You say my "facts are not exactly unbiased" but you don't refute anything I said. Talking about facts being biased makes no sense. That corporate news kept shilling for war while the US public was in favor of war can't be explained by your entertainment/sensationalism rationale.
The news media has an obligation to question power and the government's most serious act is to go to war. So it is part of the media's job to challenge the government to justify going to war. They didn't do that in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Millions of people in the streets before the war began had a hard time getting serious coverage in most corporate news outlets.
What would be sensational is for major corporate media to report on what Iraqis want (do they want the US in or out of their country?), to report on what American people said they want in their own polls—according to Jeff Cohen and Normon Solomon, most Americans want a national health insurance program run by the government and are willing to pay higher taxes for it but CBS' Jeff Greenfield says the opposite in a news piece responding to Michael Moore's "SiCKO" (which advocates for universal health care, particularly HR676, a single-payer universal health care bill):
Reflecting what became mainstream media's conventional wisdom in the wake of Michael Moore's "SiCKO" documentary, CBS correspondent Greenfield explained that the U.S. lacks a universal healthcare system not because of the powerful insurance lobby -- but because "Americans are just different." He quoted an academic who said Americans, unlike Canadians and Europeans, don't want government involvement in healthcare: "It's a cultural difference."
Actually, 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."
We know the corporate media can do better. During hurricane Katrina mainstream media covered ordinary people on-air talking about what their families went through including criticism of government inaction. It's no coincidence that the media had no managers from the government controlling the message; the soldiers who would fill that role were all shipped off to Iraq.
No, that's not why TV news is soundbites. When you reduce the amount of time in which someone is allowed to make their point, you reduce what they can say. When one has little time to speak, one can only make the same old points we've heard a dozen times before. Reframing the issue to talk about new ways of thinking takes time. Explaining more significant points that help the audience understand larger patterns takes time. The corporations that own so many TV channels all benefit from keeping tight control over the ends of allowable debate. For instance, when there's war analysis the corporate news will invite a military official (current or former) and someone else who is pro-war, so at best the debate is sure to never bring up any of the lies that were repeated by the corporate media. Instead, as so many news clips show, you get a weapons hardware show (complete with 3-D graphics of tanks, missiles, etc.). Very rarely will someone with an anti-war perspective get on-air, according to FAIR in a study of news shortly after the US invaded Iraq:
Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1.
When a network is owned by a military contractor (like NBC which is owned by contractor General Electric), it's all too clear who benefits from the status quo and why this is the way it is.
Democracy Now! is a daily TV news hour that gives people a chance to speak (audio and video archives on archive.org in a variety of formats, transcripts of a lot of their segments are on their website gratis). They cover important stories, not the fluff (celebrity goings-on, daily weather reports, sports, and traffic reports) and they cover many stories the corporate news won't touch or won't discuss from a perspective not favored by corporate lobbyists (independent and lesser-known candidates in big elections, "third rail" issues like the death penalty, Israel/Palestine conflict, Texaco/Chevron/Coca-Cola killings around the world, corporate media control, universal health care).
Get off your high horse; I've read it all. They are, in effect, the same (thus the apt term FOSS). They may have different motivations, but the FSF is just another aspect of the whole movement that likes to think it's different.
The term FOSS doesn't indicate that the two movements are the same. The term FOSS indicates that one doesn't care to choose between the two movements (which implicitly means that one recognizes a difference). From Wikipedia:
'F/OSS' is an inclusive term generally synonymous with both free software and open source software which describe similar development models, but with differing cultures and philosophies. 'Free software' focuses on the philosophical freedoms it gives to users and 'open source' focuses on the perceived strengths of its peer-to-peer development model. However many people relate to both aspects and so 'F/OSS' is a term that can be used without particular bias towards either camp.
And in all your prose you still didn't rebut the main point-- that FOSS doesn't lead to better software, just a "lowest common denominator".
I did (you didn't read closely enough) and that's not a free software argument. That's close to what open source proponents argue, but stated in an unclear way. Yours is a hard point to defend in part because the term "better" is too vague to discuss. It takes more prose to be clear in what you're trying to communicate. If you define "better" you can talk about something real and see how that argument fails.
If by "better" you mean more reliable and powerful, there are a number of proprietary programs which are more reliable and powerful than free or open source programs which do the same job. What I wrote about is how the two movements react very differently to that reality. So the free software movement likes to think it's different than the open source movement because it is.
If by "better" you mean free to be modified and shared as the user sees fit, then free software is certainly better for users because freedom beats dependency. People should be free to work together and improve their lives.
Finally, I don't know why you're quoting "lowest common denominator" nor do I understand what you mean by that. I find the "insightful" moderation on your post to be inexplicable.
The FSF doesn't do anything "open source", that's a different movement with a different set of values (values that lead directly to wondering if developmental efficiency consistently producing better software is a lie). The FSF exists to promote software freedom, the freedoms to study, share, and modify computer software so we can organize society around increased social solidarity. The free software movement is a social movement which is not about "innovation", it's about freedom.
If you want to learn what the free software movement works for and how it differs from the open source movement, you should read Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software. The free software movement appreciates the support members of the open source movement show it (members of both movements they work together on practical projects, and the OSI and open source advocates use FSF-written licenses such as the GNU GPL/LGPL/FDL), but the free software movement has a different philosophy which leads to radically different conclusions about proprietary software. The free software movement does not wish to be lumped in with the open source movement.
Of course this doesn't mean free software hackers strive for less powerful or less reliable software. But instead of waiting for some proprietor to fix things for us, we all have the freedom to learn how to fix/improve the program ourselves or get someone else to do it for us (even commercially). By contrast, all proprietors are monopolists. The philosophy of software freedom says that it is better to improve a less reliable, less powerful free program than to use a more powerful, more reliable non-free program to do the same job. Proprietary software is anti-social and therefore proprietary software should be obviated. Open source advocates disagree, seeing software development not as a social activity with ethical ramifications but instead as a technocratic act to be done in the most efficient way that benefits businesses first. So open source advocates have no problem advocating for software that would not qualify as "open source" such as proprietary software.
