Maybe the ASUS WL-107g CardBus card will work for your needs. Newegg carries it for about $30 or so. I got one of these running on gNewSense GNU/Linux, a GNU/Linux distribution that places software freedom as a higher priority than trying to work with every device out there (and the concomitant need for distributing non-free software). To this end, they strip out non-free firmware and non-free drivers from their distribution. So, I can try running any device with that OS and know that if it works there it ought to work anywhere in freedom.
I've heard the D-Link DWL G122 USB wireless network adapter works with free software drivers and without any firmware, but I don't have one of them to test first hand.
I agree with you that we need an actively maintained list of makes and models of things to buy, not just chipset lists. Makes and models are what people can ask for by name in stores.
I'm all for letting cooperative organizations know why I'm purchasing their equipment and not their uncooperative competitors (and notifying their uncooperative competitors to the contrary), but I don't expect it to mean that I'm in any way "voting" or leveraging some kind of democratic control over what is essentially a private tyranny.
I say this is another reason because the general problem with the concept of voting by spending money means that rich people have more "votes" than poor people, so this saying tries to cast a egalitarian pall on an inequity. de Raadt addresses how much consumer power you have with regard to computer hardware by pointing out how OEMs leverage competition to insulate themselves from customer's wishes for chips we can operate without proprietary software. I mentioned this before but I didn't think it would come up as a repeat so soon.
You must be looking at a radically different site than I because the site I see has numerous links to places carrying Ogg Theora files, most (if not all) with Vorbis audio tracks.
The rest of your reaction basically boils down to complaining about popularity (websites nobody has heard of, codecs that aren't bundled with popular OSes) and oxymoronically complaining that only technical people can read theora.org and claiming I'm speaking only to a technically minded audience here on/.. This is simultaneously no real response to the issue at hand (governmental organizations favoring proprietors over operating in the best interest of the public), and something that would be easy to change if it weren't for the prejudice of the market—the free market is designed to favor large established players (as I've already alluded to in the case of Microsoft illegally leveraging its power). Therefore the thing to do is to spread word of sites carrying free content to your friends, help your friends by sharing players that can play Ogg Vorbis+Theora files (including the Ogg Vorbis+Theora plugin for Windows Media Player) and in so doing challenge a situation that doesn't benefit us. The free software community faced similar hurdles over 20 years ago and, with work, today the server world is run on FLOSS (much to Microsoft's chagrin). Desktop software is very far along and ordinary computer users can get work done with a FLOSS OS such as GNU/Linux.
Finally, just to be clear, I'm not championing the Open Source movement. I'm encouraging you to consider the rhetoric of that movement and the recommended actions (which are placating popularity even at the expense of an honest pursuit of the narrow developmental message that movement offers to programmers). I support software freedom for all computer users and increased social solidarity based on an ethical examination I hope more people will undertake, therefore I am a Free Software movement advocate.
I guess we're supposed to ignore all the people who have been using Ogg Vorbis+Theora feeds for years (many listed on the Ogg Theora website and instead give in to an argument based on a version name and vague goals of "readiness", or for another overmoderated post in this thread, market presence built on violating the law. We're not supposed to advocate for people using unencumbered FLOSS software to do this job across platforms in a non-discriminatory way. Even according to the open source argument which dismisses social solidarity out of hand (something governments ought not do), discouraging use seems particularly unwise.
It's only "likely they never will" if those educated about software freedom believe they cannot talk to everyday computer users and therefore never try. I've done this work in person, on the radio, and online and I've learned that people are receptive to learning about social solidarity, ethics, and preserving freedom. In fact, it takes an inordinate amount of effort on the part of proprietors to convince people not to pay attention to issues of social solidarity in software including DRM, proprietary software, and patents. People don't take kindly to being restricted them doing something they want their computer to do. What proprietors do is constant education as well; people won't naturally separate themselves from one another and keep each other from working together. Proprietors know that people have to be taught to behave this way and endorse this mode of behavior in their everyday lives. You won't get where you want to go, politically, by giving up.
I encourage everyone to help teach others about software freedom and reject notions that others won't understand you. It's incredibly rewarding to connect with people on a level where you share and work together.
