When do people who use the word "religion" as you did get around to describing the proprietary advocates as "religious" and thus recognizing how useless that term is in this context? After all, the proprietors are quite zealous in their advocacy for things that keep their users helpless to fix their own problems or get help elsewhere including file formats nobody else can really master (even their own software sometimes has problems), software patents to preclude competition, and FUD to keep would-be competition at bay.
Software freedom is better.
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Respecting your software freedom to share and modify the program has never been an option with Photoshop, no matter how much you pay. Freedom has always been a part of the GIMP.
Why stress software freedom? I want the social solidarity that you only get in freedom; I want to be independent from masters and make sure my computer only obeys me. I'd rather have less functional or powerful free software than a more powerful or reliable proprietary program because I can hire people to improve the free program or I can ask the community to help me improve the free program. I can't free Photoshop. The catch here is that most people haven't been taught to value their software freedom, so they don't know to look for it and they haven't been taught to think of the consequences when their freedom is absent. I aim to change this by teaching people to value freedom for its own sake. I hope you will too.
It depends on whom one listens to; the term "operating system" is also confused with kernel when some refer to a "Linux operating system" despite that Linux has always been an important part of a complete operating system but not the entirety of it. It's not much of a stretch to understand how one could confuse a file system and an operating system, at least if one has no clear idea what the two are to begin with. Heaven forbid if another major contributor gets a share of the credit for the complete system.
The only role for computers to play in voting is helping to prepare a paper ballot. And even that role should be optional, according to the voter's desire. In that role there are genuine advantages no voter should have to do without. Computers can help the illiterate and blind vote in privacy (meaning that they don't have to bring a buddy into the booth with them, thus divulging their vote).
No computers are needed to count ballots at any stage of the election process. All counting can be (and is, in surprisingly large districts) by hand. I remain convinced that anyone insisting on computerized vote counting is framing the issue to place speed ahead of more important concerns such as accountability. Even ranked voting schemes (where one ranks candidates instead of picking just one) can be counted manually.
In the US, HAVA (the 2002 "Help America Vote Act") is largely a gift from the federal government to election machine vendors which compels states to revamp what may have been a perfectly adequate election system. The small advantages my county got from HAVA-compliance were far outweighed by the disadvantages. I'm unaware of any systemic substantive improvement in voting procedures that resulted from this act, but I'm aware of ongoing problems that merely shifted how elections were rigged.
There's also a problem of not knowing if the person's vote is genuine. No matter how fancy the security system is, I can't tell if that "vote" coming from some remote system was pressured (an abusive spouse or house mate forcing someone to vote a particular way). In a voting booth, election judges can see who goes in and there's a reasonable means of giving voters their privacy. This is also a reason why you don't want a "receipt" after voting (not that you asked for this, it just comes up often in discussions like these among technical people). It's not a good idea to give anyone the power to effectively compel someone to vote a particular way or be able to check on one's vote (even one's own vote) after the ballot has been cast.
I think making election day a national holiday sounds like a good idea; it's easy to implement, low-tech, familiar, and for a good cause.
It's not hard to get right, it's hard to get past vested interests which are intent on selling crap. I wrote an article for CounterPunch dealing with free software voting machines and served on an appointed committee which recommended election hardware and software to the elected county board (the county board made the real decision, taking our input as just a recommendation). I was able to explain the fatal flaws in all the options before us and they're not hard to understand or see how to do a better job.
But our choices were very restricted; we were hamstrung early. From the first day on the committee we were informed that the state only let us look at "approved hardware" (it turned out this was a lie, and one of the machines we ended up picking had not yet been approved at the state level), vendors opted out (some because they didn't like our request for proposal which included a clause—at my insistence— that we have free software voting software, some because they weren't willing to sell in our state, some just ignored our request to see their system), and some on the panel genuinely didn't foresee what should be obvious to anyone even mildly interested in democracy: when you pick a proprietor you're picking a monopolist. Our end recommendation was merely the best of the worst, not something I'd genuinely endorse given more reasonable options.
I'm under no illusion about voting system security and free software; the issue about free software voting machines does not revolve around security. I wanted (and still do want) free software voting machines because I know that localities want control over their towns, counties, and states. They want to be able to correct bugs in their voting machines and improve the software so it can handle elections other than first-past-the-post. We're talking about machines that have to last decades here, not a cheap personal computer you can afford to replace after 5-7 years. But when the software is a monopoly, voters are at the mercy of the proprietor. If the proprietor says "no", you have nowhere else to go but to buy another system (which is simply not an option for many counties starved for money, such as my county which can't afford to repurchase a whole new set of machines and software licenses). You wouldn't tolerate this lack of control over your life for your car, your house, your plumbing, your electrical system, and you'd never hesitate to hire experts to do work for you in any of those things (because you're probably not a programmer, electrician, mechanic, architect, roofer, etc. yourself). But people have a lot of work ahead of them to teach others to value software freedom for its own sake.
