We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being misidentified as open source supporters.
The notion that people would want to get credit for their work and not be identified with a movement that conveys a different message is apparently difficult for some people to understand and act upon. Witness the number of people who will refuse to give GNU a share of the credit and instead refer to a "Linux operating system" when that system features GNU software. The GNU/Linux naming FAQ responds to every rebuttal I've seen.
Lots of people don't understand the differences between the movements, even when those differences explain the vastly different results we see on the ground (such as explaining why free software movement proponents say proprietary software is anti-social and open source movement proponents endorse installing and running proprietary software). For years, the OSI told people the differences were "ideological tub-thumping" and that was about the most insightful explanation they had to offer. Meanwhile, the FSF was publishing a different and far more respectful explanation which was recently updated.
The OSI's president, Michael Tiemann, said the OSI is changing; distancing themselves from the views of Eric Raymond ("Eric does speak for himself but less and less for the OSI."). I hope that the OSI will be able to bring its audience around to understand why ethical understanding is important. Businesses greatest achievement has been to get people to believe they can separate what they do from ethics, and it's important we challenge that perception; in many cases this is a life or death matter. But there is much for the OSI to do because of the wedge they created; for example, convincing people that approving of similar sets of licenses is all there is to say on the subject (another followup to your post illustrates this point). RMS discussed the differences between the movements and Tiemann president responded.
Switching to free software is far better than switching from one master to another. Apple is largely just another proprietor, but with a completely free software operating system and only free software apps on top of that, you can liberate yourself from proprietors/monopolists.
Everyday Americans have been speaking out. I'm such an American and I haven't been waiting for executives to speak on the issue. I've been speaking out to anyone who would listen/read on my local community radio station (I had a show for a few years until the station became remarkably undemocratic), on my blog (which I maintain to this day), to Jack Valenti's face in front of an audience (when he came to my town on his anti-"piracy" tour) and related letters to the editor, and with my friends while we discuss media matters (virtually weekly at a local bar).
Americans use a lot of non-free operating systems and software (which digital restrictions require), but if you take the time to teach them to value their freedom they'll listen and learn. On my radio program, I found it interesting to take a wide angle—people found it interesting to discuss how copyright and patent issues intersect with their everyday lives.
It's critical to not give up the freedom talk and not give into the people who would have you compromise your values in order to placate proprietors. There is a deep thirst for substantive talk and action about issues that matter.
No, we don't need organizations to provide their own software because then they'll distribute proprietary software. We don't benefit from dependency. I don't need to give up my software freedom to make some device work with the Linux kernel. I don't need software which will go unmaintained because nobody who is willing to do the maintenance knows how it really works.
What we need are accurate published specs for all hardware. These specs should be published for all to see, with no legal restrictions. And the hardware should not need firmware to work (or that firmware should also be free software). I'd rather work around hardware bugs in driver code than become dependent on a binary blob. This way we can write our own software that works with the hardware, maintain the software ourselves in perpetuity, and recommend everyone go buy that specific make and model (thus giving that manufacturer or reseller more business).
I'm happy to recommend certain devices on this basis. I'll choose that hardware even if it's not the most efficient way to get some job done because I don't have to fear it will stop working when I upgrade my system or switch to another free software OS.
It's important to not take a defeatist attitude on this. Having viable machines without giving up our software freedom (which is the main thing that separates free software OSes from their proprietary alternatives) is important.
Proprietors do users no favors by locking them in.
on
Apple, the New Microsoft?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So, Apple is bad because they continue to use DRM on the iTunes store. Brilliant. It can't be because, oh, I don't know, that the media companies would absolutely freak out if Apple unilaterally dropped DRM. They can't -- they would end up in court I suspect.
According to Fred von Lohmann of the EFF, Apple would not drop iTunes Music Store DRM even if they could. As I understand it (I don't recall exactly where, but I think it was from one of DVD Jon's recent blog posts on the topic), Apple employs DRM on tracks from labels that don't want DRM. von Lohmann concludes, quite rightly:
Incredible is the reaction on tech discussion sites like/. and digg where Lexmark and Chamberlain get almost universally razzed but people believe the line that Apple only reluctantly employs digital restrictions.
von Lohmann's post is quite informative and shows the real purpose of Apple's iTMS DRM—to lock in iTMS customers. DVD Jon builds on this in his recent blog posts.
One doesn't need to delve too far into history to see how proprietors, no matter how slick their ads or how popular their consumer electronics, are not working in your best interests.
Merely repeating the University's capricious and overreaching-on-uncertainties line is hardly insightful. Bringing hardcopies of a text doesn't imply having read and understood that text. Universities ought to understand this concept, what with all the students toting their mostly unread textbooks around campus.
As for who's unsure: One can reasonably infer that the detectives and network-security technician probably hadn't read or completely understood the policy, certainly not as well as the professor who helped write it. But they seemed sure in the professor's description of what happened when they first brought the complaint to the professor:
The detectives and network-security technician listened patiently to me, wearing their best poker faces. They then gave me a copy of the university's responsible-use policy, which employees must agree to abide by when we first sign up for our e-mail accounts. They pointed out that my actions violated at least three provisions of that policy.
In the paragraph following this one, it was the professor who said the policy was vague. The visitors may have been less sure by the time they left, but a larger issue had arisen by then.