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.
It's not that difficult. But people in positions of political power are disincentivized from doing the right thing. This includes talking to technical people who advocate for free software voting machines so that we can end up with machines that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots which are stored for manual counting and are built on a free software system so that the county/state can get programmers they can trust when things don't work correctly. Having a choice of proprietors is just picking your monopolist and then hoping they'll do what you want when the contract is signed.
Instead of spending millions on a new proprietary system that will not adequately address local needs issues (and thus cause great embarrassment for the clerks who chose them), they could spend money (even with other states and counties) developing voting machines they can maintain and inspect as much as they like. Counties and states can purchase the required black box testing themselves, they don't need ES&S, Diebold, etc. to do this for them.
In this particular case, the ACLU's fear—voters not being immediately notified that their ballots are invalid—can be dealt with by a computer which scans (but doesn't count) their paper voter-verified ballot. Not only can most voters have an opportunity to read their paper ballot, they could plug in a pair of headphones into the computer and have the computer read them their ballot back and then determine if that comports with their intended vote. Then after this proofing (human and/or computer) each voter has a reasonable expectation that their ballot is valid and accurately reflects their intention.
I was part of the appointed group that recommended a set of voting machines for Champaign County, Illinois' elected County Board. Due to some not-completely-honest measures about only hearing from "approved" vendors, and a bunch of poor choices, I was pushed into picking the least-worst which happened to be a set of ES&S machines (one scanned and/or produced a paper voter-verifiable ballot, the other counted that paper ballot and physically retained it in a locked cabinet). Champaign County ended up with ES&S machines, only one of which had been approved for use by the state (in the state's bound-to-be-bullshit testing regime). The hurdles to overcome aren't ridiculously difficult. It will be hard to get some people to understand that it's beneficial to have local control over the voting machine so the machines can be reprogrammed to meet local needs (including changing the software to accommodate non-first-past-the-post voting, and generally fixing bugs or adding enhancements a county decides they want after the voting hardware contract is signed).
One thing that would really help (nothing like the power of a good example) is a free software voting machine that works just like the ES&S paper ballot scanning machines. These machines have a remarkably simple interface, good and adjustable voice, clear display, and headphone jacks. But these machines run on proprietary software which ES&S isn't willing to relicense (despite being their customer). So you're stuck with them for "support" and that means hoping they'll share your county's idea of what your voting system should do.
This kind of thing is why I wish The GIMP or similar would get useable [...]
Perhaps you should consider not making more documents you can't use fully in freedom. It will never be easier to do this than it is right now. Also, instead of contributing more money to Adobe (who apparently doesn't deserve your loyalty or money), you could give The GIMP's developers some money and help justify their time spent on making The GIMP more compatible with Photoshop documents.
Adobe's behavior of late (and it will only get worse) is why applications like Little Snitch exist.
It would seem that the proprietary software in question isn't doing anything now it didn't do months ago. This is not a recent change in the proprietary software, only our collective discovery of this questionable contact with an outside computer is new.
Also, your recommendation of "Little Snitch" is unwise because that program is proprietary. You identify the root problem correctly—a lack of software freedom (hence recommending free software such as The GIMP makes sense). Adding another black box to the mix won't help. There's no way to know that Little Snitch isn't problematic in its own way; there's no reason why users deserve less freedom with Little Snitch than with any other program they run on their computers. For all we know Little Snitch communicates something without user consent, or introduces problems all its own (security holes of various sorts, keylogging, etc.) which essentially allow a different proprietor to spy on the user or collect information that would be useful in gaining access to their accounts (thus becoming impostors).
The biggest issue here is the lack of software freedom Adobe's users have to suffer from, and how any questionable activity of Adobe's proprietary software is a direct result of that lack of freedom.
With free software one doesn't have to trust that the software does the right thing. If one wants, one can inspect the software themselves or get someone else to do that job for them. If one finds that the software does something besides what the user wants, that user is allowed to change the program (or get someone else to change it for them) and make the program work as desired. Proprietary software is licensed so that users are denied any freedom to inspect or modify the program. If you figure out how to modify the program so it won't misbehave anymore, you can't legally help your community by sharing a copy of that modified program.
Proprietary software is untrustworthy by default and it is the lack of software freedom that is the main issue here.
The announcement suggests a similar inversion of ethical and legal when it says "Everyone knows that it is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many legal uses for bittorrent."; does this mean that if there were no legal uses BitTorrent would be "wrong and unethical"?
The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.
I can't believe anyone would believe IE8 properly renders Acid2 without evidence. If this were Firefox we'd have nightlies, betas, and other code to verify and learn from, inspect, share, and modify because Firefox respects our software freedom. If this news were about Firefox I'd be able to verify this myself without signing an NDA or being part of an organization that has lost the biggest antitrust case in US history. And respecting my software freedom is worth being excited about.
So if Paint.NET's entry somehow appeared lower in some search engine's rankings, writing and distributing non-free software would somehow be justified? No, it wouldn't, but only if you value software freedom for its own sake. This shows yet another instance of how different the free software and open source philosophies are: open source philosophy will lead to defending endorsing programs which don't qualify as open source (which, I take it, is the movement you advocate for since you refer to "closing the source").
If what you're saying is true, I will not recommend the use of Paint.NET because that program no longer respects its users software freedom. I will recommend The GIMP instead, even for people who find The GIMP to have far more features than they really need (as so many do with the proprietary Photoshop program).