Actually, as the article points out, the FSF isn't about encouraging anyone to use "open source systems" they want to teach all computer users to value certain freedoms for their own sake—the freedoms to run, share, inspect, and modify software. By contrast, the open source movement speaks chiefly to software developers and managers encouraging them to value a development methodology where programmers can more efficiently improve software. The two movements approve of some of the same licenses for software and sometimes draw considerably different conclusions based on their respective philosophical perspectives.
On a related note: read Theo de Raadt's slides from his OpenCON 2006 talk "Why hardware documentation matters so much and why it is so hard to get". In this talk he answers these questions and he debunks common arguments presented by vendors who don't want to tell you how the hardware works and sycophantic users who act as intellectual bodyguards for these vendors. You'll also learn another problem with what is often described as "voting with your wallets"—informative counterarguments to what you've read on/. any time this topic comes up.
Of course not, and even if someone does feel that way that doesn't mean they are being oppressed.
But many who post to websites like this (Digg,/., and others) have been fed a steady diet of business-first thinking -- the notion that we should view every issue chiefly in terms of business interests. The posters are usually young, they haven't read much, but they aren't stupid, merely ignorant of the long struggle many people make to ensure freedoms for themselves and others. They've also been taught to not give any mind to the condition of others, so speaking and thinking in narrow economic ways is de rigeur. For them, business-first thinking is never seen as pushing something down someone's throat, that ideology has the privilege of being viewed as the norm. So when someone talks in terms of freedom (or, perhaps, ethics and social solidarity), that talk must immediately be reframed as inappropriate. One easy way to do this is to mock them for being "religious" which gives others readers a cue that such talk isn't tolerated. After all, businesses greatest achievement is convincing people to divorce their work from ethical examination; we musn't have people asking questions like what kind of society they want to live in.
No, because it's not fear, we're all certain of what Vista will include (many have already seen versions of it, including the version that will be distributed to millions of users), and therefore there's no doubt as to what Microsoft Windows Vista will do to a user's software freedom.
You talk about Microsoft and the FSF as if they're equivalent yet they're not. One has a history of locking-in users to software they can't run, inspect, share, or modify anytime they want for any reason. The other promotes those very freedoms.
What you really don't like is that talk of software freedom reframes the debate away from what Microsoft can compete on. Microsoft, despite having a budget so many orders of magnitude greater than the FSF, chooses not to deliver software freedom to its users. Therefore, advocates for software freedom reject what Microsoft distributes and they warn others of what's in store should they choose to use non-free OSes including Microsoft Windows Vista.
Actually, the campaign's agenda is to promote software freedom. Microsoft Windows doesn't do that, regardless of version. That OS is nothing but non-free software. gNewSense GNU/Linux does that because that OS is nothing but free software.
Also they wouldn't call "Linux" an OS when it's a kernel, denying themselves credit for their own OS project called GNU.
While I'm perfectly willing to admit that NMA has considered and rejected the use of archive.org (the Internet Archive or "IA"), I don't think those are good reasons to reject the IA.
IA only requires that a work be distributable by them gratis. They are currently implicitly licensed to distribute a number of restrictively licensed works. One example is the episodes of the show Democracy Now! which carry no license at all (either in the files' metadata or in the IA boilerplate webpage). Thus, the default of copyright applies and that default is (broadly speaking) no copying, no derivative works, no distribution, and no public performance or display allowed.
Personal or educational use can't be enforced on a computer. So, NMA can't do this job any better or worse than IA by distributing these files from NMA's own servers. So that's not a reason to reject using IA.
This leaves NMA's "wholesale downloading" prohibition to reckon with. It is somewhat technically enforcible (not against anyone reading/. who is probably more technically capable than a lot of people online) but, I'd argue, ultimately silly in light of the public interest for these works and NMA's apparently inadequate service.
NMA could license the IA to redistribute these files, and NMA can rescind their "wholesale downloading" prohibition in exchange for saving themselves a lot of money on bandwidth and servers. We shouldn't consider NMA's license as if it is immutable; it's completely their own and therefore it can be changed. So, instead of being "overwhelmed" by the interest, as the NMA website says, NMA can give the user a little more freedom in exchange for obtaining more bandwidth. Hence, archive.org is not so easily rejected.