Don't ever step up to defend the actions of someone who asks you not to teach someone something new as these visitors asked of the professor when they requested "that I stop using Tor, and that I avoid covering it in class". This is flatly unacceptable anywhere in society and should be anathema at a University.
Too many people who frequent/. don't appreciate freedom—note the number of people who champion the "open source" lines about adopting and recommending non-free/proprietary software—but the professor's conclusion should not be overlooked here. This is about academic freedom and we would all do well to work to spread awareness and defense of it.
Quite well as far as I'm concerned; Speex is useful with Asterisk (a popular and extensible open source telephone system), I use it to make high-quality low-bandwidth encodings of talk shows I work with, and a lot of players play it (including VideoLAN Client which works on many operating systems). I never have to worry about patent hassles, proprietary software hassles, or losing control of my audio to digital restrictions management.
This thread gave me that idea (I've already touched on some of the horrid logic I've seen here so far). As I type this, the highest moderated posts in this thread have to do with clarifying that "this is as much about them deleting her email as it is the responses she received from management" and "There are probably more than a hundred different archives, tarballs, and tape backups from which they could salvage...". In other words, technical analysis of issues that don't even scratch the surface of the privacy issues involved. No clear objection to how much "free" costs the user.
Take a look at other threads on discussion groups like/. (digg, for instance) when it comes to Google. It seems to me that every time Google comes out with a new service there are plenty of posts "critiquing" it from the lamest perspectives: how convenient is the new service, what browsers will the new service work with, how does one get access to the new service, what software/hardware are they using behind the scenes, etc. rather than thinking about the structural issues of giving your data away to a firm that indexes things about you.
The cost of "free" services rarely comes up, and if it does I've become accustomed to seeing those comments moderated down; it seems to me that the unpleasant truth breaks the rah-rah atmosphere and is duly punished. I think it's a side-effect of teaching people to think primarily of business interests and then only in narrow economic ways (as if only money matters). I certainly don't see anywhere near the number of threads chatting up these kinds of issues as I do celebrating the latest lame service Google whips up.
Thank you, I stand corrected on the service provider, and I appreciate that others can keep the pertinent details in mind. And at the same time, I'm resigned to think it almost doesn't matter; it's not like one of them is inherently more trustworthy than the other. The larger point I'm trying to make here stands.
I don't think the issue comes down to getting what you paid for. There are so many of these leaks it's apparently hard for me to remember all the specific actors involved. Wasn't there a University that recently had a leak of student record data? What about the US military inadvertently releasing info about many soldiers? How many times have US government officials lost laptops with sensitive information on them? People pay for these institutions and their services, yet these things happen. I find it difficult to believe that if people paid more money we'd see a reduction in leaks (purposeful or accidental).
It's sad to see so many/. posters getting so lost in side issues—was there enough storage for backups, railing against charging for services late in the game, differentiating between a percieved deletion (logical) versus an actual delete (physical). The more significant issue here has to do with placing one's trust in gratis services.
Many people I know recommend Google, Yahoo!, and other "free" services (IM, email, word processing, database, etc.) without ever mentioning how your data is hostage to the proprietor and probably indexed so these services can sell information about you (not that you'd know it if that's what happens). Then there are the data leaks (whether accidental or on purpose), you stand quite a bit to lose there by becoming dependent on the service. We should remember the so-called "anonymized" search data Yahoo! released some months ago where two New York Times reporters tracked down someone based on the anonymized data in her searches.
I'm sure that whatever comes out of this, people will narrowly interpret the results to arrive at ridiculous conclusions like avoid Lycos for email, use Google instead; avoid Yahoo! for web searches, use this other service instead. The bigger picture has to include not merely shuffling the deck chairs of which unaccountable corporation you'll trust for gratis services.
Right now Google is the elephant in the room: I know people on/. love Google without reservation, but how many more episodes like these do we have to see before we'll understand Google is just another organization that doesn't care about your privacy or your data?
We need better solutions for these things that allow anonymous searching, local hosting of one's own email (with remote availability), and ease-of-use that allows non-technical people to enjoy the fruits of progress as well. I don't know exactly what that would be, but I'm sure smart people can come up with something to improve upon.
People who fall into the trap of installing and using proprietary video card drivers then later discover that their video card (which still works fine) is no longer "supported" by the latest driver update would disagree with you that "Video cards are already well-supported by their manufacturers.".
I believe this kind of thing happens more than others know, particularly as GNU/Linux distributors that distribute proprietary software make it easier for users to acquire proprietary software (as I understand Ubuntu is working on). Users shouldn't be left without their software freedom, nor should they have to choose between updating their system kernel and using their video card.
Making users helpless and keeping them separate is no way to live. Users need software freedom now.
It could, and this offer of free labor is unquestionably generous, but there's nothing in the blog post to indicate that non-free software will be rejected. Non-free software in the Linux kernel is an important issue, and it would be interesting to read more about how this is going to be dealt with.
Allowing people to distribute Torvalds' version of the Linux kernel with non-free software firmware, and allowing TiVoization, these are political choices. The reasons these choices are made is more important than the label some/. posters ("political") place on them. But since they use the label, it's important that we understand what Torvalds really says and stands for.