What needs to be done is remarkably well understood. For the most part the technical issues involved are rather plain and easy to explicate to the uninitiated. What's lacking is largely political will to make better systems a reality. I don't have the time to make a new voting system myself, but in the interest of making better systems happen I am willing to work with those who are building a better system. I'll contribute my expertise and experience working on this voting machine recommendation committee.
Many web hosters offer accounts that also come with IM, email, and various web-based programs to do other things. Often these accounts cost very little money and give you gigabytes more space than GMail (and that space can be used for more than just email without resorting to clever hacks to make your email space usable in other ways). Look at who's hosting some of the sites people point to on/. and you'll get some good leads.
I'm not sure that I care where Microsoft Excel fails and where it doesn't when it comes to discovering the pattern of failure. If I were a Microsoft Excel user I wouldn't be allowed to inspect the program to see what it's really doing with my data, fix the program (no matter how expert a programmer I may be), alter the program (in violation of the license), or help my community by sharing my improved version of Excel. Then there's the hypocrisy of how proprietors (also known as monopolists) are treated compared to free software developers and distributors—knowing that the program fails where it shouldn't would be enough for people to cry foul and either stop using or never start using a free software program that exhibited such a bug. We rarely hear serious discussions of one's software freedom. Instead, we're encouraged to push that discussion aside in favor of exclusively stressing technocratic ends. Not hearing cries of "Dump Microsoft Excel Now!" or something calling for a switch to a free software spreadsheet (like Gnumeric or OpenOffice.org's Calc) is saddening. Please take this opportunity to learn more about software freedom.
I found the the use of the word "permanent" more troubling. Nothing in law is permanent, everything can be changed. That's why it takes eternal vigilance to make sure the laws aren't rewritten to hurt you.
When I think of "hot air", I'm more likely to think of posts that make no substantive argument and engage in name calling ("retarded") rather than the work of someone who has written a lot of software, started a social movement for securing software freedoms, and asks for a fair share of credit when people mention the name of a project where the initial author is quite derisive about said freedoms.
I can't agree with your overmoderated post. I think you would benefit from reading the GNU/Linux naming FAQ which addresses your concern about why people ask others to refer to the union of the GNU OS and the Linux kernel as "GNU/Linux" or "GNU+Linux".
Speaking of redistribution rights, consider the following quote from page two of the two released docs:
No license, whether express, implied, arising by estoppel, or otherwise, to any intellectual property rights are granted by this publication.
If we assume that the propaganda term "intellectual property" is to include copyright, it would seem that distributing copies of these specifications non-commercially and verbatim is disallowed. One wonders what else you're not allowed to do with these specs, make derivative works perhaps? After all, "no license" is granted.
And the "preachy" comments come from the proprietary software supporters too, but their words are so often confused for that-which-is-beyond-question that they aren't likely to raise the kinds of responses one reads here to anything RMS says. After all, they don't lead with all the limitations of their software licensing or its effect on users.
I find that people come to agree with Stallman's position when they consider what is going on, what he and the free software movement are fighting for, and how Linus Torvalds' positions on matters of legal and ethical issues leaves much to be desired (the Bitkeeper fiasco, Torvalds' reaction to Tridgell's work on a free software program to work with Bitkeeper repos being examples that come immediately to mind).
Teh Lunix is all about choice... you can choose any application teh FOSSies want you to. But don't you DARE choose Microsoft.
While you may have hit a sore spot about the open source movement (which seems to have no problem with proprietary software when that software is reliable and powerful), the free software movement has never supported "choice" where any of the choices are non-free software. Prioritizing "choice" makes equals out of all possible choices which, in this context, makes it impossible to distinguish between software that denies and supports users' software freedom. Proprietary software always denies users software freedom and is therefore always objectionable. The FSF is quite clear about this; consider what they say about the "Sincere Choice" program which is a response to Microsoft's "Software Choice" program:
We don't completely agree with Sincere Choice, since it says that proprietary software is just as legitimate as free software. We firmly disagree: software should be free. However, if you know people who have been taken in by "Software Choice" please refer them to the Sincere Choice site.
This is one of the reasons I won't do business with Adobe or Apple; they, like many other proprietors before and after them, do not treat their customers properly by freeing obsoleted software so that the software can be improved and continued even after the proprietor decides not to distribute copies for a fee. I don't agree with distributing proprietary software, however I take a very different view of organizations that distribute software as proprietary and then free that program rather than choosing for that proprietary software to never became free. I understand that a version of FrameMaker will let you generate SGML files instead of FM's proprietary format. Perhaps those files will be more easily read than the proprietary FM format I recall dealing with years ago, giving users a chance at switching to something built on free software.