It seems foolish to me to pay for server logs and an opportunity to technologically enforce the no "wholesale downloading" clause of NMA's (overly restrictive) license while telling users why their requests for license-abiding downloads are sometimes failing.
Perhaps they also ought to consider uploading to The Internet Archive which would help them offload the bandwidth burden. The Internet Archive carries a wide variety of works under a variety of licenses.
No, that's not all I'm saying. I don't think it's fair to the topic to condense one's thoughts to sound bites (where one is inevitably constrained to repeating the same cliches which give power to the status quo).
I appreciate it when open source minded hackers deliver free software to people, and I am grateful when open source advocates stand with the free software community pushing for no software patents and no DRM. We need more social solidarity to make better lives for ourselves, and I'm grateful that the free software movement argues for increased social solidarity. But when you say "the Open crowd is paving the way to the Free approach" you wouldn't know that to look at the chosen audio and video formats. Not one of the alternatives provided can be played on a completely free software system for many users around the world saddled with governments who adopt software patents.
Far more credit is due to the free software movement than the open source movement has made it acceptable to say aloud. The free software movement was working on and distributing eminently practical free software before the open source movement existed. Some of the software worked on then is still critically important today (such as GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, initially written by RMS who initially called it the GNU C Compiler). Today, the important license work on the most widely used licenses (GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, and GNU FDL) isn't being done by the Open Source Initiative, it's being done by the Free Software Foundation including RMS, who is credited as the chief author of GPLv3. GPLv3 represents the first GPL that anyone in the open source movement has ever participated in because the two prior versions predate the OSI and the open source movement.
How ironic that the/. headline mentions "OSS" (open source software) yet Prof. Moglen is General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation; an organization that not only predates the Open Source Initiative (which coined the term "open source") by over a decade but has a different philosophy which sometimes reaches different conclusions about what software is acceptable than the open source philosophy does. For the open source movement, running non-free software is okay (not that an open source proponent would call it that; the open source movement exists in part to not talk about software freedom at all). For a free software proponent, non-free software is avoided except when writing a free replacement for a non-free program. The difference in reaction to non-free software is quite striking.
You can see how that plays out in this/. story: none of the formats this talk has been transcoded to can be played by all users with free software even though this could have been accomodated. Instead of including options free software users could use, we have a list of (what are for most users) non-free alternatives. MP3 is patent-encumbered in many countries, so citizens of those countries can't have free MP3 encoding or decoding software. The QuickTime container format can be free, but the codecs most often used with QuickTime are non-free. Flash can be played with free software but the free replacements aren't yet to the point of maturity where it can be used as a drop-in replacement (and even when the job is done, MP3 soundtracks on Flash video+audio files will pose a problem).
The solution has been around for some time and works well: add Ogg Vorbis audio files and Ogg Theora+Vorbis video+audio files. These files can be played on all platforms and there are implementations which are free software for everyone.
With Cohen walking hand in hand with the MPAA nowadays, how will this affect the privacy of current Torrent users such as myself?
Fortunately, the original Bittorrent software is free software so you'll always have the freedom to make sure the software preserves your privacy (insofar as that can be done on a Bittorrent network). The same cannot be said for uTorrent which will remain proprietary.
Prof. Eben Moglen says that GPLv3 will prevent a user's loss of freedom in light of the details of the Novell-Microsoft deal. He also takes the open source movement's lack of focus on user's freedom to task by ignoring "the politics" of the situation, leaving it ripe for being moved closer to what proprietors want.
It says more that you believe the Sony rep took no stance. He did take a stance, his stance was that other people will take care of whatever the/. poster was bringing up and he needn't worry about it. In other words, he's free to remain ignorant of the details because these issues aren't his problem.
It's also revealing that you believe such behavior is polite. In many countries political talk is expected. To dodge it out of ignorance or a desire to not take a stance on something is impolite because you, not they, are putting the brakes on discussing real issues of the day. In America this is not so because Americans are taught that only popular opinion is polite to repeat. So when the monied interests determine what is popular opinion, business interests dominate conversations and it becomes impolite to talk about anything not in the perceived interest of the wealthy.