Your criticisms stem from the inadequacies of the open source movement which casts aside software freedom in pursuit of a philosophy focused on developmental methodology. In fact you echo one of the points of that essay on how the two movements' philosophies differ irreconcilably: anyone who pushes aside software freedom will think a reliable and powerful non-free program is preferred to a less capable less reliable free program (free software being software we can choose to improve to make it reliable and powerful). If you were taking software freedom and social solidarity more seriously, you would realize how petty concerns about licensing costs are (free software advocates strongly push for making as much money as you can with free software) and how much more important it is to treat one's fellows as friends and neighbors. Part of this means not trapping your fellows into a monopoly for support, recognizing that no proprietor is truly interested in your project or your well-being as a user (except to the extent that leads to giving them more control), and that therefore settling for partial freedom is unwise.
And even within the meager realm of popularity (which is truly a secondary concern), we can see FLOSS is the primary choice on the server: email servers and web servers, for instance, are two major parts of what most people do on the Internet daily and they rely on FLOSS to make sure things are reliable. I see more people using OpenOffice.org and Firefox, among other desktop and client-side programs.
So no, pursuing software freedom respects the most important points. Free software addresses challenging and important considerations in society. A technocratic approach centered on development efficiency misses those points.
Perhaps you know more about the distribution of the program than I do but I don't know that for sure. However that's not so critical to the point I was raising.
Notification requirements are non-free and I don't know how we could know if this code was ever distributed for a fee. Perhaps a particular distributor (such as the copyright holder) didn't distribute it for a fee, but someone else or some other organization (besides Sony) may have. Once a free software program is distributed we know vanishingly little about further development or distribution; that's just how it goes when you give people the freedom to share and modify.
Even if we knew that this code had never been distributed for a fee by anyone, the important point is the difference between the restrictions of proprietary software and the liberties of free software not whether the program was developed or distributed as part of business activity.
It's noticeable that concerns about organizations which don't respect relevant laws or ignore privacy issues didn't rank highly with you. Technical concerns seem to take top priority, social concerns and legal responsibilities are almost absent from the discussion. And I don't think you're alone in this.
Do you have any concerns about the mismatch between the interests of a state-run educational facility (like a state college) which isn't (ostensibly) a for-profit institution and a commercial for-profit service provider? It wasn't long ago that a search provider thought it okay to 'anonymize' some search data and release search data. The anonymization process meant generating new IDs for the searches, but still allowed anyone who has the data to put together searches (so you had a pretty good idea that the same person made a particular set of searches) and find them based on what they searched for, which is what a couple reporters did.
Who takes responsibility when the private contractor screws up? Is part of the contract that the state is no longer at fault, despite that the deal couldn't have gone through without their approval? Are we just headed to another trip toward legalizing the unethical (like the US seems to be doing with legalizing the warrantless searches)? The harm that can come from releasing sensitive information is not easily repaired. I certainly hope it's not routine for students who see the college nurse to be emailed with their test results indicating they're overweight and at risk for a host of health problems (problems future employers might use against them when they seek a job). To frame these issues in terms of administrative hassle and college cost seems incomplete at best.
But even with technical concerns, what about locking you into software? Microsoft in particular, though this comes from many other proprietors as well, is widely known for using technical schemes to lock people into software that best serves the interests of the proprietor instead of the user. This didn't seem to rank highly in your concerns either, and I don't think that this concern registers with people until it is adversely affecting them (and then only some have the motivation to get out from under that trap; as Eben Moglen said a couple years ago at an FSF talk, it's hard to get people to change their word processor).
Seeing the discussion here and asking a few students in the building where I work about this, makes me think of how much more work there is to do to teach people to identify and value certain freedoms, consider privacy issues, corruption, and learn enough about how things work (in a purely non-technical sense) so that they can see past the glitzy ads promising handy features at low prices.
Because "choice" is not always good, and merely getting "cheap laptops in the hands of poor children" is not the goal. One must be mindful of what the choices are and their long-term implications. A choice of being dominated by a proprietor is inappropriate for all users. This computer aims to educate and a system users can totally modify and learn from to suit their needs. Basing the XO on free software is entirely appropriate as is using the computer in freedom. Building the XO on proprietary software is wholly inappropriate. It's a good thing that these kids can investigate what's really going on and help one another, making their computers do what they want and only freedom can assure that.
The "choice" argument is one used by software proprietors and their sympathizers to make non-free alternative seem equal to free software. Dependency and separation, an imposed inability to help oneself is far worse than independence, helping one's community, and social solidarity.
Except that it's completely untrustworthy because it's non-free software. If a major feature of the software is that you can trust it to keep your secrets or protect your privacy, you should be able to trust that it's only going to do what you want it to do. Non-free software inherently doesn't work this way, so none of it is useful for encryption. This program disallows modification, so if you discover that it doesn't do what you want you have no permission to make it do what you want. Forget about helping your community by distributing improved versions of the program: distribution is only allowed gratis and if one distributes the software they distributed to you in its original (software) packaging.
The license for the program is so over-the-top in its restriction it's laughable. It claims to prohibit talking about the software (section 3.a.iv). Users are prohibited from any translation or localization of the software as well (section 3.a.i), so if the interface isn't in your language you're out of luck.
The solution is simple: use only free software, relish your software freedom, help your community by distributing free software, and encrypt your communications to your heart's content. This way only your limitations keep you from fully understanding what your computer is doing with your data and you can draw on the talents of other trustworthy people to help you whenever you need their assistance.
Software vulnerabilities crop up frequently, it's inherent in complex systems. The question comes to how users are treated and what freedoms they have to help one another and help themselves. With proprietary software, users must wait for the proprietor to supply a fix. All users of proprietary software are trapped in a monopoly. With free software users have the freedom to inspect, share, and modify the software at any time (or get someone else to do this work for them). Users don't have to wait to discover bugs or wait to get them fixed.