Apple, now embarking on their latest office suite, placed users in a similar situation with AppleWorks files. Hardware wise they sent the same message with the Apple Newton. I recall comparable issues around making bootable CDs for "old-world" PowerPC machines. People reverse engineer things and figure stuff out, but they shouldn't have to. With software that respects the user's freedom, any program can be shared and improved so long as there is the will to do the work.
Framing this issue around inconvenience misses the more important underlying point. Your freedom to control your stuff matters. This incident is a harbinger of bad things; ostensibly Microsoft is trying to prevent illicit use yet chiefly adversely affects legal users. A system which denies users the freedom to control their data, their computer, and (as more of their life is conducted on their computer) their lives.
All that being said, there are some things (i.e. voting machines) that just should not be electronic-ized, and I feel this is one of them.
When it comes to counting voter-verified paper ballots, I would agree with you that this task should not be done electronically. Humans can (and do in many elections around the world) manually count voter-verified paper ballots.
But when it comes to preparing the voter-verified paper ballot, I don't see the harm with electronic assistance: electronic preparation & verification of voter-verified paper ballots is a serious advantage for blind and illiterate people to vote in private. The computer reads the candidate list aloud over headphones and the voter can press buttons to indicate their vote. This vote is printed on the ballot. All voters can use electronic devices to read the voter-verified paper ballot to double-check what the ballot says or bring in someone they trust to verify the ballot with them. Of course any electronic preparation or assistance must be optional for all voters.
All ballots should be voter-verified and on paper so they can be stored and recounted whenever anyone wants.
Champaign County in Illinois, USA uses a pair of ES&S machines to prepare and count (plus store) the ballots. Use of the ballot preparation machine is optional—one can fill in the bubbles manually with a pen or pencil. This machine can also (again, optionally) scan a completed ballot and report to the voter how it read the ballot (informing the user of how that user voted, and any over/undervotes). But all voters must feed their voter-verified paper ballot into the counting+storage machine. I despise the use of the second machine. I also despise that both of these machines run on proprietary software; some citizens in Urbana, Illinois are fighting for instant runoff voting for local elections and they have quite a fight ahead of them trying to convince the proprietor (ES&S) to change the vote-counting software to work with instant runoff. This is one reason I endorse the use of free software. Urbana ought to have the freedom to get whomever they want to alter the software to their liking. Urbana can pay to send their modified software through the government-required approval process.
I don't need to contain any damage caused by proprietary software because I don't run proprietary software, but it is nice to see that you tacitly agree that proprietary software is inherently untrustworthy. I run sandboxes for other reasons. What I can't inspect myself I would rather trust the community to do so (or hire them to do so on my behalf) than to trust the monopolist who wrote the program. So I avoid trying to workaround a lack of freedom by running software that respects my freedom in the first place.
I never said "source code that is suitable for analysis" so besides misquoting me I don't know what you're talking about. What I actually said was quite clear. Disassembly isn't legally available all the time; many proprietary licenses explicitly disallow that derivative work.
There's no substitute for source code analysis and proprietary software doesn't magically become more trustworthy over time. Programs can be made to run different branches of code on different criteria, including different dates and times (a time you can't know to test for) or on some cue from a remote site (which you can't predict). Running a program in a sandbox will not necessarily let you execute all the code nor will running a program in a sandbox somehow reduce the chances untrustworthy code will execute. Only source code analysis can produce a verifiable claim of safety.
It's more efficient and (I know this phrase is weird to use around MS, but...) more secure.
Isn't Microsoft Secure Content Downloader proprietary software? If so, how did you verify the security of the software? So long as this is proprietary, its security is unverifiable and the software is untrustworthy by default, quite unlike many BitTorrent programs.
So basically, it's a good way to show copyright isn't always the answer.
So as long as the whipmaster doesn't beat us too badly, we're okay? The explanation you gave doesn't support your conclusion ("copyright isn't always the answer") because anime makers live within the copyright system; they are copyright holders and they have built their business depending on continuing copyright power. Although you acknowledge that anime fans are getting away with illicit derivative works, illicit sharing, illicit broadcasting, etc., you don't acknowledge that this is no way to live.
Better to challenge the copyright system by making desirable activities non-infringing; in other words, allow people to legally do what they want to do. This is what Stallman's talk encourages people to do—engage in organized political action aimed at reforming copyright law to our benefit. You can see another implementation of this philosophy in his work developing free software (we are better off developing free programs to do anything we need computers to do). Settling for a sleeping giant approach, as the anime situation suggests, is capitulation to power. Giving in does nothing to challenge either the idea of copyright or the abuses of power that copyright law allows. Modern publishing technology places us in a position to do things we couldn't do before, things we were formerly willing to trade away (in the ancient past few could afford printing presses so it made sense for the public to trade away publication and distribution in exchange for more published works). Therefore it's better to renegotiate the bargain of copyright and grant ourselves the freedom to do the things we couldn't do rather than hope that a copyright holder won't win lawsuits against us for copyright infringement.
