"tracking you for ads" makes a claim beyond your knowledge and risks minimizing the loss of one's privacy. Tracking users (data collection in general) is capable of being used for multiple purposes including purposes we don't yet recognize. We also aren't privy to how the collected data is being used now. We only know what organizations claim to use the data for (and that's all the Senate would know if they had a hearing, which means their hearings are nearly useless because they amount to little more than a public shaming demanding minor changes to the software publishing organization).
It's right and proper to believe that a network-connected device with a camera & microphone which runs on proprietary software is untrustworthy by default. All proprietary software is untrustworthy regardless of what the proprietors claim or how long one has used that software and seen the software do something they want.
The solution is software freedom -- the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software. Let users run, inspect, share, and modify all of the software on their devices so they can vet the software (or get someone they trust to vet that software) and device owners can make the software do what the device owner wants (or get someone they trust to do this on their behalf). Then after they install and run the improved software the device owner ends up with a device that doesn't mistreat them.
Doing so is part of a trend for Walmart. "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price", Robert Greenwald's 2005 documentary, covered how Wal-Mart set up cameras on their stores aimed at the parking lots in order to let store staff monitor any union organizing going on within view of the cameras. Meanwhile, in Germany, Wal-Mart couldn't avoid the unionized workers so Wal-Mart does business with unionized staff.
Why go to such lengths to prevent better working conditions? The same documentary tells us that a toy made in their Shenzen China factory cost $0.18 to assemble (the worker makes less than $3/day), retails at Wal-Mart for $14.96, and "Wal-Mart imported $18B from China in 2004".
Charles Kernaghan, Director of the National Labor Committee tells us that in Bangladesh workers who sew clothing for Wal-Mart:
[...]are getting up at 5:30 in the morning, they brush their teeth with their
finger using ashes from the fire because they can't afford a toothbrush.
They're forced to work from 8:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night, 14
hours a day, 7 days a week, on these wages of 13 to 17 cents an hour.
These are women who are hit by their supervisors, trapped in utter misery.
You can see more of Charles Kernaghan's work in "The Corporation" (2003) which is available online and in a 2-disc DVD set which has extended interviews with all of the interviewees. One segment of "The Corporation" features Kernaghan talking about the exploitation of children making "Kathie Lee Gifford" garments for Wal-Mart around 19m43s:
We were in Honduras and some workers, they knew what kind of work we
did, and they approached us and said conditions in our factory are
horrible. Will you please meet with us. And we said we would. But you
can't meet in the developing world you can't walk up in a factory with
your notebook and workers come up and interview them. I mean there's
goons, there's spies, the military police, so you do everything in a
clandestine manner. We are about to start the meeting, and in walk three
guys, very tough looking guys. The company had found out about our
meeting and sent these spies. Obviously we didn't have the meeting. But
these young girls were really bright. And as they were leaving, away
from the eyesight of the spies they started to put their hands
underneath the table. And I put my hand under there and they put into
my hand their pay stubs. So we'd know who they were, what they were
paid, and the labels that they made in the factory so we'd know who
they worked for. So I took my hand after everyone had left. And in the
palm of my hand was the face was of Kathie Lee Gifford. And on the
bottom of it [a Kathie Lee garment tag] was "A portion of the proceeds
from the sale of this garment would be donated to various children's
charities." Very touching gets you right here [he touches his heart].
Wal-Mart is telling you if you purchase these pants and Kathie Lee is
telling you if you purchase these pants you will be helping children.
The problem was the people that handed us this label were 13 years of
age.
We need software freedom for all published programs. Merely being able to see some source code doesn't grant anyone the right to compile that code into an executable they can share (including distribute commercially), install, and run. So, source code for one's own vehicle under a free software license is needed. It's quite easy to maintain a code base where the malware isn't listed but is present in the executables people receive and run while publishing source code that has no malware in it and is licensed to users under terms that would allow public disclosure but not the other freedoms of free software.
Examples of what you call "full of shit" would have helped your post; link to specific stories and clearly explain how they are so severely bad that the entire channel is rightly dismissed with such a criticism.
[T]he Alamo Drafthouse chain said it would begin testing a service called Season Pass that would offer unlimited movies for one monthly price.
I too can't imagine wanting to spend my time seeing Hollywood movies where such a deal would be at all attractive. But I think these deals have a shelf-life—nothing on offer stays on offer in an unlimited fashion. This site has many stories of so-called "unlimited" plans that change later on ("Microsoft previously offered Office 365 subscribers unlimited space on their OneDrive cloud storage platform."), smaller ISPs used to offer dialup access where one could pay a fixed periodic fee and stay online or reconnect if disconnected an unlimited number of times, tracker/cell phone plans, etc.). The organization later discovers people use the allegedly "unlimited" service in that way. The organization doesn't want to continue the deal and they cancel the so-called "unlimited" plan. Perhaps to deflect blame for what was never a scalable idea to begin with, the users are sometimes later called "abusive" (for instance, the aforementioned Microsoft story description continues, "Now, the company has announced that it's reducing the limit to 1 TB, citing abuse from a small number of users, some of whom dropped 75 TB worth of data in Microsoft's cloud.").
It's ironic that you complain about a feature on the basis of it not being enabled and yet defend Google's interests for an information leaking/privacy-busting feature that is enabled by default (one might not want to use Google's search engine). You also don't recognize that with proprietary software the program can do (and apparently already does) lots of things we don't know about, things that are also (as another poster points out) unalterable without source code and a license to alter and share a modified variant of that program. The details will vary from proprietor to proprietor (as the instances details on the GNU Project's proprietary webpages point out) but the theme of power over the user remains the same. Proprietary software power is the underlying problem by which we're prevented from controlling our own computers and thus harming our community from looking out for what's in our (singular or collectively) interests.