There are also related benefits when it comes to adding features users want and keeping prices low through competition and doing favors for friends.
I don't champion "open source" because I'm not particularly interested in making a business-first argument about developer efficiency (which is a bit of a myth) or going on about the latest twist on 'many hands make light work' (many eyes do help reduce bugs, but some bugs will apparently escape a lot of programmers). Instead I'd rather focus on how freedom places the control of my computer in my hands, leaving it to me to decide how much time and effort I want to put into improving my software. I've come to expect these freedoms with my house, my car, my plumbing, my electricity, and other things despite that I'm not a carpenter, mechanic, plumber, or electrician. I wouldn't trade away the freedom to criticize my government despite not being a great writer. So too I should cherish software freedom for its own sake. So it seems entirely right and proper to focus on this freedom and stress free software's inherently better way of treating users over proprietary software. Tossing aside this concern means treating freedom the same way as being trapped by monopolists.
As others have pointed out here on/., she's a billionaire. Therefore she can afford to do quite a lot of things to her liking. I don't believe that she's "massively disappointed that this matter had to come to court at all". She's disappointed that this publisher hasn't buckled to her will (even though she stood up for herself against charges of plagiarism from the author of the "Larry Potter" stories). Perhaps more publishers will publish their works and defend themselves against malicious charges of copyright infringement.
And some people say the Gimp is inferior to Photoshop.
I am not among them. I think The GIMP is great software and I use it frequently.
Funny how the/. posters complain that The GIMP's interface isn't enough like Photoshop to be worthwhile and here Photoshop's proprietor is telling us that they're walking away from that "shambling, bloated monster of a program".
When Adobe completes this work I'm sure will be regaled with another cadre of posts in every GIMP thread talking about how The GIMP is falling farther behind Photoshop's interface (where we're supposed to assume it's The GIMP's goal to be more like Photoshop). Meanwhile, the lack of discussion of software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify programs at any time for any reason) highlights how little some users have been taught to think of the social role computers play in our lives.
How can an operating system be considered "secure" if the inclusion of a third-party component makes it insecure?
This has to do with the software being proprietary, not coming from a third party.
How can an operating system be considered "secure" if it has proprietary software installed? It can't. Proprietary software security is unverifiable by anyone you can trust and therefore unworthy of being considered secure. Apparently bugs will go unfixed for years because only the proprietor is allowed to fix the bugs. However, the proprietor is unmotivated to fix bugs until the proprietor is pushed (through publicly announced exploits, better competition, and so on). All the while you, the user, are denied complete control over your computer.
The cure is simple: install nothing but free software on your computer. Give yourself the freedom to inspect, change, and share the software, hire someone else to do it for you, or leverage the talent of a community of hackers improving free software all the time. This is not about making everyone a programmer, it's about giving people the freedom to control their computers while building a society of cooperation and social solidarity. Proprietary software denies you your software freedom, so deny proprietary software a place on your computer.
We should be careful not to talk about the money Radiohead made as if they have stopped making money from commercial distribution of these recordings. For all we know these recordings will go on to become more famous, and since (ostensibly) Radiohead retains copyright control of these recordings they stand to make more money in commercial licensing.
Copyright control is something artists typically sign over to recording labels when they sign with a label. So even if the artist is unhappy that the famous recording of that song is being used in a context they object to, the artist doesn't have much say in the matter beyond trying to raise enough embarrassment to dissuade anyone from using that recording. Only the biggest artists have more say and those artists are so few in number that it isn't terribly illuminating to talk about whatever control they exert. Radiohead could even decide to license these tracks to everyone to share non-commercially and refer you to their lawyer to negotiate commercial performance and distribution licensing terms. Record labels haven't generally shown any willingness to do this.
There's also the things it's hard to put a price on: the freedom that comes with making friends by treating people well. As we're seeing with other music distribution channels, DRM-free recordings are in demand; people appreciate the freedom they get to control how and when they listen to their music.
I am glad to see the license for the fonts being published clearly and prominently so it can be reviewed along with the fonts. I recall submitting critique of an earlier license for the fonts, pointing out that the license didn't allow modification (important for improvement) or subsetting (important in PDFs). It was unfortunate that these fonts were aimed at an academic audience, people who were remarkably likely to want to improve the fonts to suit their needs, yet were disallowed from doing so under the old license. The revised license appears to have remedied my issues with their previous license; this license allows modification, subsetting, copying, and distribution (including commercial distribution) all with remarkably mild restrictions that (in my opinion) would not stop this from being a Free Software license.
Because the license allows distribution of the fonts and "the associated documentation files", you could probably find a copy of the font software somewhere that doesn't make you go through a click-through, as well as a sample rendering.
Although it didn't come up in this story with Stephen Colbert, I believe I can address why the Democrats and Republicans are part of the problem when it comes to American electoral politics: Ralph Nader is currently suing the Democrats for the stunts they pulled to keep him off the ballot when he ran in 2004 as an independent. It's worth your while to learn why Nader is suing and ask yourself if you are better served by having a few corporate candidates to choose from or more candidates spanning the political spectrum of ideas on the ballot. Voters aren't sufficiently outraged to support non-Democrat/non-Republican candidates, choosing to not vote at all most times. But their anger at the process is rising while the two major parties put up what Lawrence O'Donnell calls "virtually indistinguishable candidates" (and, let me assure you, after canvassing for signatures to get someone on the ballot in a local Congressional race, I know there's plenty of anger out there on this issue).