However, suggesting that there might be without actually saying what they are is spreading FUD.
Relax, I made no such suggestion. Challenging someone who asks you to stand behind a point you raised without attribution makes you look hyper-defensive.
What is there for them to say? They were uncertain about the legal situation before, then they looked into it, and they decided that there wasn't a problem. Isn't that enough of an annoncement?[sic]
What exactly was Red Hat uncertain of before? How did Red Hat go about determining that their uncertainties were not an issue? According to the language used in the announcement from Microsoft and Novell, only their customers are covered under whatever patent agreement those two corporations have set up (the specifics of which are said to be revealed later). Has Red Hat determined that their users are under no threat of losing a patent infringement lawsuit from Mono or the Mono-based programs Red Hat distributes, or is only Red Hat under no threat? The details are missing, so no, it's not enough to explain what happened.
Please do name at least 3 of these times. If/. threads are allowed to get away with unjustified namecalling, people come away thinking that that is right and proper to behave that way.
As for Novell's lawyers, I don't see why I should care what they think. The announcement of the Microsoft-Novell patent detente says that their customers will be covered for some things. Since most of the free software community isn't a customer of either Microsoft or Novell, I don't think their agreement helps the free software community.
The legal situation with Mono's.NET implementation on Linux is far better than with Java: Mono is already an open source implementation, it has been carefully analyzed against Microsoft's patents for several years, and there are no known patent violations.
What's your source on this—that Mono's.NET implementation has "no known patent violations"? I remember an amazing silence from Red Hat when they went from not shipping Mono or Mono-based programs to shipping them in Fedora Core. I recall reading only one or two blog entries that said a full explanation was forthcoming, but nothing in detail materialized.
While it's a shame that the entire OS isn't free software, I would love to discover that Microsoft is distributing a free software kernel to its users; the more free software distributors, the merrier.
Sounds to me like part of trusting proprietary software to do a good job with security. Uninspectable, unmodifiable, unsharable software shouldn't be trusted to perform securely. You need software freedom.
Are proprietary software installs (such as the proprietary software Opera web browser) being cited as a source of problems for upgrading Ubuntu GNU/Linux systems? While I can see how that could pose a problem, the irony is more interesting because I remember the language used in the press release talking about Opera's availability for Ubuntu GNU/Linux: "Ubuntu will always be free, and will not have restrictive licenses associated with it.". I'm guessing this refers to the cognitive dissonance of a special repository for non-free packages and using free to mean gratis rather than the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify (which would include gratis distribution if one can get a copy from a friend).
When I tried the link in the article Secunia points to as an exploit of that bug, I see that it tells me there are two testcases, one of which was fixed in Firefox 1.5.0.7 and 2.0 and the other is called "a denial-of-service condition that is an annoyance, but is not exploitable to compromise your system" but remains unfixed.
If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?
This is the more important of the two questions and the easier to answer: security is not the main reason users should switch to any free software web browser (including, but not limited to, Firefox). Users should switch to a free software browser because users should switch to free software, and browsers are an important part of modern-day computing. Despite Mozilla's focus on "open source" values (speedy development, fewer bugs, other values that are designed to appeal chiefly to business managers) which are sometimes simply lies (as one can see with the bug that the anonymous poster brings up here), that's not the reason to value any free software. One ought to value Firefox as a contribution to a free society where people can treat friends as friends and build communities who share without having to do so in the dark in fear of being discovered as copyright infringers. Mozilla won't tell you this; they're too busy pushing aside software freedom for its own sake to talk about this. It's unfortunate they have not taken any time to teach their audience this while Microsoft worked on MSIE7. Ironically, software freedom is the one thing Firefox will always have over MSIE for as long as Firefox remains free software and MSIE remains proprietary; technical features can be reimplemented and even patented to prevent competition, but software freedom is something no proprietor can deliver. Catering to businesses who distribute free software can be helpful but such interests remain shallow.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the ASUS WL-107g CardBus card will work for your needs. Newegg carries it for about $30 or so. I got one of these running on gNewSense GNU/Linux, a GNU/Linux distribution that places software freedom as a higher priority than trying to work with every device out there (and the concomitant need for distributing non-free software). To this end, they strip out non-free firmware and non-free drivers from their distribution. So, I can try running any device with that OS and know that if it works there it ought to work anywhere in freedom.