Recently John Oliver ran a piece on Venezuelan elections which was quite well debunked for being the US interest piece it was. Oliver has done comparable pieces serving American interests (some outright, some by silence) including his 2016 election coverage which never closely examined Hillary Clinton's campaign (there's not much there to like from an anti-war perspective when one gets into the details of her record) while dismissing the entirety of Dr. Jill Stein's campaign for one issue he disagreed with. Oliver had a segment on the sharp escalation of the drone war under Pres. Obama but covered in a way that doesn't criticize Obama much and lacks the drumbeat repetition that might educate Oliver's viewers on the horrors of extrajudicial assassination (including killing Americans and children). Circa 2016-02-28 Oliver got ironically worked up over then-candidate Trump for plainly stating what was Obama's policy after playing a clip of Trump calling into "Fox & Friends" where Trump said "...the other thing with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. They say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families.". Oliver replied "That is the front runner for the Republican nomination advocating a war crime." without pointing out that that's also precisely what Obama had already done and that killing people is objectively worse than ugly words. Oliver's drone segment was a one-off; easily missed if you didn't happen to catch the show or that segment, and not featuring catchphrases that pepper the show elsewhere (thus no risk of educating the audience about this to the point of raising a generation that would object to this war).
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's famous book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is well worth reading (and see the documentary based on this book) to understand the full extent of the famous Chomsky quote:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
Modern news-based comedy shows contribute to that quite well with their carefully calibrated anti-Trumpism. With one notable exception (RT's "Redacted Tonight") all of those shows make fun of Trump in very comparable ways (looks-based derision such as his skin color, hair color, weight, the fit of his suits, etc.) and even draw on the same sources to tell them what constitutes news (largely whatever CNN says). But they don't dare give drumbeat coverage of critical issues that would seriously challenge American interests such as empire building, war, pointing out the continuity of policy across administrations, or the ugliness of capitalism.
So there's no real surprise in this turn of events. Censoring this particular story either comes from a lack of understanding of the Barbara Streisand effect or has roots in self-promotion. Issues that are eminently worth criticism remain firmly outside the range of allowable debate for corporate media.
Google Chrome is proprietary software. Nobody but Google has permission to study what Chrome does, alter Chrome, or distribute a modified Chrome. This is also how Google can get away with malware, hardly surprising behavior for a known international spy. As the GNU Project rightly points out:
Power corrupts; the proprietary program's developer is tempted to design the program to mistreat its users. (Software whose functioning mistreats the user is called malware.) Of course, the developer usually does not do this out of malice, but rather to profit more at the users' expense. That does not make it any less nasty or more legitimate.
Yielding to that temptation has become ever more frequent; nowadays it is standard practice. Modern proprietary software is typically a way to be had.
The New York Times called Google Chrome "secure" but didn't explain how they arrived at that conclusion. Regardless of what they meant by that claim, it's hard to see how any of the above behavior or whatever else Google can get away with via proprietary malware could reasonably be called 'secure'. Any feature Chrome offers has to be considered in the context of being implemented in proprietary software which by its nature imposes a power over its users.
Firefox was never proprietary; users could always inspect Firefox, edit out the portions of Firefox they didn't want to run or redistribute, edit any other part they wished, and distribute the rest (even if under another name with another logo), and Firefox derivatives have done just that many times. There's good reason Tor Browser, for instance, derives from Firefox. Free software (software that respect's a user's rights and community by allowing users to run, inspect, share, and modify the program) provides verifiable security; one need not guess or blindly trust a proprietor to do right by them. Firefox's technical achievements or detriments are thus a matter of spending time developing Firefox. This is a practical example of how you're better off with less technically capable free software than more technically capable proprietary software; we can make Firefox better in a technical sense but we can't make proprietary software free.
Valve don't have to, and nobody is forcing Valve to discontinue service. They're choosing to discontinue service despite that users did what Valve once asked them to do when acquiring the software in the first place. So you've bought right into the improper framing of the issue built around letting a proprietor dictate what a computer owner should be allowed to continue to run (very much in line with corporate media, TFA, and most of the software freedom-denying coverage on sites like/.).
The people running systems Valve don't want to "support" shouldn't be denied use of the applications they obtained legally and in a manner the proprietor once deemed acceptable. That Valve has the power to identify and reject such users indicates that the client conveys a considerable amount of information to the server which the server uses to put an entirely artificial end-date on software. Clearly what people need are free software applications connecting to free software servers.
Everyone deserves to retain full control of their computers, and once again we see the only way to do that is to run a fully-free software OS with only free software on top of that.
To be fair, every major proprietor has distributed malware and people still do business with them (proprietary software is often malware) and even people who ought to know better still choose proprietary software despite that proprietary software is inherently untrustworthy. I agree with your sentiment that one shouldn't choose to be abused but I think the fix isn't to focus on a particular proprietor or even a set of proprietors, but to see that the system of non-freedom is the real problem.
When it comes to privacy and user's software freedom, there's no substantive difference between one of these spy devices (which must listen all the time in order to hear the command phrase) and a tracker. I prefer a more honest name for what are otherwise called a "cell phone" or "mobile phone"; if the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name we shouldn't call these devices by their sales name. Since geolocation is what these devices do most, we should call them what they are. The only substantive privacy and freedom related difference between the home spy device and a tracker is rather minor: you can't tell when the tracker is listening. But both devices could be covertly monitoring their users without signaling this to the user or giving the user control to stop that behavior. When considered from a user's privacy and freedom perspective these devices share more in common than they differ.
"If you apply General Curtis Le May to a situation and you get havoc, well, that s what you called General LeMay in for" (to use an Eben Moglen quote out of the context in which he said it); if you host a device in your home running proprietary software you ought not be surprised that it is spying on you and the proprietors determine what to do with that data, not you.
We must not forget another critical component of all this: these devices run on proprietary (nonfree, user-subjugating) software. Therefore the user has no permission to: inspect what it does, modify it to do only what the user wants (or, since most computer users aren't programmers, get someone technical they trust to perform such modifications for them), run the modified software in their device, and distribute copies of the improved software to help their community.
If these devices ran on free software (software that respected the user's freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share) the more technical among us could help them. But as it is even the most technically-minded willing person cannot legally do this work to help them.
As Eben Moglen reminded us after the Snowden revelations came out: It's critical that we don't fall into the trap of saying something akin to 'those kids take too many darn pictures' like concluding that we just can't have these devices or their services at all. We can have all of their alleged conveniences but only if we have free software implementations.
The problem is that GNU elbowed its way into a lot of areas of the Operating System that its maintainers allowed but didn't really agree with.
