainly the number of 12 year olds doing this seems to bother SPA clients) without having to hide one's activities. Proprietary software can only be shared sub rosa. When you share free software, you're sharing software a lot of people can (and do) inspect and modify to remove problems, even if you don't do any of this programming work yourself. When you share proprietary software you could be helping someone install spyware; you'll never really know because proprietary software largely defies inspection. So free software puts you in a position more like you are with your house or your car; if you don't do the work yourself you can get someone else to do what needs to be done. Proprietors often don't take requests and their work is unverifiable even if they claim to have done what you wanted done to a program.
As for making people feel the financial burden of commercial proprietary software, there are plenty of people wealthy enough to pay for it (apparently) including students who can afford the reduced-priced versions of the same program. At this point your rationale runs out of steam.
Finally, The GIMP is commercial software. As long as it is used for business purposes or distributed for a fee, it's commercial software. We can't confuse "commercial" with "proprietary" nor can we dodge the ethical ramifications the open source movement (but not the free software movement) would have us push aside.
Aren't there many proprietary programs that do a wide variety of jobs which require no license key, no activation, and can be installed on as many computers as you can copy the installer file to?
When Firefox makes news on this there are daily builds to test, source code to inspect and compile. One can see the progress first-hand.
There is no build of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 to test. You are accepting something unverifiable as reality and thus talking about these browsers as if they're all on the same level. This suggests a new low: believing the illegal monopolist who tells you that their vaporware behaves in accordance with published publicly-implementable standards.
I don't know what "generic software" is but there's nothing stopping you from paying developers to hack on free software to meet your needs now. What requires "draconian" enforcement isn't just about payment for software licenses, it's about keeping users from doing things neighbors and friends do with each other—sharing. There's no draconian enforcement of free software licenses. Just 2 years ago at the Plone Conference, Eben Moglen, lawyer and longtime GPL enforcer, said much of his GPL enforcement work was done quietly and that Stallman given him a directive of pursuing compliance, "I have a rule. You must never let a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance." (movie in various formats, transcript).
I don't see free software copyright compliance threatening rape (as Stallman says the lobbyists for proprietary software development firms has done in countries outside the US), putting language in free licenses to try and get physical access to your computer to do license enforcement (which is how the BFA justifies raids on their client's customers), or stopping commercial redistribution of the software. Proprietary software developers and their agents do these things.
By defining a user's freedom in terms of "programmer interest" ("mainstream" essentially means what this privileged class says it means) you're placing one set of people's priorities above another. The free software movement rejects this because it is interested in equality amongst all computer users—we should all have the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify software and our computers at any time for any reason we deem necessary. Note that they discuss freedom (permission), not skill. What you're willing to spend time learning is a restriction you place upon yourself, a restriction of skill, not freedom, and that ability is no justification for another user's freedom.
I also don't know what you mean when you say that Stallman "wants copyright to be optimal". Two years ago at the FSF member meeting (which anyone can attend, by the way, one need not be an FSF member) I asked Stallman to describe how he would organize copyright and he gave an explanation consistent with what he had said before about granting a blanket non-commercial verbatim copying and distribution permission and then an increasing set of restrictions depending on the type of work (functional works being one such type). The reason everyone should be free to share and modify functional works comes right from his perspective on free software.
RMS wrote a lot of software: he's the initial programmer of GCC, GDB, GNU Emacs, and lots of other software. Judging this by how much software one writes is a great way to dodge the real issues at hand, never having taken these issues of software freedom seriously to begin with. RMS is also the principal author of the GNU General Public Licenses. RMS not only theorizes, he also puts theory into practice, and he has established a track record of seeing restrictions to our freedom well before others.
Torvalds is widely covered when he talks about the GPL. That coverage usually neglects to tell the audience that Torvalds doesn't share the same appreciation of freedom RMS, the GNU Project, and the FSF do. Torvalds may be an excellent programmer, he may make great decisions on a wide range of technical matters that concern Linux kernel development and source code management (not surprising since he's the initial author of the Linux kernel and git), but it should be clear to all by now that when it comes to defending your freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify computer programs, Torvalds is simply not interested.
Please provide specifics instead of pointing me to something vague like a "research class in college". After all, how do you know I won't pick a class where Democracy Now! is used as a source of good journalism? While you're at it, please point me to specific instances of some of these "neutral", "reliable" sources which don't "reek of political bias".
I'd recommend you read the articles at gnu.org/philosophy/ because many of the arguments you raise are discussed there. Most notably the ethics of proprietary software, defining one's work as bringing "value" to "end users", how the GPL creates free software (nobody is ever required to distribute their derivative, and when NeXT tried to distribute a non-free GCC derivative the FSF stepped in and made NeXT comply with the GPL thus causing an increase in the amount of free software), and the myth of the "freedom of choice". You could probably read any of the essays there in any order, but I'd recommend starting at the top and working your way down if you want to understand what the free software movement stands for and why.
If you prefer to watch or listen instead of read, there are a lot of recordings of people (Richard Stallman, Brad Kuhn, Eben Moglen, to name a few) talking about why free software exists.
If you don't want to license under the GPL, that's your power. But it's not a GPL licensor's job to let you get something for nothing by distributing non-free derivatives. Go write your own software and use the power of licensing to set down terms you think find amenable.
I wouldn't mind discussing the issue with you but they do a very good job of covering the basics of why free software exists and I'd be remiss if I didn't point you to good explanations. Sadly Slashdot cuts off discussions after a while, so there's not much time to discuss what they said here. I've got a real email address listed on my Slashdot profile, if you'd care to discuss free software further we could take the discussion there.