I'd be surprised if this were a veiled accusation. That you and other posters here feel the need to spell so much of it out tells me there is what the FSF says there is: a declaration of interest. I recall the FSF being much more clear about NeXT's distribution of GCC (a GPL'd program) back when NeXT distributed their GCC derivative without simultaneously distributing complete corresponding source code or a written promise for said source code. NeXT later remedied the situation by distributing said source code.
The FSF has a history of giving copyright infringers an opportunity to do right and avoid going to court. Part of the GPLv3 gives infringers a chance to behave in accordance with the license. Another section of GPLv3 makes non-infringers out of BitTorrent sharers because they were technically infringing under GPLv2. Eben Moglen has written essays on how he enforced the GPL under Stallman's directive to never favor litigation over compliance.
I can imagine that the FSF are indeed interested to see to what extent GPL'd code is used in Apple's products today.
People know that something is better than nothing. So it's going to be tough to convince Americans that waiting months or over a year to see someone (let alone a specialist) for a non-emergency is somehow worse than waiting long periods of time knowing nobody will see you but the emergency room (which offers no chronic healthcare and everything they offer is very expensive). For over 40 million Americans without insurance that's the case now and that number is only going up. Then there's the ridiculously high cost of the shoddy healthcare Americans get: How many Canadians are entering bankruptcy or are homeless because they can't pay their healthcare bills? The leading cause of bankruptcy and homelessness in the US is not being able to afford the medical bills, according to Michael Moore. How many Canadian doctors get rewards for denying treatment at the behest of the HMOs like Dr. Linda Peeno did, and how many Canadians die as a result of being denied expensive treatment? That number will probably pale in comparison to the number of Americans.
The American system is so bad we can see it's not the best system Americans can have. And that's enough to justify leaving the HMOs out of the discussion and talk about what the Democrats, Republicans, and HMOs don't want us to focus on—a single-payer universal health care system (such as HR676, Americans: write your Congresspeople to co-sponsor this bill). Moore's "Sicko" properly recapitulates this discussion. The HMOs need to be put out of business; like America did when it stopped privatizing firefighting, America needs to stop privatizing health care. If there's a better plan than HR676 in the offing, I'd love to read more about it. But this much is clear: the insurers aren't necessary, and government does plenty of things right, so we should organize and use democratic power to steer things to how we want them to be.
Another GPL history rewriter. How convenient. They always have to attack anything in sight, with nonsense.
Do you always begin your discussions so harshly, drawing sweeping generalizations (which are bound to be untrue) about people? Is it really impossible that I could have misspoken where many thousands of free software activists have not?
The FSF does NOT predate open source, this is false. Perhaps you're confusing with the OSI?
The OSI takes credit for "inventing the 'open source' label" (which I take to mean using the term "open source" in this context) on February 3, 1998 at a "strategy session [...] in Palo Alto, California". Like you, they too try to extend their influence to cover a wide range of activities which predate the existence of their group without clear documentation that those projects actually shared their philosophy, and part of that work includes a confusing use of the term "free software" ("the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture."). It seems hard to maintain both that one "invented" something which has such a long "prehistory". But, more importantly, no matter how far back their philosophical roots go, it's clear that some important work which gets undeservedly little credit was not done under their aegis nor in line with their philosophy—the GNU work Richard Stallman started, for one. It is plainly hypocritical, regardless of what one thinks of Stallman's politics, to give credit where credit is due for, say Torvalds' initial work on the Linux kernel, but not anyone's work on GNU programs.
I for one think the GPL freedomology-rap and redefinition for their own purposes, is pure decadence from people completely disconnected from real issues of freedom, poverty and war in the world.
Your glib rancor hasn't shown how the FSF is improperly using the words "free" and/or "freedom" (as in "software freedom"). It's a shame you don't think they're contributing positively to the world. You try to minimize their effort by arguing the glass is half-empty; we should look at these huge social problems they're not solving. Arguments like that invariably end up backfiring by drawing more attention to how, apparently, you too are not single-handedly solving "poverty and war in the world". Better to recognize that these are enormous problems anyone would be proud to solve if they had something to offer besides what anti-poverty and anti-war activists have been doing since time immemorial.