This argument needs sources to back up your claims. It's easy to make claims on behalf of other people's projected behavior, not so easy to back up those claims and clarify your terms (saying "many of the "GNU" contributors and leaders would have just forked the projects", for instance, is not only making claims on behalf of others but vague; how many is many?). The quotes around the terms you use are unexplained as well; GNU is the name of the OS RMS started. Also, what operating system did "GNU elbow its way into"? The way Stallman tells it in his talks and writings, which seem to be backed by how things unfolded, he posted to Usenet announcing GNU on September 27, 1983 as a "a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix)". Work on the GNU Project would actually begin in January, 1984 by pressing various programs into service as well as programs people wrote under the aegis of the GNU Project. He also clarified the philosophy of free software as his own work on the GNU Project continued.
How many people that have contributed to all of the components in Linux even knew that the FSF was the "owner" of the project?
I don't see how this question is relevant even if its terms weren't so ironically unclear. The Linux kernel is not owned by the Free Software Foundation and never has been. Perhaps you're unwittingly underscoring the very problem this/. thread brings up by using unclear terms (like "Linux" to mean an operating system instead of a kernel).
And what does it even mean for an open source project to be GNU or not? GNOME is the perfect example.
GNU predates the open source development methodology and the Open Source Initiative. GNU is one example of a free software OS. All of the software in GNU is free for the user to run, inspect, modify, and share. GNOME was initially a response to the non-freedom of KDE at the time KDE began. KDE had a nonfree dependency (Qt was proprietary software until mid-1999) so KDE was unsuitable for GNU. There was a project called the Harmony toolkit which aimed to provide an API-compatible replacement for Qt (so one could use Harmony instead of Qt) but when Qt was relicensed as free software this project was no longer needed.
You criticized me for pointing out that for St[a]llman, free software is a political issue [...]
No, nor am I upset by that. Please read my answer more closely. I said "Software certainly is political" because it is. I also asked what you meant when you used the word "political", a question you haven't answered. You should explain your own views on the matter more clearly if you want people to understand you instead of asking them to clarify your thoughts on the issue.
No you're not. That's why you're continuing the discussion and asking people questions which further the discussion.
For Richard Stallman and the FSF leaders, free software is very much political. [...] For Linus Torvalds and the "open source" folks generally, it's not really political, it's simply a way of producing quality software, a good way to produce software which has several advantages.
You appear to be using the word "political" to advance your own views without defining what you think the word political means. Software certainly is political; as with so many things brought up on these corporate repeater sites Stallman was right (and typically people need a lot of time to come around to understanding that he got there well before the people you're allowed to hear from on corporate media).
Frankly, your overmoderated post is all too typical of what passes for acceptable on sites like these: You also don't specify which "qualities" in software are being addressed when you try the reductionist approach by saying "simply a way of producing quality software". Which qualities are you talking about? After all, what's considered a valuable quality to someone looking to preserve their freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the software on their computer often is the opposite of what a spy considers mandatory or what a DRM scheme requires to effectively restrict the user. Lots of proprietary software people run every day is malware when considered from the perspective of the user. These are political choices that are increasingly part of everyone's everyday life, regardless of whether they'd call that politics.
When people call an OS by its kernel's name they're being remarkably inconsistent (other widely-used OSes aren't called this way; they get called by the names their proprietors assign to the OS), technically inaccurate (Linux has always been a kernel and never a complete OS), and for all the claims of being practical they're choosing a remarkably impractical nomenclature. A binary that runs on one architecture of an OS (be it GNU/Linux, Busybox/Linux, or something else) won't necessarily run on another system that also uses the Linux kernel. People led to believe that these systems are all "Linux" might believe otherwise because that's what the ill-chosen name plainly indicates.
When it comes to the difference between the older free software social movement and younger open source developmental methodology, they're sometimes quite compatible (as Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" has pointed out for a decade, people who agree with either philosophy "can and do work together on some practical projects". But they are distinct philosophies that sometimes reach radically different conclusions: free software never concludes that proprietary software is acceptable because proprietary software does not respect a user's software freedom. Open source development methodology was apparently designed to be thrown away or ignored when inconvenient because software developed not using that methodology (such as proprietary software) is accepted. Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software has pointed this out for many years in the section named "Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions...but Not Always".
Your namecalling notwithstanding, Brad Kuhn has already covered this as well and there's nothing particularly special about the examples you list. Apple certainly stands out because of Apple's irrational hatred of being a GPL licensee (which dates back to how NeXT treated NeXT OS users with their Objective-C additions to GCC, referenced in Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism). Kuhn pointed out something that might be the case now: there are non-free add-ons for that compiler. As these add-ons gain popularity developers become dependent on their functionality. Kuhn has said that there could come a time when such dependence means that practical use of that compiler will almost require using these non-free add-ons as well. This means spreading more software non-freedom to more computer users. I imagine that won't be much of a problem for any OS that accepts non-free software (say by distributing non-free kernel modules, or encouraging users to install non-free applications) because such choices indicate they've already chosen to become dependent on non-free software.
In the case of Apple and Qualcomm, they apparently prefer a compiler that will let them distribute a proprietary (non-free, user-subjugating) derivative. Brad Kuhn, President of Software Freedom Conservancy, has predicted that as soon as Apple finds the compiler to be good enough they'll stop their upstream contributions.
The parent post and this entire thread is not about coding or what it takes to write code well. Talking about what's "a great boost for the company" is closer to the mark in that framing issues around what's "a great boost for the company" is self-destructively short-sighted. We're better off challenging that framing, particularly on sites like these which are built to do the opposite and give users the power to censor those who step out of line (also known as moderation).
Listen to the interview with the book's author on Doug Henwood's show. You'll quickly find this is not about coding or even high-tech; in fact, Pein says that the programmers he spoke with really don't have social skills beyond talking about their current project (suggesting a profound naiveté or downright ignorance of important political trends governing their own work). And that they believe this ridiculous myth of "work hard, play hard" so their time spent in squalid conditions is some kind of dues-paying one must endure in order to be rich later on. In reality, they're fools: they'd be lucky if even 5% experience this, meaning 95% are chumps who will spend their lives working for little and wasting time they should spend organizing for better outcomes for most (including themselves). To me this jibes with the profound innumeracy, political naiveté, and indoctrination in tech "journalism" that passes on sites like Hacker News (Pein mentions ycombinator in the interview) and/., as well as the arrogant anti-free speech bias that revolts at anyone who dares to challenge the narrative provided by the article at the head of the thread. Hence the discussion in the recording around 25m30s:
Pein: 90% of them [tech company CEOs] are liberal. But that didn't account for their views on labor.