When Torvalds takes credit for an entire operating system he didn't write by allowing people to call the GNU/Linux OS "Linux" (giving no credit to anyone but his project, named after him), that's a political choice. When he tries to insist that the name "GNU/Linux" "paint[s] Linux as a GNU project" despite that for years the FSF has been clear the Linux kernel is not a GNU package, that is a political choice. These choices are made to placate businesses (possibly also Torvalds' ego).
I'm not redefining the word political at all. It's important to see these choices for what they are: differing agendas, but still agendas. For people who share Torvalds' agenda, popularity is more important than ethics. And popularity often means going along to get along. Ironically, Torvalds' lack of advocacy for the freedom to cooperate as a general ethical principle is something people connect with him (ironic because the Linux kernel wouldn't be what it is without the cooperation of many other people and organizations). The irony continues because of the conflict between his claim that the kernel was "always about giving source code back and keeping it open, not about anything else" and proprietors efforts to make the kernel a vehicle for their proprietary code.
The FSF is a political group with political goals surrounding software. Controlling the software, and giving it away under very specific conditions, is a means for their political goals. The Linux kernel is a software project, with the goal of producing the Linux kernel.
Linus Torvalds is political too, despite any description to the contrary. But Torvalds' politics are different and contrary to the free software movement. Torvalds' thinking is more in line with the open source movement which focuses on a development methodology and eschews discussion of any freedoms for computer users. The free software movement focuses on all computer user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software.
Don't fall into the traps of believing that Torvalds is apolitical, or that describing something as "political" is sufficient to convey any substantive meaning.
No, because that's one way in which software freedom is made. Sun wouldn't have released their Java software as free software if there were no real pressure on them to compete with increasingly capable free software Java replacements.
I agree with you that GM did what is in its own (short-term) interests: cynically develop and then take away their electric cars from the market. Other manufacturers have made electric cars, but they're not terribly practical.
But the most interesting part of your post has to do with "voting with your wallet" because that phrase (common amongst those who believe the myth that the marketplace is fair arena for competition) suggests the very democratic control that is absent from dealing with private tyrannies (aka corporations). If we had democratic control over what GM produced, we might not have chosen to sink billions into SUVs most people don't need and gas cars that don't compete well with what other automakers provide. We might have chosen practical, reliable, and cost-effective electric cars.
Let the community decide what Stallman said, including comments by Stallman.
Any misunderstanding of what Stallman said will not be corrected by allowing "the community [to] decide what Stallman said". Unlike the expressions of ancient speakers, we can hear his recordings, read the transcripts of what he said, and email him.
Also, such work is being done (albeit not on a wiki, which poses some minor technical advantages) thanks to the work of the FSF and FSFE.
It's not enough just to teach people to use Free Software. Of course I hope that they use Free Software, because it's a shame if they're using non-free, user-subjugating software. But just to use Free Software is not enough if we want to have freedom that will last for many years. If we gave everybody that uses computers freedom tomorrow, but they didn't know what that freedom was, five years from now, many of them would have lost it because someone would have said to them "I've got a nice program that will make things easier, would you like it? Of course, you have to promise not to share it, and I won't let you see what's inside, but it's a nice program, don't you want it?"
A person who has not learned to think that there is something wrong there might say yes. And that means her freedom is partly gone. So, it's not enough just to give people freedom. We need to teach people to recognise it as freedom so that they can learn to value it and then defend it and not let it go. That's what we need if we want to have freedom not just tomorrow but permanently.
I'd say that's a minor concern that isn't hampering anyone's appreciation of software freedom. That concern is minor, like the excuse others (including on/.) use to dismiss his message out of hand—his gruffness and unwillingness to placate questions loaded with perspectives that silently support non-freedom. I know how his responses sometimes annoy people, and I too think that he could sometimes find ways to make the exact same point without brushing people off, but the best way to fix it is to become a better speaker yourself on the issue of software freedom and not talk to people that way, and to acknowledge that sometimes it is perfectly appropriate to call a spade a spade and not tolerate questions that make no sense or try to reframe the debate away from user's freedom.
The open source movement doesn't do this work at all, despite any claims that they agree with his perspective or that the two movements essentially say the same thing. That movement never talks about user's freedoms. So no matter how nice their representatives may appear and interact with others, they're essentially selling a philosophy that doesn't speak to all computer users (that movement speaks chiefly to managers of software developers), and dispenses with ethics and social solidarity in pursuit of placating business (including software proprietors).
Actually, that would be a mistake and completely unnecessary in order to give you the freedom you need to make and publish rebuttals. You shouldn't be able to alter what other people say when they're airing their views, as is the case with political commentary. You should be able to quote them and rebut, and this is a freedom you already have in the US thanks to fair use exceptions to copyright law. While fair use is under attack, the remedy is certainly not to let people misstate other people's views.
People outside the US probably already have something in their legal systems which is comparable to fair use, so your concern has already been addressed there too. The remaining people who have nothing comparable would not be well-served to allow their modified versions of his talk or transcript to be distributed under Stallman's name ("mak[ing] him say whatever we want").
People can't buy what they don't know about and people can't buy what's only available to them for lease.