I've heard the D-Link DWL G122 USB wireless network adapter works with free software drivers and without any firmware, but I don't have one of them to test first hand.
I agree with you that we need an actively maintained list of makes and models of things to buy, not just chipset lists. Makes and models are what people can ask for by name in stores.
I'm all for letting cooperative organizations know why I'm purchasing their equipment and not their uncooperative competitors (and notifying their uncooperative competitors to the contrary), but I don't expect it to mean that I'm in any way "voting" or leveraging some kind of democratic control over what is essentially a private tyranny.
However, if you read Theo de Raadt's informative talk slides, you'd see another reason why "voting" with your money isn't what it is made out to be (slides 24 and 25—"The OEM problem"). Maybe if customers in the US were organized to a scale never before seen and all demanding chips with complete and unrestricted documentation, we'd have more control as a group. This is worth pursuing, and if you are calling for this I would gladly join such an effort.
I say this is another reason because the general problem with the concept of voting by spending money means that rich people have more "votes" than poor people, so this saying tries to cast a egalitarian pall on an inequity. de Raadt addresses how much consumer power you have with regard to computer hardware by pointing out how OEMs leverage competition to insulate themselves from customer's wishes for chips we can operate without proprietary software. I mentioned this before but I didn't think it would come up as a repeat so soon.
You must be looking at a radically different site than I because the site I see has numerous links to places carrying Ogg Theora files, most (if not all) with Vorbis audio tracks.
/.. This is simultaneously no real response to the issue at hand (governmental organizations favoring proprietors over operating in the best interest of the public), and something that would be easy to change if it weren't for the prejudice of the market—the free market is designed to favor large established players (as I've already alluded to in the case of Microsoft illegally leveraging its power). Therefore the thing to do is to spread word of sites carrying free content to your friends, help your friends by sharing players that can play Ogg Vorbis+Theora files (including the Ogg Vorbis+Theora plugin for Windows Media Player) and in so doing challenge a situation that doesn't benefit us. The free software community faced similar hurdles over 20 years ago and, with work, today the server world is run on FLOSS (much to Microsoft's chagrin). Desktop software is very far along and ordinary computer users can get work done with a FLOSS OS such as GNU/Linux.
The rest of your reaction basically boils down to complaining about popularity (websites nobody has heard of, codecs that aren't bundled with popular OSes) and oxymoronically complaining that only technical people can read theora.org and claiming I'm speaking only to a technically minded audience here on
Finally, just to be clear, I'm not championing the Open Source movement. I'm encouraging you to consider the rhetoric of that movement and the recommended actions (which are placating popularity even at the expense of an honest pursuit of the narrow developmental message that movement offers to programmers). I support software freedom for all computer users and increased social solidarity based on an ethical examination I hope more people will undertake, therefore I am a Free Software movement advocate.
I guess we're supposed to ignore all the people who have been using Ogg Vorbis+Theora feeds for years (many listed on the Ogg Theora website and instead give in to an argument based on a version name and vague goals of "readiness", or for another overmoderated post in this thread, market presence built on violating the law. We're not supposed to advocate for people using unencumbered FLOSS software to do this job across platforms in a non-discriminatory way. Even according to the open source argument which dismisses social solidarity out of hand (something governments ought not do), discouraging use seems particularly unwise.
It's only "likely they never will" if those educated about software freedom believe they cannot talk to everyday computer users and therefore never try. I've done this work in person, on the radio, and online and I've learned that people are receptive to learning about social solidarity, ethics, and preserving freedom. In fact, it takes an inordinate amount of effort on the part of proprietors to convince people not to pay attention to issues of social solidarity in software including DRM, proprietary software, and patents. People don't take kindly to being restricted them doing something they want their computer to do. What proprietors do is constant education as well; people won't naturally separate themselves from one another and keep each other from working together. Proprietors know that people have to be taught to behave this way and endorse this mode of behavior in their everyday lives. You won't get where you want to go, politically, by giving up.