Henwood: They're okay with transgender bathrooms, but don't raise the minimum wage.
Pein: No; no unions; they don't even want to recognize their employees as employees.
Henwood: That would be a commitment.
Pein: Right, well there's all sorts of mumbo-jumbo explanations they have for why their vision of a direct democracy where everyone's Bitcoin holdings translate to their share of the vote would be better than what we have now, but when you see how these things work in practice it's strongly authoritarian, no place for labor. And the tolerance for progressivism on identity issues—there's a limit to it. [...]
While I don't think autonomous vehicles are a good thing, and I wouldn't trust one enough to get in one (nor do I relish being anywhere near them as they share the road with me), I think it's also silly to accuse the "owner" (I'll explain the quotes below) of doing what such cars purport to deliver (which you describe as "drinking the Kool-Aid of the media") instead of challenging automakers and proponents to supply compelling reasons why anyone should bother with autonomous vehicles. If what we're told is true, it seems reasonable to do what this fellow did. The reaction against the lounging passenger seems to me indistinguishable from sycophantically siding with power. I recall there was a discussion about a proposed car that had no controls for the person in the driver seat. If this car is made and someone uses one and is found lounging or even drinking alcohol in the seat formerly known as the driver's seat, who's side will the power sycophants take then?
By the same token, amazon.com offers a way to deliver packages inside one's home or car. I'm sure there are people who think that this ostensible convenience completely outweighs letting unaccountable strangers into one's home or car. Again, here too I don't think such delivery is worth having and I think anyone who takes them up on it is being foolish. But by what right would I hold it against the customer when their house is robbed or their car gets altered, damaged, or stolen because they believed what was promised to them? At what point do we start defending what's in our interest: stop lying to us about the features and start offering services that respect our privacy, our property, and focus on improving the nature of the service by delivering goods on time and without mishandling the package.
Why the quotes around "owner" in this context? Self-driving cars are spybots riddled with proprietary software. For all we know, the car's controls can be taken over remotely by a number of different people in multiple organizations any time they want to; I imagine police love the promise of these vehicles because they could be made to ignore the driver's instructions and pull over whenever the police are nearby (should we think the police are fools to "drink the Kool-Aid" of this promise?). Therefore calling the person who pays for this tracker-on-wheels an "owner" of their vehicle seems to me an incredible claim.
I didn't misunderstand; you didn't demonstrate hyperbole in the way you think you did. Your one-sided application of the term hyperbole is telling and inverted ("the whole free software movement as a whole" is not undermined, but the power proprietors wield to take advantage of computer users causes all proprietary software to come under suspicion by default precisely because we can't tell what's really going on, improve, or share modified proprietary software regardless of our skill and motivation). https://gnu.org/malware has plenty of examples of proprietary malware that work precisely because that software doesn't respect a user's software freedom; as that page says,
Power corrupts; the proprietary program's developer is tempted to design the program to mistreat its users. (Software whose functioning mistreats the user is called malware.) Of course, the developer usually does not do this out of malice, but rather to profit more at the users' expense. That does not make it any less nasty or more legitimate. Yielding to that temptation has become ever more frequent; nowadays it is standard practice. Modern proprietary software is typically a way to be had.
Also, you oversimplify what's going on with Facebook: the harm of Facebook's data collection is partially attributable to proprietary software. There are other methods by which Facebook harms people (both its users and non-users) that don't involve proprietary software, so there's plenty of good reason not to trust spying services like Facebook. Depending on the method, software licenses might not be relevant at all. But software licenses don't all treat users the same way even if they all hinge on copyright law, therefore there's nothing compelling anyone to view all licenses the same way.
The FSF apparently believed NeXT was not complying with the GPL. If it's not clear what a court would have found, it is a half-truth to try and draw the conclusion you do comparing this to the nVidia infringement case concerning the Linux kernel without looking at more than one case: such as whether courts tend to favor copyright holders' interpretation of their chosen licenses, and how well courts understand the GPL. We know that NeXT valued that code, that code was critical to NeXT's development system; code for which there was no alternative then. NeXT's decision to "throw code over the wall" (as you passive aggressively say) came after talking to the FSF. NeXT did not do this on their own.
Your entire second paragraph is basically a red herring, as whatever technical issues were present in NeXT's Objective-C code and your further prognostication on FSF adding Objective-C support in GCC don't have any bearing on whether what NeXT did was copyright infringement against what was and is a very generous license. It doesn't matter if you conclude that the FSF would have been better off in some alternate version of events because that didn't happen.
A free and open internet means you don't restrict that information or what can be done with it, if you don't want it on there then don't put it there but don't try and use lawyers to prevent the existence of the free and open internet.
You're arguing for exploitation. Free software licenses, particularly strongly-copylefted free software licenses, are designed to ensure software freedom remains intact for everyone who gets a copy. Defending software freedom requires standing up for one's free software license, in court if need be. After all, we're not talking about some proprietor licensing their work on restrictive terms, we're talking about the FSF licensing under the GNU GPL v2; a generous copyright holder licensing their work under terms that allow us to leverage their achievements for our own gain (even privately) so long as any published software remains in the commons for us all to use (share and share alike). If you don't like that, don't distribute strongly-copylefted free software. This choice means not giving up on the freedom that came with the software and not treating other people badly by denying them those freedoms (an undefended GNU GPL'd work is functionally no different from a non-copylefted free software license, also called a "pushover" license). The freedoms of the Internet aren't threatened by people running, inspecting, sharing, or modifying strongly-copylefted free software.
NeXT was not forced to release the code for their runtime, which made the compiler useless on non-NeXT platforms. Eventually other GCC contributors wrote a replacement runtime, but this was not quote compatible with the NeXT one and so the ugly GCC code was then full of 'if (next_runtime)' chunks.
In other words, had the FSF let NeXT run roughshod over them by remaining silent about continued infringement on the generous GNU GPL v2 license terms, as you seem to think would have been a good idea, people would have had even less code on which to implement anything instead of gaining something with "a replacement runtime". You're actually arguing for a more difficult set of improvements for GCC because that would have been more convenient for proprietors (NeXT and later Apple).
By forcing NeXT to release the code, rather than persuading them to join the community, they [the FSF] burned any goodwill that existed.