Neither GM nor Toyota advertised their EVs like they do their gas-based vehicles—national advertisements featuring attractive people having a good time championing the benefits of the electric car. The remaining GM EV1 fleet could have been sold to the people waiting outside the lot who were keeping an eye on where those cars were going. Some of them had been EV1 lessors and knew what the practical limitations on service were. Parts descriptions could have been licensed to a series of third parties for maintenance. It seems more likely that the electric car market profiled in "Who Killed the Electric Car?" was taken away from lessors so as to not provide an ongoing reminder to consumers of what twice was and what is possible.
Why should anyone think that Toyota is above the same oil-based interests GM is? Of course they'll say the focus on GM was too harsh; they don't want the same focus on them for doing to their EV RAV4 lessors what GM did to EV1 lessors. When the major automakers control the market (as they apparently do here), they'll do what they can to retain dominance. No darkroom collusion is necessary, just multiple semi-independent groups of people reaching comparable conclusions about how to maintain the lucrative status quo while convincing people away from something new that would require a shift in business model; in other words, what the oil lobbyist spokesman said (roughly) "It was a mistake that ought not be repeated".
I'll seriously consider buying a 100% electric car because my driving needs match what an electric car can deliver. But I'll have a hard time trusting GM to deliver an electric car that isn't just another scam to respond to the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?".
Ralph Nader says what you're saying—GM has a long history of saying that advanced cars like these are coming real soon now (including making show cars) but GM rarely delivers. With the death of the EV1 (which GM never marketed well, both in quality and quantity of advertising), GM was one of the forces that killed what looked to be a practical electric car.
Now it will be hard for people to take the "Volt" seriously because GM has a strong history of being untrustworthy, and a car is too serious of an investment to be frivolous with. GM could always: lease the Volt which allows them to take the Volt fleet back at any time (like they did the EV1 fleet), put out a car that doesn't compete well with gas-powered cars (and then cynically use this as "evidence" that the public doesn't want electric cars), and distribute the Volt from very few dealers (making the car harder to get).
If Honda made an all-electric car, I'd seriously consider that too. The Tesla cars are too expensive for my budget.
Free software cannot be proprietary. In fact, it is the free software movement's proponents who argue that proprietary software is unethical and has no place in society. The only time the folks at the FSF install proprietary software is when they're working on a free replacement program. A user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software are the freedoms all computer users must have. The reason why we need these freedoms are ethical issues which the free software movement identifies and pursues as such, raising issues of social solidarity to make their point.
By contrast, the open source movement argues for an increase in developmental efficiency and never discusses social solidarity. This technocratic message not only carries no weight with most computer users (who aren't developers), it stresses the quality of the programming over what users are allowed to do with a copy of the program once they get it. This is why a few OSI-approved licenses are considered non-free (such as the v1.x revisions of the Apple Public Source License)—the criteria for acceptance comes from the movements' different philosophies. This is also why open source proponents sometimes side with proprietors—running proprietary video drivers instead of switching to other hardware or simply doing without the fancy 3D graphics; setting up repositories where users can more easily acquire copies of proprietary software (like the Ubuntu GNU/Linux repo which carries Opera, among other proprietary programs). Some open source movement proponents even drop the pursuit of technical superiority when faced with an argument of popularity, which is why some endorse the use of the patent-encumbered MP3 lossy audio codec when Ogg Vorbis is not only technically superior (as demonstrated in numerous blind listening tests) but has objectively better tagging. Open source proponents have no means to argue against technically superior programs even when the license for those programs hold users separate and helpless to control their own computers.
Years ago, Richard Stallman wrote about the difference between the two movements. More recently, he addressed this difference when he spoke at the fifth international GPLv3 conference in Tokyo in 2006. One interesting consequence of the differences is what you have to start with if you want the social solidarity the free software movement champions as well as powerful reliable software.
So if I am offered a choice between a proprietary program which is powerful and reliable and a free program which is not, I choose the free program because that I can do in freedom. I'd rather make some practical sacrifices to reject oppression.
But suppose you want both? Suppose you want freedom and solidarity, and you want powerful reliable software? How can you get it? You can't get that starting with the powerful, reliable, proprietary program because there is no way you can liberate that program. The only way you can get that, your ideal goal, is to start from the free program, technically inadequate as it may be, because you do have the option of improving it. That is the only path that can possibly ever get you to your ideal situation. Insist on freedom and make the program better.
Finally, it's important to not conflate the difference between freedom and skill. Freedom has to do with permission. I have the freedom to criticize my government even though I can't write as well as the man whose pen name was William Shakespeare. I could choose to spend more time reading and learning to write better, as he did. My lack of skill does not in any way justify denying me my freedom of speech. So how well I can do this task, how well others I trust can do it, doesn't enter into the situation.
It helps illustrate how untrustworthy proprietary software is by default and why you should not promote or run proprietary software. How many other things are proprietors leaving out of their changelogs (assuming they publish them at all)? With free software you don't have to guess because you're given the freedoms you need to do the work yourself or get someone else to help you.
Big name vendor + non-supported hardware. Any system consultant with a few years of experience should be able to tell you "don't do that".
Anyone who confuses "support" with proprietary software is not working in their client's best interests. Proprietors drop software maintenance to get users on the upgrade treadmill. Proprietors ostensibly act motivated by profit, but users can find computers that do their job well after the hardware is no longer profitable. Consultants ought to promote the use of free software drivers and firmware (or, preferably, no firmware needed at all) so that their clients can leverage the talents of a free market of developers to improve and maintain the software needed to make all hardware work with any system. Separating users from their freedom is not fiscally sound for users.