The open source movement has nothing to do with framing anything in terms of a computer user's freedom or liberty. The language "open source" was purposefully chosen to get away from freedom talk. The open source movement focuses on a developmental methodology designed to appeal chiefly to software businesses. You can see the effect of the open source wedge movement where people have taken that movement's bait by accusing anyone talking about software freedom of "monopolization" of terms and not going along with dismissing freedom in favor of pursuing business ends (such as faster, cheaper, and less buggy software). Incident after incident shows that we are wise to look out for our own interests and to organize politically in order to make life better for ourselves; we can do this while allowing businesses to stay in business so long as they don't restrict our freedom. But business interests should remain subordinate to the interests of democratic control.
Slashdot Mirror
When do people who use the word "religion" as you did get around to describing the proprietary advocates as "religious" and thus recognizing how useless that term is in this context? After all, the proprietors are quite zealous in their advocacy for things that keep their users helpless to fix their own problems or get help elsewhere including file formats nobody else can really master (even their own software sometimes has problems), software patents to preclude competition, and FUD to keep would-be competition at bay.
Respecting your software freedom to share and modify the program has never been an option with Photoshop, no matter how much you pay. Freedom has always been a part of the GIMP.
Why stress software freedom? I want the social solidarity that you only get in freedom; I want to be independent from masters and make sure my computer only obeys me. I'd rather have less functional or powerful free software than a more powerful or reliable proprietary program because I can hire people to improve the free program or I can ask the community to help me improve the free program. I can't free Photoshop. The catch here is that most people haven't been taught to value their software freedom, so they don't know to look for it and they haven't been taught to think of the consequences when their freedom is absent. I aim to change this by teaching people to value freedom for its own sake. I hope you will too.
It depends on whom one listens to; the term "operating system" is also confused with kernel when some refer to a "Linux operating system" despite that Linux has always been an important part of a complete operating system but not the entirety of it. It's not much of a stretch to understand how one could confuse a file system and an operating system, at least if one has no clear idea what the two are to begin with. Heaven forbid if another major contributor gets a share of the credit for the complete system.
The only role for computers to play in voting is helping to prepare a paper ballot. And even that role should be optional, according to the voter's desire. In that role there are genuine advantages no voter should have to do without. Computers can help the illiterate and blind vote in privacy (meaning that they don't have to bring a buddy into the booth with them, thus divulging their vote).
No computers are needed to count ballots at any stage of the election process. All counting can be (and is, in surprisingly large districts) by hand. I remain convinced that anyone insisting on computerized vote counting is framing the issue to place speed ahead of more important concerns such as accountability. Even ranked voting schemes (where one ranks candidates instead of picking just one) can be counted manually.
In the US, HAVA (the 2002 "Help America Vote Act") is largely a gift from the federal government to election machine vendors which compels states to revamp what may have been a perfectly adequate election system. The small advantages my county got from HAVA-compliance were far outweighed by the disadvantages. I'm unaware of any systemic substantive improvement in voting procedures that resulted from this act, but I'm aware of ongoing problems that merely shifted how elections were rigged.
There's also a problem of not knowing if the person's vote is genuine. No matter how fancy the security system is, I can't tell if that "vote" coming from some remote system was pressured (an abusive spouse or house mate forcing someone to vote a particular way). In a voting booth, election judges can see who goes in and there's a reasonable means of giving voters their privacy. This is also a reason why you don't want a "receipt" after voting (not that you asked for this, it just comes up often in discussions like these among technical people). It's not a good idea to give anyone the power to effectively compel someone to vote a particular way or be able to check on one's vote (even one's own vote) after the ballot has been cast.
I think making election day a national holiday sounds like a good idea; it's easy to implement, low-tech, familiar, and for a good cause.
It's not hard to get right, it's hard to get past vested interests which are intent on selling crap. I wrote an article for CounterPunch dealing with free software voting machines and served on an appointed committee which recommended election hardware and software to the elected county board (the county board made the real decision, taking our input as just a recommendation). I was able to explain the fatal flaws in all the options before us and they're not hard to understand or see how to do a better job.
But our choices were very restricted; we were hamstrung early. From the first day on the committee we were informed that the state only let us look at "approved hardware" (it turned out this was a lie, and one of the machines we ended up picking had not yet been approved at the state level), vendors opted out (some because they didn't like our request for proposal which included a clause—at my insistence— that we have free software voting software, some because they weren't willing to sell in our state, some just ignored our request to see their system), and some on the panel genuinely didn't foresee what should be obvious to anyone even mildly interested in democracy: when you pick a proprietor you're picking a monopolist. Our end recommendation was merely the best of the worst, not something I'd genuinely endorse given more reasonable options.