I encourage everyone to help teach others about software freedom and reject notions that others won't understand you. It's incredibly rewarding to connect with people on a level where you share and work together.
Actually, as the article points out, the FSF isn't about encouraging anyone to use "open source systems" they want to teach all computer users to value certain freedoms for their own sake—the freedoms to run, share, inspect, and modify software. By contrast, the open source movement speaks chiefly to software developers and managers encouraging them to value a development methodology where programmers can more efficiently improve software. The two movements approve of some of the same licenses for software and sometimes draw considerably different conclusions based on their respective philosophical perspectives.
On a related note: read Theo de Raadt's slides from his OpenCON 2006 talk "Why hardware documentation matters so much and why it is so hard to get". In this talk he answers these questions and he debunks common arguments presented by vendors who don't want to tell you how the hardware works and sycophantic users who act as intellectual bodyguards for these vendors. You'll also learn another problem with what is often described as "voting with your wallets"—informative counterarguments to what you've read on /. any time this topic comes up.
Of course not, and even if someone does feel that way that doesn't mean they are being oppressed.
/., and others) have been fed a steady diet of business-first thinking -- the notion that we should view every issue chiefly in terms of business interests. The posters are usually young, they haven't read much, but they aren't stupid, merely ignorant of the long struggle many people make to ensure freedoms for themselves and others. They've also been taught to not give any mind to the condition of others, so speaking and thinking in narrow economic ways is de rigeur. For them, business-first thinking is never seen as pushing something down someone's throat, that ideology has the privilege of being viewed as the norm. So when someone talks in terms of freedom (or, perhaps, ethics and social solidarity), that talk must immediately be reframed as inappropriate. One easy way to do this is to mock them for being "religious" which gives others readers a cue that such talk isn't tolerated. After all, businesses greatest achievement is convincing people to divorce their work from ethical examination; we musn't have people asking questions like what kind of society they want to live in.
But many who post to websites like this (Digg,
No, because it's not fear, we're all certain of what Vista will include (many have already seen versions of it, including the version that will be distributed to millions of users), and therefore there's no doubt as to what Microsoft Windows Vista will do to a user's software freedom.
You talk about Microsoft and the FSF as if they're equivalent yet they're not. One has a history of locking-in users to software they can't run, inspect, share, or modify anytime they want for any reason. The other promotes those very freedoms.
What you really don't like is that talk of software freedom reframes the debate away from what Microsoft can compete on. Microsoft, despite having a budget so many orders of magnitude greater than the FSF, chooses not to deliver software freedom to its users. Therefore, advocates for software freedom reject what Microsoft distributes and they warn others of what's in store should they choose to use non-free OSes including Microsoft Windows Vista.
Actually, the campaign's agenda is to promote software freedom. Microsoft Windows doesn't do that, regardless of version. That OS is nothing but non-free software. gNewSense GNU/Linux does that because that OS is nothing but free software.
Also they wouldn't call "Linux" an OS when it's a kernel, denying themselves credit for their own OS project called GNU.
While I'm perfectly willing to admit that NMA has considered and rejected the use of archive.org (the Internet Archive or "IA"), I don't think those are good reasons to reject the IA.
/. who is probably more technically capable than a lot of people online) but, I'd argue, ultimately silly in light of the public interest for these works and NMA's apparently inadequate service.
IA only requires that a work be distributable by them gratis. They are currently implicitly licensed to distribute a number of restrictively licensed works. One example is the episodes of the show Democracy Now! which carry no license at all (either in the files' metadata or in the IA boilerplate webpage). Thus, the default of copyright applies and that default is (broadly speaking) no copying, no derivative works, no distribution, and no public performance or display allowed.
Personal or educational use can't be enforced on a computer. So, NMA can't do this job any better or worse than IA by distributing these files from NMA's own servers. So that's not a reason to reject using IA.
This leaves NMA's "wholesale downloading" prohibition to reckon with. It is somewhat technically enforcible (not against anyone reading
NMA could license the IA to redistribute these files, and NMA can rescind their "wholesale downloading" prohibition in exchange for saving themselves a lot of money on bandwidth and servers. We shouldn't consider NMA's license as if it is immutable; it's completely their own and therefore it can be changed. So, instead of being "overwhelmed" by the interest, as the NMA website says, NMA can give the user a little more freedom in exchange for obtaining more bandwidth. Hence, archive.org is not so easily rejected.
