Re:RMS wrote GCC to pursue software freedom.
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GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
So it's wrong to sneak software Freedom in through a back door?
Free software would be just as free by any other name, but the Open Source movement doesn't work to get people to recognize and cherish software freedom in its own right. RMS is asking people to recognize that his work was done in pursuit of software freedom, not the developmental goals of the Open Source movement. By the way, GCC was initially developed well before the Open Source Initiative existed.
Open Source Software is software that is available also in source code format.
Not according to the first sentence of the introduction to the definition of the term "Open Source" as defined by the Open Source Initiative, which claims credit for coining the term and starting the Open Source movement. That definition tells us that "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code.". I take it you mean to refer to the OSI's work since you cite them as an authority on the matter.
Here's a quote from opensource.org:
The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves.
That is a development methodology chiefly aimed at programmers, not a call for defending user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software.
If the OSI is so sympathetic to software freedom, they shouldn't continue to call freedom-talk "ideological tub-thumping" in their FAQ and they shouldn't try to phrase Peruvian Congressman Villanueva's work as pursuit of "Open Source" when Villanueva explicitly told the Microsoft representative that he wanted to call attention to free software (as the OSI does on their front page). Villanueva told Microsoft that his bill doesn't call for "Open Source". Microsoft just uses that term to try and steer the conversation to matters Microsoft's people believe they can address better—price and reliability. Furthermore, I think RMS hit the nail on the head when he talked about the philosophical differences between the two movements and when Eben Moglen talks similarly in his speeches. If the OSI and its defenders are so sympathetic to software freedom, they should be fine with people explicitly engaging in freedom talk, not just (as you say) "inherently" agree with freedom talk but never mentioning it.
It's telling that in an instance where the preeminent Free Software movement advocate, RMS, writes a program to make software freedom a reality, and doing so well before there was an Open Source Initiative, Open Source advocates are arguing that it's okay to associate RMS' work with a movement he "is not against [...] but [doesn't] want to be lumped in with" (quoting his aforementioned essay). These admonitions suggest that even in cases like this one, the objective is to get everyone to remain silent about software freedom so that we can all get on with pleasing business and framing issues in terms of increasing developmental efficiency. I won't go along with that. I will continue to find the ethical and social examinations the Free Software movement raises far more compelling. And I will continue to associate what was initially RMS' work with the movement he started.
RMS wrote GCC to pursue software freedom.
on
GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The philosophical difference RMS describes is quite clear and RMS points it out quite well. The benefits we get from free software are great, but they shouldn't be celebrated at the expense of celebrating the freedom free software gives us for its own sake. You can't "make that group as broad as you want or as narrow as you want" and still convey the same point. People might not know about software freedom, so it's easy to make that mistake without any malicious intent (as I think was the case here). But to set out to refer to programs like GCC—programs written to make software freedom real—in the name of a movement that was built in part to not mention software freedom is ahistorical.
Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success
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GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Please do take this in the supportive spirit in which it is intended. It's a letter from GCC's initial author, Richard Stallman (also founder of the free software movement) to a CNet article author who referred to GCC as an "open source" programming tool.
Quoting from that letter:
I appreciate the admiration expressed in your article about upgrading the GNU Compiler Collection, but it erred in describing the program as an "open source" programming tool. I developed GCC as part of the Free Software Movement--so that people can use computers in freedom as part of a community.
Free software means software that respects the users' freedom. The philosophy of the movement is that users of software should be free to run it, study it, change it, redistribute it and publish modified versions.
With these freedoms, you're free to engage in cooperative development; you're also free to develop it on your own or to redistribute it unchanged. Describing this as a "philosophy of cooperative development" emphasizes one beneficial consequence of freedom at the expense of freedom itself.
It was impossible in 1984 to use a computer in freedom, since all the operating systems were proprietary. So I launched the development of GNU, a free Unix-like operating system.
A Unix-like system must include a C compiler, so I wrote one: GCC. I designed it to handle other languages, also, so that GNU users could use more than one. GCC, like the GNU/Linux operating system in which GCC is a crucial part, exists because of the ideals of the Free Software Movement--the ideals that are forgotten when speaking of open source.
Of course, this is not a letter from RMS to you or directly pertaining to your article. However, I thought that it was worth mentioning in case people want to tell their friends about the new GCC release. It seems that people who frequent/. go to some length to make sure that they describe Linus Torvalds' initial authorship of the Linux kernel in a manner according to his chosen movement. I thought that the same respect should be due to RMS.
I understand what you mean, but please ask for "voter-verified paper ballots" instead of a "paper trail".