Free software advocates won't install non-free firmware because that software is non-free. All of the arguments about free software apply to discussions of "firmware" because firmware is software. For those who want their freedom, proprietary software on their systems is not "wonderful".
Theo de Raadt's requests are quite clear: he's not asking for gratis firmware development (and how much that development costs is wildly overestimated so long as people are willing to do this unpaid). He and other OpenBSD hackers are willing to write that software themselves (including maintenance and bugfixes probably for longer than proprietors). He's asking for complete and correct documentation to hardware, and he has also previously stumped for a license to distribute proprietary firmware. This strikes me as a position no proprietor can argue with, yet some do.
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Quite right; as RMS says in his updated version of an underrated essay on gnu.org:
The notion that people would want to get credit for their work and not be identified with a movement that conveys a different message is apparently difficult for some people to understand and act upon. Witness the number of people who will refuse to give GNU a share of the credit and instead refer to a "Linux operating system" when that system features GNU software. The GNU/Linux naming FAQ responds to every rebuttal I've seen.
Lots of people don't understand the differences between the movements, even when those differences explain the vastly different results we see on the ground (such as explaining why free software movement proponents say proprietary software is anti-social and open source movement proponents endorse installing and running proprietary software). For years, the OSI told people the differences were "ideological tub-thumping" and that was about the most insightful explanation they had to offer. Meanwhile, the FSF was publishing a different and far more respectful explanation which was recently updated.
The OSI's president, Michael Tiemann, said the OSI is changing; distancing themselves from the views of Eric Raymond ("Eric does speak for himself but less and less for the OSI."). I hope that the OSI will be able to bring its audience around to understand why ethical understanding is important. Businesses greatest achievement has been to get people to believe they can separate what they do from ethics, and it's important we challenge that perception; in many cases this is a life or death matter. But there is much for the OSI to do because of the wedge they created; for example, convincing people that approving of similar sets of licenses is all there is to say on the subject (another followup to your post illustrates this point). RMS discussed the differences between the movements and Tiemann president responded.
Switching to free software is far better than switching from one master to another. Apple is largely just another proprietor, but with a completely free software operating system and only free software apps on top of that, you can liberate yourself from proprietors/monopolists.
Everyday Americans have been speaking out. I'm such an American and I haven't been waiting for executives to speak on the issue. I've been speaking out to anyone who would listen/read on my local community radio station (I had a show for a few years until the station became remarkably undemocratic), on my blog (which I maintain to this day), to Jack Valenti's face in front of an audience (when he came to my town on his anti-"piracy" tour) and related letters to the editor, and with my friends while we discuss media matters (virtually weekly at a local bar).
Americans use a lot of non-free operating systems and software (which digital restrictions require), but if you take the time to teach them to value their freedom they'll listen and learn. On my radio program, I found it interesting to take a wide angle—people found it interesting to discuss how copyright and patent issues intersect with their everyday lives.
It's critical to not give up the freedom talk and not give into the people who would have you compromise your values in order to placate proprietors. There is a deep thirst for substantive talk and action about issues that matter.
No, we don't need organizations to provide their own software because then they'll distribute proprietary software. We don't benefit from dependency. I don't need to give up my software freedom to make some device work with the Linux kernel. I don't need software which will go unmaintained because nobody who is willing to do the maintenance knows how it really works.
What we need are accurate published specs for all hardware. These specs should be published for all to see, with no legal restrictions. And the hardware should not need firmware to work (or that firmware should also be free software). I'd rather work around hardware bugs in driver code than become dependent on a binary blob. This way we can write our own software that works with the hardware, maintain the software ourselves in perpetuity, and recommend everyone go buy that specific make and model (thus giving that manufacturer or reseller more business).
I'm happy to recommend certain devices on this basis. I'll choose that hardware even if it's not the most efficient way to get some job done because I don't have to fear it will stop working when I upgrade my system or switch to another free software OS.
It's important to not take a defeatist attitude on this. Having viable machines without giving up our software freedom (which is the main thing that separates free software OSes from their proprietary alternatives) is important.
According to Fred von Lohmann of the EFF, Apple would not drop iTunes Music Store DRM even if they could. As I understand it (I don't recall exactly where, but I think it was from one of DVD Jon's recent blog posts on the topic), Apple employs DRM on tracks from labels that don't want DRM. von Lohmann concludes, quite rightly:
Incredible is the reaction on tech discussion sites like /. and digg where Lexmark and Chamberlain get almost universally razzed but people believe the line that Apple only reluctantly employs digital restrictions.
von Lohmann's post is quite informative and shows the real purpose of Apple's iTMS DRM—to lock in iTMS customers. DVD Jon builds on this in his recent blog posts.
Then there's Steve Jobs' recent lie about not "gum[ming] up" networks with third-party software, which the FSF debunked handily.
One doesn't need to delve too far into history to see how proprietors, no matter how slick their ads or how popular their consumer electronics, are not working in your best interests.
Merely repeating the University's capricious and overreaching-on-uncertainties line is hardly insightful. Bringing hardcopies of a text doesn't imply having read and understood that text. Universities ought to understand this concept, what with all the students toting their mostly unread textbooks around campus.