By committing copyright infringement against a very generous copyright holder licensing its work for all to build upon and share, NeXT created that bad will. Maybe NeXT should have written their own code or licensed a compiler from someone willing to work with them on proprietary terms. That's what Apple is doing today, perhaps guided by having learned that the FSF isn't going to ignore being mistreated when it offers its work for all to run, share, inspect, and modify (even commercially).
In other words, if the GCC Objective-C story is a poster child for the success of the GPL (and for a long time, it was on the FSF web site) then the GPL is an abject failure.
Only in your topsy-turvy view where works offered on a share-and-share-alike basis are somehow bad and only worth as much respect as a proprietor feels like doling out. And those copyright holders who stand up for software freedom are somehow doing the wrong thing because life became more inconvenient for proprietors and perhaps require some more work to make something more featureful.
"The Corporation" features Robert Hare's analysis of corporation as psychopath. RMS is likely referring to this when he said:
Q: As somebody who's had your set of experiences and expertise, I'm curious: Do you feel like you've had any experiences that lend particular insight into how these companies work?
A: They're corporations. Corporations have been compared to psychopaths.
The Corporation is an excellent documentary. I highly recommend the 2-disc DVD set and the additional features and alternate audio tracks. There are other copies on archive.org too. And I see the same team is now working on a sequel.
It's so telling that people would ever push an ego-based argument about the name "GNU" (as in GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux) when "Linux" is clearly the egotistical name. RMS has consistently stood behind the idea that he wants GNU to get a fair share of the credit for the systems that contain GNU so people are reminded of software freedom. That's not egotistical at all. But the name Linux points to one guy, Linus Torvalds. Linux was never an OS and still isn't; if all one has is Linux one doesn't have the majority of the code one needs to do practical work or that one would expect an OS to do (even if that expectation is kept low, such as doing everything on the command line). Linux was and remains a kernel. Even in 2018 it's hard to give credit where credit is due on/., what a shame.
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"tracking you for ads" makes a claim beyond your knowledge and risks minimizing the loss of one's privacy. Tracking users (data collection in general) is capable of being used for multiple purposes including purposes we don't yet recognize. We also aren't privy to how the collected data is being used now. We only know what organizations claim to use the data for (and that's all the Senate would know if they had a hearing, which means their hearings are nearly useless because they amount to little more than a public shaming demanding minor changes to the software publishing organization).
It's right and proper to believe that a network-connected device with a camera & microphone which runs on proprietary software is untrustworthy by default. All proprietary software is untrustworthy regardless of what the proprietors claim or how long one has used that software and seen the software do something they want.
The solution is software freedom -- the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software. Let users run, inspect, share, and modify all of the software on their devices so they can vet the software (or get someone they trust to vet that software) and device owners can make the software do what the device owner wants (or get someone they trust to do this on their behalf). Then after they install and run the improved software the device owner ends up with a device that doesn't mistreat them.
Doing so is part of a trend for Walmart. "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price", Robert Greenwald's 2005 documentary, covered how Wal-Mart set up cameras on their stores aimed at the parking lots in order to let store staff monitor any union organizing going on within view of the cameras. Meanwhile, in Germany, Wal-Mart couldn't avoid the unionized workers so Wal-Mart does business with unionized staff.
Why go to such lengths to prevent better working conditions? The same documentary tells us that a toy made in their Shenzen China factory cost $0.18 to assemble (the worker makes less than $3/day), retails at Wal-Mart for $14.96, and "Wal-Mart imported $18B from China in 2004".
Charles Kernaghan, Director of the National Labor Committee tells us that in Bangladesh workers who sew clothing for Wal-Mart:
You can see more of Charles Kernaghan's work in "The Corporation" (2003) which is available online and in a 2-disc DVD set which has extended interviews with all of the interviewees. One segment of "The Corporation" features Kernaghan talking about the exploitation of children making "Kathie Lee Gifford" garments for Wal-Mart around 19m43s:
We need software freedom for all published programs. Merely being able to see some source code doesn't grant anyone the right to compile that code into an executable they can share (including distribute commercially), install, and run. So, source code for one's own vehicle under a free software license is needed. It's quite easy to maintain a code base where the malware isn't listed but is present in the executables people receive and run while publishing source code that has no malware in it and is licensed to users under terms that would allow public disclosure but not the other freedoms of free software.
Examples of what you call "full of shit" would have helped your post; link to specific stories and clearly explain how they are so severely bad that the entire channel is rightly dismissed with such a criticism.
I too can't imagine wanting to spend my time seeing Hollywood movies where such a deal would be at all attractive. But I think these deals have a shelf-life—nothing on offer stays on offer in an unlimited fashion. This site has many stories of so-called "unlimited" plans that change later on ("Microsoft previously offered Office 365 subscribers unlimited space on their OneDrive cloud storage platform."), smaller ISPs used to offer dialup access where one could pay a fixed periodic fee and stay online or reconnect if disconnected an unlimited number of times, tracker/cell phone plans, etc.). The organization later discovers people use the allegedly "unlimited" service in that way. The organization doesn't want to continue the deal and they cancel the so-called "unlimited" plan. Perhaps to deflect blame for what was never a scalable idea to begin with, the users are sometimes later called "abusive" (for instance, the aforementioned Microsoft story description continues, "Now, the company has announced that it's reducing the limit to 1 TB, citing abuse from a small number of users, some of whom dropped 75 TB worth of data in Microsoft's cloud.").
It's ironic that you complain about a feature on the basis of it not being enabled and yet defend Google's interests for an information leaking/privacy-busting feature that is enabled by default (one might not want to use Google's search engine). You also don't recognize that with proprietary software the program can do (and apparently already does) lots of things we don't know about, things that are also (as another poster points out) unalterable without source code and a license to alter and share a modified variant of that program. The details will vary from proprietor to proprietor (as the instances details on the GNU Project's proprietary webpages point out) but the theme of power over the user remains the same. Proprietary software power is the underlying problem by which we're prevented from controlling our own computers and thus harming our community from looking out for what's in our (singular or collectively) interests.