I'm under no illusion about voting system security and free software; the issue about free software voting machines does not revolve around security. I wanted (and still do want) free software voting machines because I know that localities want control over their towns, counties, and states. They want to be able to correct bugs in their voting machines and improve the software so it can handle elections other than first-past-the-post. We're talking about machines that have to last decades here, not a cheap personal computer you can afford to replace after 5-7 years. But when the software is a monopoly, voters are at the mercy of the proprietor. If the proprietor says "no", you have nowhere else to go but to buy another system (which is simply not an option for many counties starved for money, such as my county which can't afford to repurchase a whole new set of machines and software licenses). You wouldn't tolerate this lack of control over your life for your car, your house, your plumbing, your electrical system, and you'd never hesitate to hire experts to do work for you in any of those things (because you're probably not a programmer, electrician, mechanic, architect, roofer, etc. yourself). But people have a lot of work ahead of them to teach others to value software freedom for its own sake.
What needs to be done is remarkably well understood. For the most part the technical issues involved are rather plain and easy to explicate to the uninitiated. What's lacking is largely political will to make better systems a reality. I don't have the time to make a new voting system myself, but in the interest of making better systems happen I am willing to work with those who are building a better system. I'll contribute my expertise and experience working on this voting machine recommendation committee.
Many web hosters offer accounts that also come with IM, email, and various web-based programs to do other things. Often these accounts cost very little money and give you gigabytes more space than GMail (and that space can be used for more than just email without resorting to clever hacks to make your email space usable in other ways). Look at who's hosting some of the sites people point to on /. and you'll get some good leads.
I'm not sure that I care where Microsoft Excel fails and where it doesn't when it comes to discovering the pattern of failure. If I were a Microsoft Excel user I wouldn't be allowed to inspect the program to see what it's really doing with my data, fix the program (no matter how expert a programmer I may be), alter the program (in violation of the license), or help my community by sharing my improved version of Excel. Then there's the hypocrisy of how proprietors (also known as monopolists) are treated compared to free software developers and distributors—knowing that the program fails where it shouldn't would be enough for people to cry foul and either stop using or never start using a free software program that exhibited such a bug. We rarely hear serious discussions of one's software freedom. Instead, we're encouraged to push that discussion aside in favor of exclusively stressing technocratic ends. Not hearing cries of "Dump Microsoft Excel Now!" or something calling for a switch to a free software spreadsheet (like Gnumeric or OpenOffice.org's Calc) is saddening. Please take this opportunity to learn more about software freedom.
I found the the use of the word "permanent" more troubling. Nothing in law is permanent, everything can be changed. That's why it takes eternal vigilance to make sure the laws aren't rewritten to hurt you.
When I think of "hot air", I'm more likely to think of posts that make no substantive argument and engage in name calling ("retarded") rather than the work of someone who has written a lot of software, started a social movement for securing software freedoms, and asks for a fair share of credit when people mention the name of a project where the initial author is quite derisive about said freedoms.
I can't agree with your overmoderated post. I think you would benefit from reading the GNU/Linux naming FAQ which addresses your concern about why people ask others to refer to the union of the GNU OS and the Linux kernel as "GNU/Linux" or "GNU+Linux".
Speaking of redistribution rights, consider the following quote from page two of the two released docs:
If we assume that the propaganda term "intellectual property" is to include copyright, it would seem that distributing copies of these specifications non-commercially and verbatim is disallowed. One wonders what else you're not allowed to do with these specs, make derivative works perhaps? After all, "no license" is granted.
And the "preachy" comments come from the proprietary software supporters too, but their words are so often confused for that-which-is-beyond-question that they aren't likely to raise the kinds of responses one reads here to anything RMS says. After all, they don't lead with all the limitations of their software licensing or its effect on users.
I find that people come to agree with Stallman's position when they consider what is going on, what he and the free software movement are fighting for, and how Linus Torvalds' positions on matters of legal and ethical issues leaves much to be desired (the Bitkeeper fiasco, Torvalds' reaction to Tridgell's work on a free software program to work with Bitkeeper repos being examples that come immediately to mind).
While you may have hit a sore spot about the open source movement (which seems to have no problem with proprietary software when that software is reliable and powerful), the free software movement has never supported "choice" where any of the choices are non-free software. Prioritizing "choice" makes equals out of all possible choices which, in this context, makes it impossible to distinguish between software that denies and supports users' software freedom. Proprietary software always denies users software freedom and is therefore always objectionable. The FSF is quite clear about this; consider what they say about the "Sincere Choice" program which is a response to Microsoft's "Software Choice" program:
This is one of the reasons I won't do business with Adobe or Apple; they, like many other proprietors before and after them, do not treat their customers properly by freeing obsoleted software so that the software can be improved and continued even after the proprietor decides not to distribute copies for a fee. I don't agree with distributing proprietary software, however I take a very different view of organizations that distribute software as proprietary and then free that program rather than choosing for that proprietary software to never became free. I understand that a version of FrameMaker will let you generate SGML files instead of FM's proprietary format. Perhaps those files will be more easily read than the proprietary FM format I recall dealing with years ago, giving users a chance at switching to something built on free software.