I was part of the Champaign County Election Equipment Advisory Board in Champaign county Illinois. We were an appointed body whose job was to evaluate voting machines that would make us compliant with the new "Help America Vote Act" law. Our board heard sales pitches from a few vendors (Diebold, HartIntercivic, ES&S) and their local reps, we asked them questions, collected information, and eventually made a recommendation to the County Board (who are elected). We've given the County Board our advice and the County Board will make the final decision and sign the contracts.
We took a field trip to Tippecanoe county Indiana and saw a Diebold voting machine, and our guides were nice enough to give us a demonstration. We were familiar with the Diebold system they demonstrated from a user and administrator's perspective, but we were stunned that the long strip of paper the machine printed was not voter-verified. The Diebold machine we saw produced this paper if the operator had a physical key and pressed the appropriate button (typically the election judge on the site would do this at the end of election day). But no voters got to see what was printed on the paper, therefore there was no way for a voter to make sure that there was any accurate written record of their vote, even a printed record that stayed with the election judges (not a receipt).
Ostensibly, what's on the paper is a record of votes in a pseudo-random order (so as to prevent an election judge from correlating a particular voter with the printed information). But since the paper is not voter-verified, what was written on the paper is completely untrustworthy. Voters were relying on whatever the software says. Tippecanoe county Indiana is a long-time Diebold customer (since before Diebold bought Global Election Systems, if I recall correctly).
This machine compelled me to distinguish between a "paper trail" (which the Diebold reps and the Tippecanoe county demonstrators assured us the machine could generate) and a "voter-verified paper ballot". The former simply isn't good enough.
Actually, the statement was quite clear that the relationship existed "Because it's free". Whether the "free" meant price or some set of freedoms, it's not true. The statement applied to more than just WordPress even though it was in a section of an article concerning WordPress.
But it will be entertaining to watch you prove that absolutely nobody will take money providing any degree of support for WordPress. I expect it will take you some time to exhaustively detail this, so might I suggest starting with the commercial service providers pointed to on WordPress' website just because they seem to be obvious choices for someone looking to pay someone for WordPress service.
It seems like there's a big world of consultants out there and I don't know them all. I'm guessing that there are more than just me who continue to do paid support for a variety of GPL-covered programs.
The Closed Source sections of OS X are mostly the value add features, such as the Carbon, Quartz, Aqua or whatever libraries that interface with OS X's frame buffer interface, and some tools and a slew of more software that you can run.
They're not "value added", they are freedom removed. Users get the software minus the freedom.
I'm surprised your post isn't moderated as troll, calling the grandparent poster's point asinine with no explanation at all. I'm also glad that the free software community doesn't hinge on you to progress.
Running the software for any reason is only a part of software freedom. In fact, it's the first part of the Free Software definition. It's the part that is supplied by just about all programs (but some programs even cut this off after a certain amount of time). What you don't get is the freedom to inspect the program, to learn how it works, or to share copies of the program, to help your neighbors, or to modify the program, to make the program suit your needs. In short, you miss out on all of the other parts of what makes a program Free Software. You could have used a different program to do that job, or written one yourself, or hired someone to write the program for you, then you would have software freedom. But with proprietary software, the proprietor is purposefully denying you your software freedom.
I would hope that the project's principles will allow for more free software to do those jobs. Giving the students free software today can inspire them to develop such free software in the future. We can and should switch to free software to do these jobs (free BIOS, for instance) when it works. We should help those working on such things now. Recent history shows that when we work on such programs and switch to using them we gain the freedom over our own lives.
I too would like free software for all the parts of my computer that run software (as opposed to those that run instructions burned into ROM, which might as well be hardwired circuitry). But progress on these grounds will be made one step at a time. There's an old aphorism about winning a revolution by using the enemy's bullets; of course, the free software community is fighting a non-violent revolution, but using what's available often means using something repressive to build something better. Had the project chosen a proprietary OS where perfectly good free software exists, that would have been a different situation entirely; fortunately for the children using these computers, the project leaders say they aren't choosing proprietary software.
Doesn't it seem like pro-proprietary software zealotry to think that refusing an opportunity to lose one's software freedom is pitched as "zealotry"? No, framing this issue as zealotry won't help you understand what is really going on.
Ease of use is not freedom. Ease of use is a subjective assessment (everything is probably roughly equally hard to learn when you have no experience with computers) that doesn't address educational goals to the degree software freedom does. Any software can be made easier to use and people don't need to rely on proprietors to do it for us. We can and should do it for ourselves and share the results with people (particularly those who will share their improvements with us). This is part of the spirit that got us the free software OSes we enjoy today.