If you want to have a more informed view of the power which the Democrats and Republicans hold and how they use that power to keep candidates off the ballot, I suggest looking into
the Open Debates website, particularly their criticisms of the current American presidential televised presentations by which most American voters learn about the allowable range of debate in the US—the televised "debates" are a sham run by a partisan and corporate-sponsored group called the "Commission on Presidential Debates" which is headed by former Democrat and Republican higher-ups
both discs of the 2-disc DVD "An Unreasonable Man" (a related entry from my blog), the recent documentary about Nader. In the candidacy portion of the movie (which isn't most of what's on these discs), the question before you isn't whether you agree with his politics, it's why he and so many other candidates have a hard time running. The second disc has a series of short videos on apropos topics including "What happened to the Democratic Party?" and "Debating the Role of Third Parties in the U.S.".
The real rub in Colbert's rejection is that he was polling higher than some Democrats (according to one brief clip Colbert played on his show last night). Perhaps the Democratic Party wanted to be the group that shut those Democratic Party candidates out, not let some citizen show them up and point out how managed American elections really are.
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I don't understand what you're getting at with "less extreme sources". How are sources "extreme" or mild (?).
You say my "facts are not exactly unbiased" but you don't refute anything I said. Talking about facts being biased makes no sense. That corporate news kept shilling for war while the US public was in favor of war can't be explained by your entertainment/sensationalism rationale.
The news media has an obligation to question power and the government's most serious act is to go to war. So it is part of the media's job to challenge the government to justify going to war. They didn't do that in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Millions of people in the streets before the war began had a hard time getting serious coverage in most corporate news outlets.
What would be sensational is for major corporate media to report on what Iraqis want (do they want the US in or out of their country?), to report on what American people said they want in their own polls—according to Jeff Cohen and Normon Solomon, most Americans want a national health insurance program run by the government and are willing to pay higher taxes for it but CBS' Jeff Greenfield says the opposite in a news piece responding to Michael Moore's "SiCKO" (which advocates for universal health care, particularly HR676, a single-payer universal health care bill):
We know the corporate media can do better. During hurricane Katrina mainstream media covered ordinary people on-air talking about what their families went through including criticism of government inaction. It's no coincidence that the media had no managers from the government controlling the message; the soldiers who would fill that role were all shipped off to Iraq.
No, that's not why TV news is soundbites. When you reduce the amount of time in which someone is allowed to make their point, you reduce what they can say. When one has little time to speak, one can only make the same old points we've heard a dozen times before. Reframing the issue to talk about new ways of thinking takes time. Explaining more significant points that help the audience understand larger patterns takes time. The corporations that own so many TV channels all benefit from keeping tight control over the ends of allowable debate. For instance, when there's war analysis the corporate news will invite a military official (current or former) and someone else who is pro-war, so at best the debate is sure to never bring up any of the lies that were repeated by the corporate media. Instead, as so many news clips show, you get a weapons hardware show (complete with 3-D graphics of tanks, missiles, etc.). Very rarely will someone with an anti-war perspective get on-air, according to FAIR in a study of news shortly after the US invaded Iraq:
When a network is owned by a military contractor (like NBC which is owned by contractor General Electric), it's all too clear who benefits from the status quo and why this is the way it is.
Democracy Now! is a daily TV news hour that gives people a chance to speak (audio and video archives on archive.org in a variety of formats, transcripts of a lot of their segments are on their website gratis). They cover important stories, not the fluff (celebrity goings-on, daily weather reports, sports, and traffic reports) and they cover many stories the corporate news won't touch or won't discuss from a perspective not favored by corporate lobbyists (independent and lesser-known candidates in big elections, "third rail" issues like the death penalty, Israel/Palestine conflict, Texaco/Chevron/Coca-Cola killings around the world, corporate media control, universal health care).
The term FOSS doesn't indicate that the two movements are the same. The term FOSS indicates that one doesn't care to choose between the two movements (which implicitly means that one recognizes a difference). From Wikipedia:
I did (you didn't read closely enough) and that's not a free software argument. That's close to what open source proponents argue, but stated in an unclear way. Yours is a hard point to defend in part because the term "better" is too vague to discuss. It takes more prose to be clear in what you're trying to communicate. If you define "better" you can talk about something real and see how that argument fails.
If by "better" you mean more reliable and powerful, there are a number of proprietary programs which are more reliable and powerful than free or open source programs which do the same job. What I wrote about is how the two movements react very differently to that reality. So the free software movement likes to think it's different than the open source movement because it is.
If by "better" you mean free to be modified and shared as the user sees fit, then free software is certainly better for users because freedom beats dependency. People should be free to work together and improve their lives.
Finally, I don't know why you're quoting "lowest common denominator" nor do I understand what you mean by that. I find the "insightful" moderation on your post to be inexplicable.
The FSF doesn't do anything "open source", that's a different movement with a different set of values (values that lead directly to wondering if developmental efficiency consistently producing better software is a lie). The FSF exists to promote software freedom, the freedoms to study, share, and modify computer software so we can organize society around increased social solidarity. The free software movement is a social movement which is not about "innovation", it's about freedom.
If you want to learn what the free software movement works for and how it differs from the open source movement, you should read Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software. The free software movement appreciates the support members of the open source movement show it (members of both movements they work together on practical projects, and the OSI and open source advocates use FSF-written licenses such as the GNU GPL/LGPL/FDL), but the free software movement has a different philosophy which leads to radically different conclusions about proprietary software. The free software movement does not wish to be lumped in with the open source movement.
Of course this doesn't mean free software hackers strive for less powerful or less reliable software. But instead of waiting for some proprietor to fix things for us, we all have the freedom to learn how to fix/improve the program ourselves or get someone else to do it for us (even commercially). By contrast, all proprietors are monopolists. The philosophy of software freedom says that it is better to improve a less reliable, less powerful free program than to use a more powerful, more reliable non-free program to do the same job. Proprietary software is anti-social and therefore proprietary software should be obviated. Open source advocates disagree, seeing software development not as a social activity with ethical ramifications but instead as a technocratic act to be done in the most efficient way that benefits businesses first. So open source advocates have no problem advocating for software that would not qualify as "open source" such as proprietary software.