Recently John Oliver ran a piece on Venezuelan elections which was quite well debunked for being the US interest piece it was. Oliver has done comparable pieces serving American interests (some outright, some by silence) including his 2016 election coverage which never closely examined Hillary Clinton's campaign (there's not much there to like from an anti-war perspective when one gets into the details of her record) while dismissing the entirety of Dr. Jill Stein's campaign for one issue he disagreed with. Oliver had a segment on the sharp escalation of the drone war under Pres. Obama but covered in a way that doesn't criticize Obama much and lacks the drumbeat repetition that might educate Oliver's viewers on the horrors of extrajudicial assassination (including killing Americans and children). Circa 2016-02-28 Oliver got ironically worked up over then-candidate Trump for plainly stating what was Obama's policy after playing a clip of Trump calling into "Fox & Friends" where Trump said "...the other thing with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. They say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families.". Oliver replied "That is the front runner for the Republican nomination advocating a war crime." without pointing out that that's also precisely what Obama had already done and that killing people is objectively worse than ugly words. Oliver's drone segment was a one-off; easily missed if you didn't happen to catch the show or that segment, and not featuring catchphrases that pepper the show elsewhere (thus no risk of educating the audience about this to the point of raising a generation that would object to this war).
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's famous book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is well worth reading (and see the documentary based on this book) to understand the full extent of the famous Chomsky quote:
Modern news-based comedy shows contribute to that quite well with their carefully calibrated anti-Trumpism. With one notable exception (RT's "Redacted Tonight") all of those shows make fun of Trump in very comparable ways (looks-based derision such as his skin color, hair color, weight, the fit of his suits, etc.) and even draw on the same sources to tell them what constitutes news (largely whatever CNN says). But they don't dare give drumbeat coverage of critical issues that would seriously challenge American interests such as empire building, war, pointing out the continuity of policy across administrations, or the ugliness of capitalism.
So there's no real surprise in this turn of events. Censoring this particular story either comes from a lack of understanding of the Barbara Streisand effect or has roots in self-promotion. Issues that are eminently worth criticism remain firmly outside the range of allowable debate for corporate media.
Google Chrome is said to have made it easy for an extension to do total snooping on the user's browsing, and many of them do so. Chrome includes a module that activates microphones and transmits audio to its servers, and Chrome contains a key logger that sends Google every URL typed in, one key at a time. Google Chrome does a good job securing access to a user's data without telling the user what's really going on or giving the user a chance to stop the behavior they likely don't agree with.
Google Chrome is proprietary software. Nobody but Google has permission to study what Chrome does, alter Chrome, or distribute a modified Chrome. This is also how Google can get away with malware, hardly surprising behavior for a known international spy. As the GNU Project rightly points out:
The New York Times called Google Chrome "secure" but didn't explain how they arrived at that conclusion. Regardless of what they meant by that claim, it's hard to see how any of the above behavior or whatever else Google can get away with via proprietary malware could reasonably be called 'secure'. Any feature Chrome offers has to be considered in the context of being implemented in proprietary software which by its nature imposes a power over its users.
Firefox was never proprietary; users could always inspect Firefox, edit out the portions of Firefox they didn't want to run or redistribute, edit any other part they wished, and distribute the rest (even if under another name with another logo), and Firefox derivatives have done just that many times. There's good reason Tor Browser, for instance, derives from Firefox. Free software (software that respect's a user's rights and community by allowing users to run, inspect, share, and modify the program) provides verifiable security; one need not guess or blindly trust a proprietor to do right by them. Firefox's technical achievements or detriments are thus a matter of spending time developing Firefox. This is a practical example of how you're better off with less technically capable free software than more technically capable proprietary software; we can make Firefox better in a technical sense but we can't make proprietary software free.
Valve don't have to, and nobody is forcing Valve to discontinue service. They're choosing to discontinue service despite that users did what Valve once asked them to do when acquiring the software in the first place. So you've bought right into the improper framing of the issue built around letting a proprietor dictate what a computer owner should be allowed to continue to run (very much in line with corporate media, TFA, and most of the software freedom-denying coverage on sites like /.).
The people running systems Valve don't want to "support" shouldn't be denied use of the applications they obtained legally and in a manner the proprietor once deemed acceptable. That Valve has the power to identify and reject such users indicates that the client conveys a considerable amount of information to the server which the server uses to put an entirely artificial end-date on software. Clearly what people need are free software applications connecting to free software servers.
Everyone deserves to retain full control of their computers, and once again we see the only way to do that is to run a fully-free software OS with only free software on top of that.
To be fair, every major proprietor has distributed malware and people still do business with them (proprietary software is often malware) and even people who ought to know better still choose proprietary software despite that proprietary software is inherently untrustworthy. I agree with your sentiment that one shouldn't choose to be abused but I think the fix isn't to focus on a particular proprietor or even a set of proprietors, but to see that the system of non-freedom is the real problem.
When it comes to privacy and user's software freedom, there's no substantive difference between one of these spy devices (which must listen all the time in order to hear the command phrase) and a tracker. I prefer a more honest name for what are otherwise called a "cell phone" or "mobile phone"; if the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name we shouldn't call these devices by their sales name. Since geolocation is what these devices do most, we should call them what they are. The only substantive privacy and freedom related difference between the home spy device and a tracker is rather minor: you can't tell when the tracker is listening. But both devices could be covertly monitoring their users without signaling this to the user or giving the user control to stop that behavior. When considered from a user's privacy and freedom perspective these devices share more in common than they differ.
"If you apply General Curtis Le May to a situation and you get havoc, well, that s what you called General LeMay in for" (to use an Eben Moglen quote out of the context in which he said it); if you host a device in your home running proprietary software you ought not be surprised that it is spying on you and the proprietors determine what to do with that data, not you.
We must not forget another critical component of all this: these devices run on proprietary (nonfree, user-subjugating) software. Therefore the user has no permission to: inspect what it does, modify it to do only what the user wants (or, since most computer users aren't programmers, get someone technical they trust to perform such modifications for them), run the modified software in their device, and distribute copies of the improved software to help their community.
If these devices ran on free software (software that respected the user's freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share) the more technical among us could help them. But as it is even the most technically-minded willing person cannot legally do this work to help them.
As Eben Moglen reminded us after the Snowden revelations came out: It's critical that we don't fall into the trap of saying something akin to 'those kids take too many darn pictures' like concluding that we just can't have these devices or their services at all. We can have all of their alleged conveniences but only if we have free software implementations.