What Apple is offering here is a gratis opportunity to put on some handcuffs and choose between a set of masters. Some of MacOS X is free software but not all of it. Why subject the kids to a computer they can't control completely? Why help them grow an addiction to proprietary software that will be hard to break? I realize that/. readers tend to think this way only of Microsoft, but Apple is offering a comparable deal here: no software freedom, more like "the first bite is free".
Because it's free, paid support is not available [...]
Actually, there's nothing stopping anyone from supplying paid support for any GNU General Public Licensed program, including WordPress. And such paid support can be available but not widely enough advertised for most people to know about it. The relationship the author is getting at here is simply not true.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the RIAA and MPAA members will back stiffer penalties wholeheartedly. Yeah, I'm a real soothsayer. But I have a hard time believing that/. readers and moderators will keep this in mind when the next Buffy/Star Wars/Firefly or other corporate-backed fantasy or sci-fi media comes along.
I choose not to do business with them. I try to surround myself with media I can share. I've stopped listening to the corporate-backed stuff in part because of the restrictions which put me in an ethical dilemma when my friends want a copy of something I've got: Do I do the ethically correct thing and infringe upon some organization's copyright by making and distributing illicit copies with my friends (who have done me no harm, and therefore I have no reason to treat them badly)? Or do I obey the law and treat my friends badly by rejecting their request? I've chosen to get out of this quandry by working toward surrounding myself with media I can share, whether I have to buy it or not.
Why bother? The new installer is almost the same.
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Etch Goes Beta
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· Score: 1
This installer is only graphical in the most technical sense of the term. The screenshots of Etch's beta installer I've seen will not satisfy most users who want a "graphical" installer.
To my eyes, Anaconda is looking like a more approachable installer for those who aren't technically inclined. But Anaconda could ask fewer questions and place technical stuff behind "Advanced..." buttons.
Actually, all proprietary software is unauditable. There's no way to know what the software will do in any circumstance until it does something. Believing that you have seen all the program can do is unwise. Tracing calls that go from Skype user to Skype user can only be done with the help of the Skype service provider. If Skype is uncooperative you've only got what your logs tell you. If the call is encrypted (as we're led to believe with Skype, although proprietary encryption is inherently untrustworthy for the aforementioned reason) you won't have much to go on.
However, one could raise comparable practical problems with any other proprietary program, such as those running many businesses today. That doesn't make Skype any better (in for a penny in for a pound doesn't make foolish behavior sensible) it means that businesses should run exclusively free software.
There are ways to cut down the costs—archive.org (the Internet Archive) will host any file, allow unlimited downloads, and mirror it internationally over reasonably fast connections for free. 6GB of transfer and 400MB of storage space can be had online for $12/month (and I'm guessing plenty of/. readers know better deals than that). This is certainly a lot of storage for some fixed (X)HTML+CSS and an RSS file. If one can reliably get free Internet access whenever one needs to upload files, one could make a nice site that is regularly updated and features an RSS feed for less than $80/month.
So, I'm not entirely convinced that one needs to have ads here.
I have access to a Brother HL-2070N laser printer that uses Zeroconf (or "Bonjour" or "Rendevous" if you use the Apple terminology) to let computers on the LAN know that it is available. For those of you who don't know, this protocol Apple made is very useful for automatic discovery of various things on a network (instant messaging buddies, hardware devices like printers, other computer services like file transfer services, etc.). FLOSS should get into this in a big way because the protocol is unencumbered to share and there is software to make use of this which is licensed to share and modify.
I can print to it with the previous Ubuntu release after some configuration (nothing terribly technical, but nowhere near as easy as it ought to be). Even if enable "discover LAN printers" (or somesuch) in the printer control program, the previous Ubuntu Live CD never saw the Brother HL-2070N printer.
Hence my question for those of you who have tried the new Ubuntu: does it use Zeroconf for automatically discovering and setting up services such as printers?
Funny how the grandparent poster was "a bit of a zealot" yet those who distribute the movies exclusively in formats that can't yet be read with free software merit no mention at all. Such one-sidedness in examining the issue effectively stigmatizes free software advocacy and endorses proprietary software without explicitly calling attention to the one-sidedness. Perhaps we should call refer to such files and programs as "freedom subtracted" or somesuch, and explicitly frame the debate along the lines of software freedom instead of letting proprietary software inducements pass as the uncommented norm.
I visited www.share.org and I couldn't find any document from the 1950's indicating the use of the term "open source". Is there a specific document you can point me to? I'm willing to try to be more careful in my use of the term if I can see evidence of the unbroken line of usage you're talking about.