It's not that difficult. But people in positions of political power are disincentivized from doing the right thing. This includes talking to technical people who advocate for free software voting machines so that we can end up with machines that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots which are stored for manual counting and are built on a free software system so that the county/state can get programmers they can trust when things don't work correctly. Having a choice of proprietors is just picking your monopolist and then hoping they'll do what you want when the contract is signed.
Instead of spending millions on a new proprietary system that will not adequately address local needs issues (and thus cause great embarrassment for the clerks who chose them), they could spend money (even with other states and counties) developing voting machines they can maintain and inspect as much as they like. Counties and states can purchase the required black box testing themselves, they don't need ES&S, Diebold, etc. to do this for them.
In this particular case, the ACLU's fear—voters not being immediately notified that their ballots are invalid—can be dealt with by a computer which scans (but doesn't count) their paper voter-verified ballot. Not only can most voters have an opportunity to read their paper ballot, they could plug in a pair of headphones into the computer and have the computer read them their ballot back and then determine if that comports with their intended vote. Then after this proofing (human and/or computer) each voter has a reasonable expectation that their ballot is valid and accurately reflects their intention.
I was part of the appointed group that recommended a set of voting machines for Champaign County, Illinois' elected County Board. Due to some not-completely-honest measures about only hearing from "approved" vendors, and a bunch of poor choices, I was pushed into picking the least-worst which happened to be a set of ES&S machines (one scanned and/or produced a paper voter-verifiable ballot, the other counted that paper ballot and physically retained it in a locked cabinet). Champaign County ended up with ES&S machines, only one of which had been approved for use by the state (in the state's bound-to-be-bullshit testing regime). The hurdles to overcome aren't ridiculously difficult. It will be hard to get some people to understand that it's beneficial to have local control over the voting machine so the machines can be reprogrammed to meet local needs (including changing the software to accommodate non-first-past-the-post voting, and generally fixing bugs or adding enhancements a county decides they want after the voting hardware contract is signed).
One thing that would really help (nothing like the power of a good example) is a free software voting machine that works just like the ES&S paper ballot scanning machines. These machines have a remarkably simple interface, good and adjustable voice, clear display, and headphone jacks. But these machines run on proprietary software which ES&S isn't willing to relicense (despite being their customer). So you're stuck with them for "support" and that means hoping they'll share your county's idea of what your voting system should do.
Perhaps you should consider not making more documents you can't use fully in freedom. It will never be easier to do this than it is right now. Also, instead of contributing more money to Adobe (who apparently doesn't deserve your loyalty or money), you could give The GIMP's developers some money and help justify their time spent on making The GIMP more compatible with Photoshop documents.
It would seem that the proprietary software in question isn't doing anything now it didn't do months ago. This is not a recent change in the proprietary software, only our collective discovery of this questionable contact with an outside computer is new.
Also, your recommendation of "Little Snitch" is unwise because that program is proprietary. You identify the root problem correctly—a lack of software freedom (hence recommending free software such as The GIMP makes sense). Adding another black box to the mix won't help. There's no way to know that Little Snitch isn't problematic in its own way; there's no reason why users deserve less freedom with Little Snitch than with any other program they run on their computers. For all we know Little Snitch communicates something without user consent, or introduces problems all its own (security holes of various sorts, keylogging, etc.) which essentially allow a different proprietor to spy on the user or collect information that would be useful in gaining access to their accounts (thus becoming impostors).
The biggest issue here is the lack of software freedom Adobe's users have to suffer from, and how any questionable activity of Adobe's proprietary software is a direct result of that lack of freedom.
With free software one doesn't have to trust that the software does the right thing. If one wants, one can inspect the software themselves or get someone else to do that job for them. If one finds that the software does something besides what the user wants, that user is allowed to change the program (or get someone else to change it for them) and make the program work as desired. Proprietary software is licensed so that users are denied any freedom to inspect or modify the program. If you figure out how to modify the program so it won't misbehave anymore, you can't legally help your community by sharing a copy of that modified program.
Proprietary software is untrustworthy by default and it is the lack of software freedom that is the main issue here.
How are you defining "legitimate"?
The announcement suggests a similar inversion of ethical and legal when it says "Everyone knows that it is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many legal uses for bittorrent."; does this mean that if there were no legal uses BitTorrent would be "wrong and unethical"?
I can't believe anyone would believe IE8 properly renders Acid2 without evidence. If this were Firefox we'd have nightlies, betas, and other code to verify and learn from, inspect, share, and modify because Firefox respects our software freedom. If this news were about Firefox I'd be able to verify this myself without signing an NDA or being part of an organization that has lost the biggest antitrust case in US history. And respecting my software freedom is worth being excited about.
So if Paint.NET's entry somehow appeared lower in some search engine's rankings, writing and distributing non-free software would somehow be justified? No, it wouldn't, but only if you value software freedom for its own sake. This shows yet another instance of how different the free software and open source philosophies are: open source philosophy will lead to defending endorsing programs which don't qualify as open source (which, I take it, is the movement you advocate for since you refer to "closing the source").
If what you're saying is true, I will not recommend the use of Paint.NET because that program no longer respects its users software freedom. I will recommend The GIMP instead, even for people who find The GIMP to have far more features than they really need (as so many do with the proprietary Photoshop program).
Your criticisms stem from the inadequacies of the open source movement which casts aside software freedom in pursuit of a philosophy focused on developmental methodology. In fact you echo one of the points of that essay on how the two movements' philosophies differ irreconcilably: anyone who pushes aside software freedom will think a reliable and powerful non-free program is preferred to a less capable less reliable free program (free software being software we can choose to improve to make it reliable and powerful). If you were taking software freedom and social solidarity more seriously, you would realize how petty concerns about licensing costs are (free software advocates strongly push for making as much money as you can with free software) and how much more important it is to treat one's fellows as friends and neighbors. Part of this means not trapping your fellows into a monopoly for support, recognizing that no proprietor is truly interested in your project or your well-being as a user (except to the extent that leads to giving them more control), and that therefore settling for partial freedom is unwise.