Apple, now embarking on their latest office suite, placed users in a similar situation with AppleWorks files. Hardware wise they sent the same message with the Apple Newton. I recall comparable issues around making bootable CDs for "old-world" PowerPC machines. People reverse engineer things and figure stuff out, but they shouldn't have to. With software that respects the user's freedom, any program can be shared and improved so long as there is the will to do the work.
Framing this issue around inconvenience misses the more important underlying point. Your freedom to control your stuff matters. This incident is a harbinger of bad things; ostensibly Microsoft is trying to prevent illicit use yet chiefly adversely affects legal users. A system which denies users the freedom to control their data, their computer, and (as more of their life is conducted on their computer) their lives.
When it comes to counting voter-verified paper ballots, I would agree with you that this task should not be done electronically. Humans can (and do in many elections around the world) manually count voter-verified paper ballots.
But when it comes to preparing the voter-verified paper ballot, I don't see the harm with electronic assistance: electronic preparation & verification of voter-verified paper ballots is a serious advantage for blind and illiterate people to vote in private. The computer reads the candidate list aloud over headphones and the voter can press buttons to indicate their vote. This vote is printed on the ballot. All voters can use electronic devices to read the voter-verified paper ballot to double-check what the ballot says or bring in someone they trust to verify the ballot with them. Of course any electronic preparation or assistance must be optional for all voters.
All ballots should be voter-verified and on paper so they can be stored and recounted whenever anyone wants.
Champaign County in Illinois, USA uses a pair of ES&S machines to prepare and count (plus store) the ballots. Use of the ballot preparation machine is optional—one can fill in the bubbles manually with a pen or pencil. This machine can also (again, optionally) scan a completed ballot and report to the voter how it read the ballot (informing the user of how that user voted, and any over/undervotes). But all voters must feed their voter-verified paper ballot into the counting+storage machine. I despise the use of the second machine. I also despise that both of these machines run on proprietary software; some citizens in Urbana, Illinois are fighting for instant runoff voting for local elections and they have quite a fight ahead of them trying to convince the proprietor (ES&S) to change the vote-counting software to work with instant runoff. This is one reason I endorse the use of free software. Urbana ought to have the freedom to get whomever they want to alter the software to their liking. Urbana can pay to send their modified software through the government-required approval process.
I don't need to contain any damage caused by proprietary software because I don't run proprietary software, but it is nice to see that you tacitly agree that proprietary software is inherently untrustworthy. I run sandboxes for other reasons. What I can't inspect myself I would rather trust the community to do so (or hire them to do so on my behalf) than to trust the monopolist who wrote the program. So I avoid trying to workaround a lack of freedom by running software that respects my freedom in the first place.
I never said "source code that is suitable for analysis" so besides misquoting me I don't know what you're talking about. What I actually said was quite clear. Disassembly isn't legally available all the time; many proprietary licenses explicitly disallow that derivative work.
There's no substitute for source code analysis and proprietary software doesn't magically become more trustworthy over time. Programs can be made to run different branches of code on different criteria, including different dates and times (a time you can't know to test for) or on some cue from a remote site (which you can't predict). Running a program in a sandbox will not necessarily let you execute all the code nor will running a program in a sandbox somehow reduce the chances untrustworthy code will execute. Only source code analysis can produce a verifiable claim of safety.
Isn't Microsoft Secure Content Downloader proprietary software? If so, how did you verify the security of the software? So long as this is proprietary, its security is unverifiable and the software is untrustworthy by default, quite unlike many BitTorrent programs.
So as long as the whipmaster doesn't beat us too badly, we're okay? The explanation you gave doesn't support your conclusion ("copyright isn't always the answer") because anime makers live within the copyright system; they are copyright holders and they have built their business depending on continuing copyright power. Although you acknowledge that anime fans are getting away with illicit derivative works, illicit sharing, illicit broadcasting, etc., you don't acknowledge that this is no way to live.
Better to challenge the copyright system by making desirable activities non-infringing; in other words, allow people to legally do what they want to do. This is what Stallman's talk encourages people to do—engage in organized political action aimed at reforming copyright law to our benefit. You can see another implementation of this philosophy in his work developing free software (we are better off developing free programs to do anything we need computers to do). Settling for a sleeping giant approach, as the anime situation suggests, is capitulation to power. Giving in does nothing to challenge either the idea of copyright or the abuses of power that copyright law allows. Modern publishing technology places us in a position to do things we couldn't do before, things we were formerly willing to trade away (in the ancient past few could afford printing presses so it made sense for the public to trade away publication and distribution in exchange for more published works). Therefore it's better to renegotiate the bargain of copyright and grant ourselves the freedom to do the things we couldn't do rather than hope that a copyright holder won't win lawsuits against us for copyright infringement.