Regarding Shankland and CNet News' unwillingness to call GCC a free software compiler instead of an open source compiler: I'm not talking about TeX, X, most shells, or window managers. I wrote about a specific program—GCC—and how RMS kindly explained why he would like the program to be called free software. What should matter here is not reflecting the desire of the reporter or their news organization, but respecting the wishes of the programmer. People extend this courtesy to Linus Torvalds when describing the Linux kernel, I think fairness demands the same for RMS.
Finally, if "what is in common is a belief in code sharing and community", then there are some strange bedfellows in this group. Linus Torvalds recently stopped using Bitkeeper, the proprietary revision tracking software. For quite some time he was happy to endorse the proprietary program for other Linux kernel hackers in word and deed. At about the time Torvalds' Bitkeeper license was pulled, it became known that Andrew Tridgell was working on what was described as a free software program to get data from Bitkeeper repositories. Tridgell reverse engineered the proprietary Bitkeeper protocol as part of the work to write this program, and Torvalds reportedly disagreed with this and defended a software proprietor. Communities are denied the ability to do code sharing when proprietary software is involved. Torvalds strikes me as a pragmatist—he'll use whatever software is convenient to get the job done, apparently he's not someone who shares the aforementioned belief in code sharing or community if it is inconvenient or a challenge to a proprietor.
Where is the post from RMS you mentioned? What's your source for the IBM usage? No citation was given. I'm familiar with IBM mainframe OS software being shared and modified, but this was the norm then and therefore there was no social movement to defend this way of doing things on the computer.
There is nothing "neutral" about the distinction you describe. Any software that cannot be redistributed leaves users helpless to build a community by sharing copies of programs even if they are allowed to improve the software. This is oppressive.
RMS did not choose for the open source movement to begin at all. He had already started his movement, a social movement he called the free software movement. In reading the OSI's website, it seems that it was part of their purpose to remove any discussion of ethics from their framing of issues before business because they believed that ethical discussion made people uncomfortable.
It seems remarkably one-sided that so many in the business press are reluctant to mention free software at all (despite the term being used for the better part of 20 years and an important body of work being done in that movement's name), and didn't mention open source until the OSI popularized the term (despite the OSI not being around as long). This clearly conveys the impression that they stand with the open source movement, not the free software movement. Which would be fine if they were describing software written in the name of that movement; people and organizations should be able to choose their affiliation. But to describe software written explicitly for software freedom and credit it to the movement that never talks about software freedom strikes me as disrespectful at the least.
RMS did not define "open source", the Open Source Initiative did that with their 10-part definition. Anyone who understands "GPL" to mean all free software is sorely mistaken and does not understand licensing; this misunderstanding has nothing to do with advancing or agreeing with RMS' argument justifying a user's software freedom. Finally, there's plenty commercial about the GNU Project. Not long after RMS wrote some of the earliest GNU programs, RMS himself was distributing copies of GNU software for a fee—a commercial endeavor—and later large and small businesses have enhanced and distributed free software for a fee.
I notice that your explanation of terms doesn't come with any pointers to back up your claims. I'd like to read instances of these terms being used as you say they're being used, in particular by those who know what these terms mean—RMS using the term "open source" to refer to ESR's attacks, for instance.
Fancier file permissions won't protect users against what proprietary software can do running in that user's name, with that user's privileges.
The real threat of spyware is the threat proprietary programs pose—they are uninspectable, unmodifiable, and undistributable. So even the most skilled can't really tell all of what they do, can't change them in any significant way to do something else, and if they somehow figure out how to change the binary they can't legally distribute the improved version to their community. Free software spyware doesn't suffer these problems because when the spyware is found, the program can be legally modified and shared, and the community can switch to the improved version.
GNU has nothing to do with open source. The GNU Project predates the open source movement by over a decade and started the free software movement, a movement with a different philosophy than the open source movement. RMS has spent a lot of time in his talks and essays explaining that the work he has done for the past two decades was not done in the name of open source.
The open source movement has made their name quite popular but I doubt you'll be able to find people who understand what it actually means. The FSF wrote about this in their essay on the differences between the two movements.
This discussion is weakened by moving along the framing of the open source movement. That movement says nothing about software freedom, in fact it was built in part to talk about much the same software as the older free software movement minus the ethical discussion. This is a serious philosophical difference between the two movements and it has practical consequences--do users get freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify any time they want for whatever reason they want? Some of the choices the open source movement has made indicate that the answer is of secondary interest to whatever a business wants.