And even within the meager realm of popularity (which is truly a secondary concern), we can see FLOSS is the primary choice on the server: email servers and web servers, for instance, are two major parts of what most people do on the Internet daily and they rely on FLOSS to make sure things are reliable. I see more people using OpenOffice.org and Firefox, among other desktop and client-side programs.
So no, pursuing software freedom respects the most important points. Free software addresses challenging and important considerations in society. A technocratic approach centered on development efficiency misses those points.
Naomi Wolf was recently on Democracy Now! talking about "The End of America" (transcript, low-bandwidth audio, high-bandwidth audio, low-bandwidth video, high-bandwidth video).
Perhaps you know more about the distribution of the program than I do but I don't know that for sure. However that's not so critical to the point I was raising.
Notification requirements are non-free and I don't know how we could know if this code was ever distributed for a fee. Perhaps a particular distributor (such as the copyright holder) didn't distribute it for a fee, but someone else or some other organization (besides Sony) may have. Once a free software program is distributed we know vanishingly little about further development or distribution; that's just how it goes when you give people the freedom to share and modify.
Even if we knew that this code had never been distributed for a fee by anyone, the important point is the difference between the restrictions of proprietary software and the liberties of free software not whether the program was developed or distributed as part of business activity.
You don't mean "commercial" because GPL-covered code is distributed for a fee and is thus already commercial code. You mean proprietary code.
It's noticeable that concerns about organizations which don't respect relevant laws or ignore privacy issues didn't rank highly with you. Technical concerns seem to take top priority, social concerns and legal responsibilities are almost absent from the discussion. And I don't think you're alone in this.
Do you have any concerns about the mismatch between the interests of a state-run educational facility (like a state college) which isn't (ostensibly) a for-profit institution and a commercial for-profit service provider? It wasn't long ago that a search provider thought it okay to 'anonymize' some search data and release search data. The anonymization process meant generating new IDs for the searches, but still allowed anyone who has the data to put together searches (so you had a pretty good idea that the same person made a particular set of searches) and find them based on what they searched for, which is what a couple reporters did.
Who takes responsibility when the private contractor screws up? Is part of the contract that the state is no longer at fault, despite that the deal couldn't have gone through without their approval? Are we just headed to another trip toward legalizing the unethical (like the US seems to be doing with legalizing the warrantless searches)? The harm that can come from releasing sensitive information is not easily repaired. I certainly hope it's not routine for students who see the college nurse to be emailed with their test results indicating they're overweight and at risk for a host of health problems (problems future employers might use against them when they seek a job). To frame these issues in terms of administrative hassle and college cost seems incomplete at best.
But even with technical concerns, what about locking you into software? Microsoft in particular, though this comes from many other proprietors as well, is widely known for using technical schemes to lock people into software that best serves the interests of the proprietor instead of the user. This didn't seem to rank highly in your concerns either, and I don't think that this concern registers with people until it is adversely affecting them (and then only some have the motivation to get out from under that trap; as Eben Moglen said a couple years ago at an FSF talk, it's hard to get people to change their word processor).
Seeing the discussion here and asking a few students in the building where I work about this, makes me think of how much more work there is to do to teach people to identify and value certain freedoms, consider privacy issues, corruption, and learn enough about how things work (in a purely non-technical sense) so that they can see past the glitzy ads promising handy features at low prices.
Because "choice" is not always good, and merely getting "cheap laptops in the hands of poor children" is not the goal. One must be mindful of what the choices are and their long-term implications. A choice of being dominated by a proprietor is inappropriate for all users. This computer aims to educate and a system users can totally modify and learn from to suit their needs. Basing the XO on free software is entirely appropriate as is using the computer in freedom. Building the XO on proprietary software is wholly inappropriate. It's a good thing that these kids can investigate what's really going on and help one another, making their computers do what they want and only freedom can assure that.
The "choice" argument is one used by software proprietors and their sympathizers to make non-free alternative seem equal to free software. Dependency and separation, an imposed inability to help oneself is far worse than independence, helping one's community, and social solidarity.
Except that it's completely untrustworthy because it's non-free software. If a major feature of the software is that you can trust it to keep your secrets or protect your privacy, you should be able to trust that it's only going to do what you want it to do. Non-free software inherently doesn't work this way, so none of it is useful for encryption. This program disallows modification, so if you discover that it doesn't do what you want you have no permission to make it do what you want. Forget about helping your community by distributing improved versions of the program: distribution is only allowed gratis and if one distributes the software they distributed to you in its original (software) packaging.
The license for the program is so over-the-top in its restriction it's laughable. It claims to prohibit talking about the software (section 3.a.iv). Users are prohibited from any translation or localization of the software as well (section 3.a.i), so if the interface isn't in your language you're out of luck.
The solution is simple: use only free software, relish your software freedom, help your community by distributing free software, and encrypt your communications to your heart's content. This way only your limitations keep you from fully understanding what your computer is doing with your data and you can draw on the talents of other trustworthy people to help you whenever you need their assistance.
Software vulnerabilities crop up frequently, it's inherent in complex systems. The question comes to how users are treated and what freedoms they have to help one another and help themselves. With proprietary software, users must wait for the proprietor to supply a fix. All users of proprietary software are trapped in a monopoly. With free software users have the freedom to inspect, share, and modify the software at any time (or get someone else to do this work for them). Users don't have to wait to discover bugs or wait to get them fixed.
There are also related benefits when it comes to adding features users want and keeping prices low through competition and doing favors for friends.