I'd be surprised if this were a veiled accusation. That you and other posters here feel the need to spell so much of it out tells me there is what the FSF says there is: a declaration of interest. I recall the FSF being much more clear about NeXT's distribution of GCC (a GPL'd program) back when NeXT distributed their GCC derivative without simultaneously distributing complete corresponding source code or a written promise for said source code. NeXT later remedied the situation by distributing said source code.
The FSF has a history of giving copyright infringers an opportunity to do right and avoid going to court. Part of the GPLv3 gives infringers a chance to behave in accordance with the license. Another section of GPLv3 makes non-infringers out of BitTorrent sharers because they were technically infringing under GPLv2. Eben Moglen has written essays on how he enforced the GPL under Stallman's directive to never favor litigation over compliance.
I can imagine that the FSF are indeed interested to see to what extent GPL'd code is used in Apple's products today.
People know that something is better than nothing. So it's going to be tough to convince Americans that waiting months or over a year to see someone (let alone a specialist) for a non-emergency is somehow worse than waiting long periods of time knowing nobody will see you but the emergency room (which offers no chronic healthcare and everything they offer is very expensive). For over 40 million Americans without insurance that's the case now and that number is only going up. Then there's the ridiculously high cost of the shoddy healthcare Americans get: How many Canadians are entering bankruptcy or are homeless because they can't pay their healthcare bills? The leading cause of bankruptcy and homelessness in the US is not being able to afford the medical bills, according to Michael Moore. How many Canadian doctors get rewards for denying treatment at the behest of the HMOs like Dr. Linda Peeno did, and how many Canadians die as a result of being denied expensive treatment? That number will probably pale in comparison to the number of Americans.
The American system is so bad we can see it's not the best system Americans can have. And that's enough to justify leaving the HMOs out of the discussion and talk about what the Democrats, Republicans, and HMOs don't want us to focus on—a single-payer universal health care system (such as HR676, Americans: write your Congresspeople to co-sponsor this bill). Moore's "Sicko" properly recapitulates this discussion. The HMOs need to be put out of business; like America did when it stopped privatizing firefighting, America needs to stop privatizing health care. If there's a better plan than HR676 in the offing, I'd love to read more about it. But this much is clear: the insurers aren't necessary, and government does plenty of things right, so we should organize and use democratic power to steer things to how we want them to be.
Do you always begin your discussions so harshly, drawing sweeping generalizations (which are bound to be untrue) about people? Is it really impossible that I could have misspoken where many thousands of free software activists have not?
The OSI takes credit for "inventing the 'open source' label" (which I take to mean using the term "open source" in this context) on February 3, 1998 at a "strategy session [...] in Palo Alto, California". Like you, they too try to extend their influence to cover a wide range of activities which predate the existence of their group without clear documentation that those projects actually shared their philosophy, and part of that work includes a confusing use of the term "free software" ("the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture."). It seems hard to maintain both that one "invented" something which has such a long "prehistory". But, more importantly, no matter how far back their philosophical roots go, it's clear that some important work which gets undeservedly little credit was not done under their aegis nor in line with their philosophy—the GNU work Richard Stallman started, for one. It is plainly hypocritical, regardless of what one thinks of Stallman's politics, to give credit where credit is due for, say Torvalds' initial work on the Linux kernel, but not anyone's work on GNU programs.
Your glib rancor hasn't shown how the FSF is improperly using the words "free" and/or "freedom" (as in "software freedom"). It's a shame you don't think they're contributing positively to the world. You try to minimize their effort by arguing the glass is half-empty; we should look at these huge social problems they're not solving. Arguments like that invariably end up backfiring by drawing more attention to how, apparently, you too are not single-handedly solving "poverty and war in the world". Better to recognize that these are enormous problems anyone would be proud to solve if they had something to offer besides what anti-poverty and anti-war activists have been doing since time immemorial.
The open source movement has nothing to do with framing anything in terms of a computer user's freedom or liberty. The language "open source" was purposefully chosen to get away from freedom talk. The open source movement focuses on a developmental methodology designed to appeal chiefly to software businesses. You can see the effect of the open source wedge movement where people have taken that movement's bait by accusing anyone talking about software freedom of "monopolization" of terms and not going along with dismissing freedom in favor of pursuing business ends (such as faster, cheaper, and less buggy software). Incident after incident shows that we are wise to look out for our own interests and to organize politically in order to make life better for ourselves; we can do this while allowing businesses to stay in business so long as they don't restrict our freedom. But business interests should remain subordinate to the interests of democratic control.