This argument needs sources to back up your claims. It's easy to make claims on behalf of other people's projected behavior, not so easy to back up those claims and clarify your terms (saying "many of the "GNU" contributors and leaders would have just forked the projects", for instance, is not only making claims on behalf of others but vague; how many is many?). The quotes around the terms you use are unexplained as well; GNU is the name of the OS RMS started. Also, what operating system did "GNU elbow its way into"? The way Stallman tells it in his talks and writings, which seem to be backed by how things unfolded, he posted to Usenet announcing GNU on September 27, 1983 as a "a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix)". Work on the GNU Project would actually begin in January, 1984 by pressing various programs into service as well as programs people wrote under the aegis of the GNU Project. He also clarified the philosophy of free software as his own work on the GNU Project continued.
I don't see how this question is relevant even if its terms weren't so ironically unclear. The Linux kernel is not owned by the Free Software Foundation and never has been. Perhaps you're unwittingly underscoring the very problem this /. thread brings up by using unclear terms (like "Linux" to mean an operating system instead of a kernel).
GNU predates the open source development methodology and the Open Source Initiative. GNU is one example of a free software OS. All of the software in GNU is free for the user to run, inspect, modify, and share. GNOME was initially a response to the non-freedom of KDE at the time KDE began. KDE had a nonfree dependency (Qt was proprietary software until mid-1999) so KDE was unsuitable for GNU. There was a project called the Harmony toolkit which aimed to provide an API-compatible replacement for Qt (so one could use Harmony instead of Qt) but when Qt was relicensed as free software this project was no longer needed.
No, nor am I upset by that. Please read my answer more closely. I said "Software certainly is political" because it is. I also asked what you meant when you used the word "political", a question you haven't answered. You should explain your own views on the matter more clearly if you want people to understand you instead of asking them to clarify your thoughts on the issue.
No you're not. That's why you're continuing the discussion and asking people questions which further the discussion.
You appear to be using the word "political" to advance your own views without defining what you think the word political means. Software certainly is political; as with so many things brought up on these corporate repeater sites Stallman was right (and typically people need a lot of time to come around to understanding that he got there well before the people you're allowed to hear from on corporate media).
Frankly, your overmoderated post is all too typical of what passes for acceptable on sites like these: You also don't specify which "qualities" in software are being addressed when you try the reductionist approach by saying "simply a way of producing quality software". Which qualities are you talking about? After all, what's considered a valuable quality to someone looking to preserve their freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the software on their computer often is the opposite of what a spy considers mandatory or what a DRM scheme requires to effectively restrict the user. Lots of proprietary software people run every day is malware when considered from the perspective of the user. These are political choices that are increasingly part of everyone's everyday life, regardless of whether they'd call that politics.
When people call an OS by its kernel's name they're being remarkably inconsistent (other widely-used OSes aren't called this way; they get called by the names their proprietors assign to the OS), technically inaccurate (Linux has always been a kernel and never a complete OS), and for all the claims of being practical they're choosing a remarkably impractical nomenclature. A binary that runs on one architecture of an OS (be it GNU/Linux, Busybox/Linux, or something else) won't necessarily run on another system that also uses the Linux kernel. People led to believe that these systems are all "Linux" might believe otherwise because that's what the ill-chosen name plainly indicates.
When it comes to the difference between the older free software social movement and younger open source developmental methodology, they're sometimes quite compatible (as Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" has pointed out for a decade, people who agree with either philosophy "can and do work together on some practical projects". But they are distinct philosophies that sometimes reach radically different conclusions: free software never concludes that proprietary software is acceptable because proprietary software does not respect a user's software freedom. Open source development methodology was apparently designed to be thrown away or ignored when inconvenient because software developed not using that methodology (such as proprietary software) is accepted. Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software has pointed this out for many years in the section named "Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions...but Not Always".
Your namecalling notwithstanding, Brad Kuhn has already covered this as well and there's nothing particularly special about the examples you list. Apple certainly stands out because of Apple's irrational hatred of being a GPL licensee (which dates back to how NeXT treated NeXT OS users with their Objective-C additions to GCC, referenced in Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism). Kuhn pointed out something that might be the case now: there are non-free add-ons for that compiler. As these add-ons gain popularity developers become dependent on their functionality. Kuhn has said that there could come a time when such dependence means that practical use of that compiler will almost require using these non-free add-ons as well. This means spreading more software non-freedom to more computer users. I imagine that won't be much of a problem for any OS that accepts non-free software (say by distributing non-free kernel modules, or encouraging users to install non-free applications) because such choices indicate they've already chosen to become dependent on non-free software.
In the case of Apple and Qualcomm, they apparently prefer a compiler that will let them distribute a proprietary (non-free, user-subjugating) derivative. Brad Kuhn, President of Software Freedom Conservancy, has predicted that as soon as Apple finds the compiler to be good enough they'll stop their upstream contributions.
The parent post and this entire thread is not about coding or what it takes to write code well. Talking about what's "a great boost for the company" is closer to the mark in that framing issues around what's "a great boost for the company" is self-destructively short-sighted. We're better off challenging that framing, particularly on sites like these which are built to do the opposite and give users the power to censor those who step out of line (also known as moderation).
Listen to the interview with the book's author on Doug Henwood's show. You'll quickly find this is not about coding or even high-tech; in fact, Pein says that the programmers he spoke with really don't have social skills beyond talking about their current project (suggesting a profound naiveté or downright ignorance of important political trends governing their own work). And that they believe this ridiculous myth of "work hard, play hard" so their time spent in squalid conditions is some kind of dues-paying one must endure in order to be rich later on. In reality, they're fools: they'd be lucky if even 5% experience this, meaning 95% are chumps who will spend their lives working for little and wasting time they should spend organizing for better outcomes for most (including themselves). To me this jibes with the profound innumeracy, political naiveté, and indoctrination in tech "journalism" that passes on sites like Hacker News (Pein mentions ycombinator in the interview) and /., as well as the arrogant anti-free speech bias that revolts at anyone who dares to challenge the narrative provided by the article at the head of the thread. Hence the discussion in the recording around 25m30s:
While I don't think autonomous vehicles are a good thing, and I wouldn't trust one enough to get in one (nor do I relish being anywhere near them as they share the road with me), I think it's also silly to accuse the "owner" (I'll explain the quotes below) of doing what such cars purport to deliver (which you describe as "drinking the Kool-Aid of the media") instead of challenging automakers and proponents to supply compelling reasons why anyone should bother with autonomous vehicles. If what we're told is true, it seems reasonable to do what this fellow did. The reaction against the lounging passenger seems to me indistinguishable from sycophantically siding with power. I recall there was a discussion about a proposed car that had no controls for the person in the driver seat. If this car is made and someone uses one and is found lounging or even drinking alcohol in the seat formerly known as the driver's seat, who's side will the power sycophants take then?