I don't champion "open source" because I'm not particularly interested in making a business-first argument about developer efficiency (which is a bit of a myth) or going on about the latest twist on 'many hands make light work' (many eyes do help reduce bugs, but some bugs will apparently escape a lot of programmers). Instead I'd rather focus on how freedom places the control of my computer in my hands, leaving it to me to decide how much time and effort I want to put into improving my software. I've come to expect these freedoms with my house, my car, my plumbing, my electricity, and other things despite that I'm not a carpenter, mechanic, plumber, or electrician. I wouldn't trade away the freedom to criticize my government despite not being a great writer. So too I should cherish software freedom for its own sake. So it seems entirely right and proper to focus on this freedom and stress free software's inherently better way of treating users over proprietary software. Tossing aside this concern means treating freedom the same way as being trapped by monopolists.
She's ridiculously litigious and her inaction against her publisher is a threat to human rights. Richard Stallman (RMS) has good coverage of this issue and an explanation of why this campaign against buying Harry Potter books is necessary.
As others have pointed out here on /., she's a billionaire. Therefore she can afford to do quite a lot of things to her liking. I don't believe that she's "massively disappointed that this matter had to come to court at all". She's disappointed that this publisher hasn't buckled to her will (even though she stood up for herself against charges of plagiarism from the author of the "Larry Potter" stories). Perhaps more publishers will publish their works and defend themselves against malicious charges of copyright infringement.
I am not among them. I think The GIMP is great software and I use it frequently.
Funny how the /. posters complain that The GIMP's interface isn't enough like Photoshop to be worthwhile and here Photoshop's proprietor is telling us that they're walking away from that "shambling, bloated monster of a program".
When Adobe completes this work I'm sure will be regaled with another cadre of posts in every GIMP thread talking about how The GIMP is falling farther behind Photoshop's interface (where we're supposed to assume it's The GIMP's goal to be more like Photoshop). Meanwhile, the lack of discussion of software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify programs at any time for any reason) highlights how little some users have been taught to think of the social role computers play in our lives.
This has to do with the software being proprietary, not coming from a third party.
How can an operating system be considered "secure" if it has proprietary software installed? It can't. Proprietary software security is unverifiable by anyone you can trust and therefore unworthy of being considered secure. Apparently bugs will go unfixed for years because only the proprietor is allowed to fix the bugs. However, the proprietor is unmotivated to fix bugs until the proprietor is pushed (through publicly announced exploits, better competition, and so on). All the while you, the user, are denied complete control over your computer.
The cure is simple: install nothing but free software on your computer. Give yourself the freedom to inspect, change, and share the software, hire someone else to do it for you, or leverage the talent of a community of hackers improving free software all the time. This is not about making everyone a programmer, it's about giving people the freedom to control their computers while building a society of cooperation and social solidarity. Proprietary software denies you your software freedom, so deny proprietary software a place on your computer.
We should be careful not to talk about the money Radiohead made as if they have stopped making money from commercial distribution of these recordings. For all we know these recordings will go on to become more famous, and since (ostensibly) Radiohead retains copyright control of these recordings they stand to make more money in commercial licensing.
Copyright control is something artists typically sign over to recording labels when they sign with a label. So even if the artist is unhappy that the famous recording of that song is being used in a context they object to, the artist doesn't have much say in the matter beyond trying to raise enough embarrassment to dissuade anyone from using that recording. Only the biggest artists have more say and those artists are so few in number that it isn't terribly illuminating to talk about whatever control they exert. Radiohead could even decide to license these tracks to everyone to share non-commercially and refer you to their lawyer to negotiate commercial performance and distribution licensing terms. Record labels haven't generally shown any willingness to do this.
There's also the things it's hard to put a price on: the freedom that comes with making friends by treating people well. As we're seeing with other music distribution channels, DRM-free recordings are in demand; people appreciate the freedom they get to control how and when they listen to their music.
I am glad to see the license for the fonts being published clearly and prominently so it can be reviewed along with the fonts. I recall submitting critique of an earlier license for the fonts, pointing out that the license didn't allow modification (important for improvement) or subsetting (important in PDFs). It was unfortunate that these fonts were aimed at an academic audience, people who were remarkably likely to want to improve the fonts to suit their needs, yet were disallowed from doing so under the old license. The revised license appears to have remedied my issues with their previous license; this license allows modification, subsetting, copying, and distribution (including commercial distribution) all with remarkably mild restrictions that (in my opinion) would not stop this from being a Free Software license.
Because the license allows distribution of the fonts and "the associated documentation files", you could probably find a copy of the font software somewhere that doesn't make you go through a click-through, as well as a sample rendering.
Although it didn't come up in this story with Stephen Colbert, I believe I can address why the Democrats and Republicans are part of the problem when it comes to American electoral politics: Ralph Nader is currently suing the Democrats for the stunts they pulled to keep him off the ballot when he ran in 2004 as an independent. It's worth your while to learn why Nader is suing and ask yourself if you are better served by having a few corporate candidates to choose from or more candidates spanning the political spectrum of ideas on the ballot. Voters aren't sufficiently outraged to support non-Democrat/non-Republican candidates, choosing to not vote at all most times. But their anger at the process is rising while the two major parties put up what Lawrence O'Donnell calls "virtually indistinguishable candidates" (and, let me assure you, after canvassing for signatures to get someone on the ballot in a local Congressional race, I know there's plenty of anger out there on this issue).
If you want to have a more informed view of the power which the Democrats and Republicans hold and how they use that power to keep candidates off the ballot, I suggest looking into
The real rub in Colbert's rejection is that he was polling higher than some Democrats (according to one brief clip Colbert played on his show last night). Perhaps the Democratic Party wanted to be the group that shut those Democratic Party candidates out, not let some citizen show them up and point out how managed American elections really are.