As for who's unsure: One can reasonably infer that the detectives and network-security technician probably hadn't read or completely understood the policy, certainly not as well as the professor who helped write it. But they seemed sure in the professor's description of what happened when they first brought the complaint to the professor:
In the paragraph following this one, it was the professor who said the policy was vague. The visitors may have been less sure by the time they left, but a larger issue had arisen by then.
Don't ever step up to defend the actions of someone who asks you not to teach someone something new as these visitors asked of the professor when they requested "that I stop using Tor, and that I avoid covering it in class". This is flatly unacceptable anywhere in society and should be anathema at a University.
Too many people who frequent /. don't appreciate freedom—note the number of people who champion the "open source" lines about adopting and recommending non-free/proprietary software—but the professor's conclusion should not be overlooked here. This is about academic freedom and we would all do well to work to spread awareness and defense of it.
Quite well as far as I'm concerned; Speex is useful with Asterisk (a popular and extensible open source telephone system), I use it to make high-quality low-bandwidth encodings of talk shows I work with, and a lot of players play it (including VideoLAN Client which works on many operating systems). I never have to worry about patent hassles, proprietary software hassles, or losing control of my audio to digital restrictions management.
This thread gave me that idea (I've already touched on some of the horrid logic I've seen here so far). As I type this, the highest moderated posts in this thread have to do with clarifying that "this is as much about them deleting her email as it is the responses she received from management" and "There are probably more than a hundred different archives, tarballs, and tape backups from which they could salvage...". In other words, technical analysis of issues that don't even scratch the surface of the privacy issues involved. No clear objection to how much "free" costs the user.
/. (digg, for instance) when it comes to Google. It seems to me that every time Google comes out with a new service there are plenty of posts "critiquing" it from the lamest perspectives: how convenient is the new service, what browsers will the new service work with, how does one get access to the new service, what software/hardware are they using behind the scenes, etc. rather than thinking about the structural issues of giving your data away to a firm that indexes things about you.
Take a look at other threads on discussion groups like
The cost of "free" services rarely comes up, and if it does I've become accustomed to seeing those comments moderated down; it seems to me that the unpleasant truth breaks the rah-rah atmosphere and is duly punished. I think it's a side-effect of teaching people to think primarily of business interests and then only in narrow economic ways (as if only money matters). I certainly don't see anywhere near the number of threads chatting up these kinds of issues as I do celebrating the latest lame service Google whips up.
Thank you, I stand corrected on the service provider, and I appreciate that others can keep the pertinent details in mind. And at the same time, I'm resigned to think it almost doesn't matter; it's not like one of them is inherently more trustworthy than the other. The larger point I'm trying to make here stands.
I don't think the issue comes down to getting what you paid for. There are so many of these leaks it's apparently hard for me to remember all the specific actors involved. Wasn't there a University that recently had a leak of student record data? What about the US military inadvertently releasing info about many soldiers? How many times have US government officials lost laptops with sensitive information on them? People pay for these institutions and their services, yet these things happen. I find it difficult to believe that if people paid more money we'd see a reduction in leaks (purposeful or accidental).
It's sad to see so many /. posters getting so lost in side issues—was there enough storage for backups, railing against charging for services late in the game, differentiating between a percieved deletion (logical) versus an actual delete (physical). The more significant issue here has to do with placing one's trust in gratis services.
/. love Google without reservation, but how many more episodes like these do we have to see before we'll understand Google is just another organization that doesn't care about your privacy or your data?
Many people I know recommend Google, Yahoo!, and other "free" services (IM, email, word processing, database, etc.) without ever mentioning how your data is hostage to the proprietor and probably indexed so these services can sell information about you (not that you'd know it if that's what happens). Then there are the data leaks (whether accidental or on purpose), you stand quite a bit to lose there by becoming dependent on the service. We should remember the so-called "anonymized" search data Yahoo! released some months ago where two New York Times reporters tracked down someone based on the anonymized data in her searches.
I'm sure that whatever comes out of this, people will narrowly interpret the results to arrive at ridiculous conclusions like avoid Lycos for email, use Google instead; avoid Yahoo! for web searches, use this other service instead. The bigger picture has to include not merely shuffling the deck chairs of which unaccountable corporation you'll trust for gratis services.
Right now Google is the elephant in the room: I know people on
We need better solutions for these things that allow anonymous searching, local hosting of one's own email (with remote availability), and ease-of-use that allows non-technical people to enjoy the fruits of progress as well. I don't know exactly what that would be, but I'm sure smart people can come up with something to improve upon.
People who fall into the trap of installing and using proprietary video card drivers then later discover that their video card (which still works fine) is no longer "supported" by the latest driver update would disagree with you that "Video cards are already well-supported by their manufacturers.".
I believe this kind of thing happens more than others know, particularly as GNU/Linux distributors that distribute proprietary software make it easier for users to acquire proprietary software (as I understand Ubuntu is working on). Users shouldn't be left without their software freedom, nor should they have to choose between updating their system kernel and using their video card.
Making users helpless and keeping them separate is no way to live. Users need software freedom now.