It seems foolish to me to pay for server logs and an opportunity to technologically enforce the no "wholesale downloading" clause of NMA's (overly restrictive) license while telling users why their requests for license-abiding downloads are sometimes failing.
How does any of this have any bearing on where these files are distributed from--the Internet Archive's servers or NMA's servers?
Perhaps they also ought to consider uploading to The Internet Archive which would help them offload the bandwidth burden. The Internet Archive carries a wide variety of works under a variety of licenses.
No, that's not all I'm saying. I don't think it's fair to the topic to condense one's thoughts to sound bites (where one is inevitably constrained to repeating the same cliches which give power to the status quo).
I appreciate it when open source minded hackers deliver free software to people, and I am grateful when open source advocates stand with the free software community pushing for no software patents and no DRM. We need more social solidarity to make better lives for ourselves, and I'm grateful that the free software movement argues for increased social solidarity. But when you say "the Open crowd is paving the way to the Free approach" you wouldn't know that to look at the chosen audio and video formats. Not one of the alternatives provided can be played on a completely free software system for many users around the world saddled with governments who adopt software patents.
Far more credit is due to the free software movement than the open source movement has made it acceptable to say aloud. The free software movement was working on and distributing eminently practical free software before the open source movement existed. Some of the software worked on then is still critically important today (such as GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, initially written by RMS who initially called it the GNU C Compiler). Today, the important license work on the most widely used licenses (GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, and GNU FDL) isn't being done by the Open Source Initiative, it's being done by the Free Software Foundation including RMS, who is credited as the chief author of GPLv3. GPLv3 represents the first GPL that anyone in the open source movement has ever participated in because the two prior versions predate the OSI and the open source movement.
I've written more on the topic of free software and open source, so I won't repeat it here except to say that I am reminded of RMS' response to a questioner at FISL7 (quoted at the previous link) and how "open source" became a useless phrase, according to Eben Moglen.
How ironic that the /. headline mentions "OSS" (open source software) yet Prof. Moglen is General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation; an organization that not only predates the Open Source Initiative (which coined the term "open source") by over a decade but has a different philosophy which sometimes reaches different conclusions about what software is acceptable than the open source philosophy does. For the open source movement, running non-free software is okay (not that an open source proponent would call it that; the open source movement exists in part to not talk about software freedom at all). For a free software proponent, non-free software is avoided except when writing a free replacement for a non-free program. The difference in reaction to non-free software is quite striking.
/. story: none of the formats this talk has been transcoded to can be played by all users with free software even though this could have been accomodated. Instead of including options free software users could use, we have a list of (what are for most users) non-free alternatives. MP3 is patent-encumbered in many countries, so citizens of those countries can't have free MP3 encoding or decoding software. The QuickTime container format can be free, but the codecs most often used with QuickTime are non-free. Flash can be played with free software but the free replacements aren't yet to the point of maturity where it can be used as a drop-in replacement (and even when the job is done, MP3 soundtracks on Flash video+audio files will pose a problem).
You can see how that plays out in this
The solution has been around for some time and works well: add Ogg Vorbis audio files and Ogg Theora+Vorbis video+audio files. These files can be played on all platforms and there are implementations which are free software for everyone.
Fortunately, the original Bittorrent software is free software so you'll always have the freedom to make sure the software preserves your privacy (insofar as that can be done on a Bittorrent network). The same cannot be said for uTorrent which will remain proprietary.
Prof. Eben Moglen says that GPLv3 will prevent a user's loss of freedom in light of the details of the Novell-Microsoft deal. He also takes the open source movement's lack of focus on user's freedom to task by ignoring "the politics" of the situation, leaving it ripe for being moved closer to what proprietors want.
It says more that you believe the Sony rep took no stance. He did take a stance, his stance was that other people will take care of whatever the /. poster was bringing up and he needn't worry about it. In other words, he's free to remain ignorant of the details because these issues aren't his problem.