By the same token, amazon.com offers a way to deliver packages inside one's home or car. I'm sure there are people who think that this ostensible convenience completely outweighs letting unaccountable strangers into one's home or car. Again, here too I don't think such delivery is worth having and I think anyone who takes them up on it is being foolish. But by what right would I hold it against the customer when their house is robbed or their car gets altered, damaged, or stolen because they believed what was promised to them? At what point do we start defending what's in our interest: stop lying to us about the features and start offering services that respect our privacy, our property, and focus on improving the nature of the service by delivering goods on time and without mishandling the package.
Why the quotes around "owner" in this context? Self-driving cars are spybots riddled with proprietary software. For all we know, the car's controls can be taken over remotely by a number of different people in multiple organizations any time they want to; I imagine police love the promise of these vehicles because they could be made to ignore the driver's instructions and pull over whenever the police are nearby (should we think the police are fools to "drink the Kool-Aid" of this promise?). Therefore calling the person who pays for this tracker-on-wheels an "owner" of their vehicle seems to me an incredible claim.
Richard Stallman has long pointed out the contradiction between how the word "hacker" was used ("playful cleverness") dating back to the 1960's and how it is used by mainstream media dating back to the 1980's ("security breaker").
I didn't misunderstand; you didn't demonstrate hyperbole in the way you think you did. Your one-sided application of the term hyperbole is telling and inverted ("the whole free software movement as a whole" is not undermined, but the power proprietors wield to take advantage of computer users causes all proprietary software to come under suspicion by default precisely because we can't tell what's really going on, improve, or share modified proprietary software regardless of our skill and motivation). https://gnu.org/malware has plenty of examples of proprietary malware that work precisely because that software doesn't respect a user's software freedom; as that page says,
Also, you oversimplify what's going on with Facebook: the harm of Facebook's data collection is partially attributable to proprietary software. There are other methods by which Facebook harms people (both its users and non-users) that don't involve proprietary software, so there's plenty of good reason not to trust spying services like Facebook. Depending on the method, software licenses might not be relevant at all. But software licenses don't all treat users the same way even if they all hinge on copyright law, therefore there's nothing compelling anyone to view all licenses the same way.
The FSF apparently believed NeXT was not complying with the GPL. If it's not clear what a court would have found, it is a half-truth to try and draw the conclusion you do comparing this to the nVidia infringement case concerning the Linux kernel without looking at more than one case: such as whether courts tend to favor copyright holders' interpretation of their chosen licenses, and how well courts understand the GPL. We know that NeXT valued that code, that code was critical to NeXT's development system; code for which there was no alternative then. NeXT's decision to "throw code over the wall" (as you passive aggressively say) came after talking to the FSF. NeXT did not do this on their own.
Your entire second paragraph is basically a red herring, as whatever technical issues were present in NeXT's Objective-C code and your further prognostication on FSF adding Objective-C support in GCC don't have any bearing on whether what NeXT did was copyright infringement against what was and is a very generous license. It doesn't matter if you conclude that the FSF would have been better off in some alternate version of events because that didn't happen.
You're arguing for exploitation. Free software licenses, particularly strongly-copylefted free software licenses, are designed to ensure software freedom remains intact for everyone who gets a copy. Defending software freedom requires standing up for one's free software license, in court if need be. After all, we're not talking about some proprietor licensing their work on restrictive terms, we're talking about the FSF licensing under the GNU GPL v2; a generous copyright holder licensing their work under terms that allow us to leverage their achievements for our own gain (even privately) so long as any published software remains in the commons for us all to use (share and share alike). If you don't like that, don't distribute strongly-copylefted free software. This choice means not giving up on the freedom that came with the software and not treating other people badly by denying them those freedoms (an undefended GNU GPL'd work is functionally no different from a non-copylefted free software license, also called a "pushover" license). The freedoms of the Internet aren't threatened by people running, inspecting, sharing, or modifying strongly-copylefted free software.
In other words, had the FSF let NeXT run roughshod over them by remaining silent about continued infringement on the generous GNU GPL v2 license terms, as you seem to think would have been a good idea, people would have had even less code on which to implement anything instead of gaining something with "a replacement runtime". You're actually arguing for a more difficult set of improvements for GCC because that would have been more convenient for proprietors (NeXT and later Apple).
By committing copyright infringement against a very generous copyright holder licensing its work for all to build upon and share, NeXT created that bad will. Maybe NeXT should have written their own code or licensed a compiler from someone willing to work with them on proprietary terms. That's what Apple is doing today, perhaps guided by having learned that the FSF isn't going to ignore being mistreated when it offers its work for all to run, share, inspect, and modify (even commercially).
Only in your topsy-turvy view where works offered on a share-and-share-alike basis are somehow bad and only worth as much respect as a proprietor feels like doling out. And those copyright holders who stand up for software freedom are somehow doing the wrong thing because life became more inconvenient for proprietors and perhaps require some more work to make something more featureful.
"The Corporation" features Robert Hare's analysis of corporation as psychopath. RMS is likely referring to this when he said:
The Corporation is an excellent documentary. I highly recommend the 2-disc DVD set and the additional features and alternate audio tracks. There are other copies on archive.org too. And I see the same team is now working on a sequel.
It's so telling that people would ever push an ego-based argument about the name "GNU" (as in GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux) when "Linux" is clearly the egotistical name. RMS has consistently stood behind the idea that he wants GNU to get a fair share of the credit for the systems that contain GNU so people are reminded of software freedom. That's not egotistical at all. But the name Linux points to one guy, Linus Torvalds. Linux was never an OS and still isn't; if all one has is Linux one doesn't have the majority of the code one needs to do practical work or that one would expect an OS to do (even if that expectation is kept low, such as doing everything on the command line). Linux was and remains a kernel. Even in 2018 it's hard to give credit where credit is due on /., what a shame.