From the post summary:
It could, and this offer of free labor is unquestionably generous, but there's nothing in the blog post to indicate that non-free software will be rejected. Non-free software in the Linux kernel is an important issue, and it would be interesting to read more about how this is going to be dealt with.
No, not better because it's untrue.
/. posters ("political") place on them. But since they use the label, it's important that we understand what Torvalds really says and stands for.
Allowing people to distribute Torvalds' version of the Linux kernel with non-free software firmware, and allowing TiVoization, these are political choices. The reasons these choices are made is more important than the label some
When Torvalds takes credit for an entire operating system he didn't write by allowing people to call the GNU/Linux OS "Linux" (giving no credit to anyone but his project, named after him), that's a political choice. When he tries to insist that the name "GNU/Linux" "paint[s] Linux as a GNU project" despite that for years the FSF has been clear the Linux kernel is not a GNU package, that is a political choice. These choices are made to placate businesses (possibly also Torvalds' ego).
I'm not redefining the word political at all. It's important to see these choices for what they are: differing agendas, but still agendas. For people who share Torvalds' agenda, popularity is more important than ethics. And popularity often means going along to get along. Ironically, Torvalds' lack of advocacy for the freedom to cooperate as a general ethical principle is something people connect with him (ironic because the Linux kernel wouldn't be what it is without the cooperation of many other people and organizations). The irony continues because of the conflict between his claim that the kernel was "always about giving source code back and keeping it open, not about anything else" and proprietors efforts to make the kernel a vehicle for their proprietary code.
Linus Torvalds is political too, despite any description to the contrary. But Torvalds' politics are different and contrary to the free software movement. Torvalds' thinking is more in line with the open source movement which focuses on a development methodology and eschews discussion of any freedoms for computer users. The free software movement focuses on all computer user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software.
Don't fall into the traps of believing that Torvalds is apolitical, or that describing something as "political" is sufficient to convey any substantive meaning.
No, because that's one way in which software freedom is made. Sun wouldn't have released their Java software as free software if there were no real pressure on them to compete with increasingly capable free software Java replacements.
I agree with you that GM did what is in its own (short-term) interests: cynically develop and then take away their electric cars from the market. Other manufacturers have made electric cars, but they're not terribly practical.
But the most interesting part of your post has to do with "voting with your wallet" because that phrase (common amongst those who believe the myth that the marketplace is fair arena for competition) suggests the very democratic control that is absent from dealing with private tyrannies (aka corporations). If we had democratic control over what GM produced, we might not have chosen to sink billions into SUVs most people don't need and gas cars that don't compete well with what other automakers provide. We might have chosen practical, reliable, and cost-effective electric cars.
Any misunderstanding of what Stallman said will not be corrected by allowing "the community [to] decide what Stallman said". Unlike the expressions of ancient speakers, we can hear his recordings, read the transcripts of what he said, and email him.
Also, such work is being done (albeit not on a wiki, which poses some minor technical advantages) thanks to the work of the FSF and FSFE.
Finally, it's worth noting that Stallman was not and is not a member of the open source movement. He started and remains a member of the free software movement which is philosophically distinct and over 10 years older than the open source movement. In fact, it is people's ignorance of this is directly addressed in the talk being referenced in this /. story:
I'd say that's a minor concern that isn't hampering anyone's appreciation of software freedom. That concern is minor, like the excuse others (including on /.) use to dismiss his message out of hand—his gruffness and unwillingness to placate questions loaded with perspectives that silently support non-freedom. I know how his responses sometimes annoy people, and I too think that he could sometimes find ways to make the exact same point without brushing people off, but the best way to fix it is to become a better speaker yourself on the issue of software freedom and not talk to people that way, and to acknowledge that sometimes it is perfectly appropriate to call a spade a spade and not tolerate questions that make no sense or try to reframe the debate away from user's freedom.
The open source movement doesn't do this work at all, despite any claims that they agree with his perspective or that the two movements essentially say the same thing. That movement never talks about user's freedoms. So no matter how nice their representatives may appear and interact with others, they're essentially selling a philosophy that doesn't speak to all computer users (that movement speaks chiefly to managers of software developers), and dispenses with ethics and social solidarity in pursuit of placating business (including software proprietors).
Then there is the 2-stage trap RMS identified and debunked in his talk.
Actually, that would be a mistake and completely unnecessary in order to give you the freedom you need to make and publish rebuttals. You shouldn't be able to alter what other people say when they're airing their views, as is the case with political commentary. You should be able to quote them and rebut, and this is a freedom you already have in the US thanks to fair use exceptions to copyright law. While fair use is under attack, the remedy is certainly not to let people misstate other people's views.
People outside the US probably already have something in their legal systems which is comparable to fair use, so your concern has already been addressed there too. The remaining people who have nothing comparable would not be well-served to allow their modified versions of his talk or transcript to be distributed under Stallman's name ("mak[ing] him say whatever we want").
Finally, to be able to misquote someone is not a freedom, it's a power.
People can't buy what they don't know about and people can't buy what's only available to them for lease.
Neither GM nor Toyota advertised their EVs like they do their gas-based vehicles—national advertisements featuring attractive people having a good time championing the benefits of the electric car. The remaining GM EV1 fleet could have been sold to the people waiting outside the lot who were keeping an eye on where those cars were going. Some of them had been EV1 lessors and knew what the practical limitations on service were. Parts descriptions could have been licensed to a series of third parties for maintenance. It seems more likely that the electric car market profiled in "Who Killed the Electric Car?" was taken away from lessors so as to not provide an ongoing reminder to consumers of what twice was and what is possible.