It's also revealing that you believe such behavior is polite. In many countries political talk is expected. To dodge it out of ignorance or a desire to not take a stance on something is impolite because you, not they, are putting the brakes on discussing real issues of the day. In America this is not so because Americans are taught that only popular opinion is polite to repeat. So when the monied interests determine what is popular opinion, business interests dominate conversations and it becomes impolite to talk about anything not in the perceived interest of the wealthy.
Relax, I made no such suggestion. Challenging someone who asks you to stand behind a point you raised without attribution makes you look hyper-defensive.
What exactly was Red Hat uncertain of before? How did Red Hat go about determining that their uncertainties were not an issue? According to the language used in the announcement from Microsoft and Novell, only their customers are covered under whatever patent agreement those two corporations have set up (the specifics of which are said to be revealed later). Has Red Hat determined that their users are under no threat of losing a patent infringement lawsuit from Mono or the Mono-based programs Red Hat distributes, or is only Red Hat under no threat? The details are missing, so no, it's not enough to explain what happened.
Please do name at least 3 of these times. If /. threads are allowed to get away with unjustified namecalling, people come away thinking that that is right and proper to behave that way.
As for Novell's lawyers, I don't see why I should care what they think. The announcement of the Microsoft-Novell patent detente says that their customers will be covered for some things. Since most of the free software community isn't a customer of either Microsoft or Novell, I don't think their agreement helps the free software community.
What's your source on this—that Mono's .NET implementation has "no known patent violations"? I remember an amazing silence from Red Hat when they went from not shipping Mono or Mono-based programs to shipping them in Fedora Core. I recall reading only one or two blog entries that said a full explanation was forthcoming, but nothing in detail materialized.
If you'd like to hear a very well-spoken argument to explain how unique the GNU/Linux system is in the market for small portable computers, listen to Eben Moglen's talk from the 2006 FSF Associate Member meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This talk was a hit in its own right and a highlight of the day's events. This talk is called "The Hardware Wars and the future of free software". Other talks from the meeting are online as well.
While it's a shame that the entire OS isn't free software, I would love to discover that Microsoft is distributing a free software kernel to its users; the more free software distributors, the merrier.
Sounds to me like part of trusting proprietary software to do a good job with security. Uninspectable, unmodifiable, unsharable software shouldn't be trusted to perform securely. You need software freedom.
Are proprietary software installs (such as the proprietary software Opera web browser) being cited as a source of problems for upgrading Ubuntu GNU/Linux systems? While I can see how that could pose a problem, the irony is more interesting because I remember the language used in the press release talking about Opera's availability for Ubuntu GNU/Linux: "Ubuntu will always be free, and will not have restrictive licenses associated with it.". I'm guessing this refers to the cognitive dissonance of a special repository for non-free packages and using free to mean gratis rather than the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify (which would include gratis distribution if one can get a copy from a friend).
An anonymous reader writes (and /. copies into the lead-up to this story):
When I tried the link in the article Secunia points to as an exploit of that bug, I see that it tells me there are two testcases, one of which was fixed in Firefox 1.5.0.7 and 2.0 and the other is called "a denial-of-service condition that is an annoyance, but is not exploitable to compromise your system" but remains unfixed.
This is the more important of the two questions and the easier to answer: security is not the main reason users should switch to any free software web browser (including, but not limited to, Firefox). Users should switch to a free software browser because users should switch to free software, and browsers are an important part of modern-day computing. Despite Mozilla's focus on "open source" values (speedy development, fewer bugs, other values that are designed to appeal chiefly to business managers) which are sometimes simply lies (as one can see with the bug that the anonymous poster brings up here), that's not the reason to value any free software. One ought to value Firefox as a contribution to a free society where people can treat friends as friends and build communities who share without having to do so in the dark in fear of being discovered as copyright infringers. Mozilla won't tell you this; they're too busy pushing aside software freedom for its own sake to talk about this. It's unfortunate they have not taken any time to teach their audience this while Microsoft worked on MSIE7. Ironically, software freedom is the one thing Firefox will always have over MSIE for as long as Firefox remains free software and MSIE remains proprietary; technical features can be reimplemented and even patented to prevent competition, but software freedom is something no proprietor can deliver. Catering to businesses who distribute free software can be helpful but such interests remain shallow.