Why should anyone think that Toyota is above the same oil-based interests GM is? Of course they'll say the focus on GM was too harsh; they don't want the same focus on them for doing to their EV RAV4 lessors what GM did to EV1 lessors. When the major automakers control the market (as they apparently do here), they'll do what they can to retain dominance. No darkroom collusion is necessary, just multiple semi-independent groups of people reaching comparable conclusions about how to maintain the lucrative status quo while convincing people away from something new that would require a shift in business model; in other words, what the oil lobbyist spokesman said (roughly) "It was a mistake that ought not be repeated".
I'll seriously consider buying a 100% electric car because my driving needs match what an electric car can deliver. But I'll have a hard time trusting GM to deliver an electric car that isn't just another scam to respond to the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?".
Ralph Nader says what you're saying—GM has a long history of saying that advanced cars like these are coming real soon now (including making show cars) but GM rarely delivers. With the death of the EV1 (which GM never marketed well, both in quality and quantity of advertising), GM was one of the forces that killed what looked to be a practical electric car.
Now it will be hard for people to take the "Volt" seriously because GM has a strong history of being untrustworthy, and a car is too serious of an investment to be frivolous with. GM could always: lease the Volt which allows them to take the Volt fleet back at any time (like they did the EV1 fleet), put out a car that doesn't compete well with gas-powered cars (and then cynically use this as "evidence" that the public doesn't want electric cars), and distribute the Volt from very few dealers (making the car harder to get).
If Honda made an all-electric car, I'd seriously consider that too. The Tesla cars are too expensive for my budget.
Free software cannot be proprietary. In fact, it is the free software movement's proponents who argue that proprietary software is unethical and has no place in society. The only time the folks at the FSF install proprietary software is when they're working on a free replacement program. A user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software are the freedoms all computer users must have. The reason why we need these freedoms are ethical issues which the free software movement identifies and pursues as such, raising issues of social solidarity to make their point.
By contrast, the open source movement argues for an increase in developmental efficiency and never discusses social solidarity. This technocratic message not only carries no weight with most computer users (who aren't developers), it stresses the quality of the programming over what users are allowed to do with a copy of the program once they get it. This is why a few OSI-approved licenses are considered non-free (such as the v1.x revisions of the Apple Public Source License)—the criteria for acceptance comes from the movements' different philosophies. This is also why open source proponents sometimes side with proprietors—running proprietary video drivers instead of switching to other hardware or simply doing without the fancy 3D graphics; setting up repositories where users can more easily acquire copies of proprietary software (like the Ubuntu GNU/Linux repo which carries Opera, among other proprietary programs). Some open source movement proponents even drop the pursuit of technical superiority when faced with an argument of popularity, which is why some endorse the use of the patent-encumbered MP3 lossy audio codec when Ogg Vorbis is not only technically superior (as demonstrated in numerous blind listening tests) but has objectively better tagging. Open source proponents have no means to argue against technically superior programs even when the license for those programs hold users separate and helpless to control their own computers.
Years ago, Richard Stallman wrote about the difference between the two movements. More recently, he addressed this difference when he spoke at the fifth international GPLv3 conference in Tokyo in 2006. One interesting consequence of the differences is what you have to start with if you want the social solidarity the free software movement champions as well as powerful reliable software.
Finally, it's important to not conflate the difference between freedom and skill. Freedom has to do with permission. I have the freedom to criticize my government even though I can't write as well as the man whose pen name was William Shakespeare. I could choose to spend more time reading and learning to write better, as he did. My lack of skill does not in any way justify denying me my freedom of speech. So how well I can do this task, how well others I trust can do it, doesn't enter into the situation.
It helps illustrate how untrustworthy proprietary software is by default and why you should not promote or run proprietary software. How many other things are proprietors leaving out of their changelogs (assuming they publish them at all)? With free software you don't have to guess because you're given the freedoms you need to do the work yourself or get someone else to help you.
Users deserve software freedom.
Anyone who confuses "support" with proprietary software is not working in their client's best interests. Proprietors drop software maintenance to get users on the upgrade treadmill. Proprietors ostensibly act motivated by profit, but users can find computers that do their job well after the hardware is no longer profitable. Consultants ought to promote the use of free software drivers and firmware (or, preferably, no firmware needed at all) so that their clients can leverage the talents of a free market of developers to improve and maintain the software needed to make all hardware work with any system. Separating users from their freedom is not fiscally sound for users.
Free software advocates won't install non-free firmware because that software is non-free. All of the arguments about free software apply to discussions of "firmware" because firmware is software. For those who want their freedom, proprietary software on their systems is not "wonderful".
Theo de Raadt's requests are quite clear: he's not asking for gratis firmware development (and how much that development costs is wildly overestimated so long as people are willing to do this unpaid). He and other OpenBSD hackers are willing to write that software themselves (including maintenance and bugfixes probably for longer than proprietors). He's asking for complete and correct documentation to hardware, and he has also previously stumped for a license to distribute proprietary firmware. This strikes me as a position no proprietor can argue with, yet some do.