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Free software would be just as free by any other name, but the Open Source movement doesn't work to get people to recognize and cherish software freedom in its own right. RMS is asking people to recognize that his work was done in pursuit of software freedom, not the developmental goals of the Open Source movement. By the way, GCC was initially developed well before the Open Source Initiative existed.
Not according to the first sentence of the introduction to the definition of the term "Open Source" as defined by the Open Source Initiative, which claims credit for coining the term and starting the Open Source movement. That definition tells us that "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code.". I take it you mean to refer to the OSI's work since you cite them as an authority on the matter.
That is a development methodology chiefly aimed at programmers, not a call for defending user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software.
If the OSI is so sympathetic to software freedom, they shouldn't continue to call freedom-talk "ideological tub-thumping" in their FAQ and they shouldn't try to phrase Peruvian Congressman Villanueva's work as pursuit of "Open Source" when Villanueva explicitly told the Microsoft representative that he wanted to call attention to free software (as the OSI does on their front page). Villanueva told Microsoft that his bill doesn't call for "Open Source". Microsoft just uses that term to try and steer the conversation to matters Microsoft's people believe they can address better—price and reliability. Furthermore, I think RMS hit the nail on the head when he talked about the philosophical differences between the two movements and when Eben Moglen talks similarly in his speeches. If the OSI and its defenders are so sympathetic to software freedom, they should be fine with people explicitly engaging in freedom talk, not just (as you say) "inherently" agree with freedom talk but never mentioning it.
It's telling that in an instance where the preeminent Free Software movement advocate, RMS, writes a program to make software freedom a reality, and doing so well before there was an Open Source Initiative, Open Source advocates are arguing that it's okay to associate RMS' work with a movement he "is not against [...] but [doesn't] want to be lumped in with" (quoting his aforementioned essay). These admonitions suggest that even in cases like this one, the objective is to get everyone to remain silent about software freedom so that we can all get on with pleasing business and framing issues in terms of increasing developmental efficiency. I won't go along with that. I will continue to find the ethical and social examinations the Free Software movement raises far more compelling. And I will continue to associate what was initially RMS' work with the movement he started.
The philosophical difference RMS describes is quite clear and RMS points it out quite well. The benefits we get from free software are great, but they shouldn't be celebrated at the expense of celebrating the freedom free software gives us for its own sake. You can't "make that group as broad as you want or as narrow as you want" and still convey the same point. People might not know about software freedom, so it's easy to make that mistake without any malicious intent (as I think was the case here). But to set out to refer to programs like GCC—programs written to make software freedom real—in the name of a movement that was built in part to not mention software freedom is ahistorical.
Please do take this in the supportive spirit in which it is intended. It's a letter from GCC's initial author, Richard Stallman (also founder of the free software movement) to a CNet article author who referred to GCC as an "open source" programming tool.
Quoting from that letter:
Of course, this is not a letter from RMS to you or directly pertaining to your article. However, I thought that it was worth mentioning in case people want to tell their friends about the new GCC release. It seems that people who frequent /. go to some length to make sure that they describe Linus Torvalds' initial authorship of the Linux kernel in a manner according to his chosen movement. I thought that the same respect should be due to RMS.
I understand what you mean, but please ask for "voter-verified paper ballots" instead of a "paper trail".
I was part of the Champaign County Election Equipment Advisory Board in Champaign county Illinois. We were an appointed body whose job was to evaluate voting machines that would make us compliant with the new "Help America Vote Act" law. Our board heard sales pitches from a few vendors (Diebold, HartIntercivic, ES&S) and their local reps, we asked them questions, collected information, and eventually made a recommendation to the County Board (who are elected). We've given the County Board our advice and the County Board will make the final decision and sign the contracts.
We took a field trip to Tippecanoe county Indiana and saw a Diebold voting machine, and our guides were nice enough to give us a demonstration. We were familiar with the Diebold system they demonstrated from a user and administrator's perspective, but we were stunned that the long strip of paper the machine printed was not voter-verified. The Diebold machine we saw produced this paper if the operator had a physical key and pressed the appropriate button (typically the election judge on the site would do this at the end of election day). But no voters got to see what was printed on the paper, therefore there was no way for a voter to make sure that there was any accurate written record of their vote, even a printed record that stayed with the election judges (not a receipt).
Ostensibly, what's on the paper is a record of votes in a pseudo-random order (so as to prevent an election judge from correlating a particular voter with the printed information). But since the paper is not voter-verified, what was written on the paper is completely untrustworthy. Voters were relying on whatever the software says. Tippecanoe county Indiana is a long-time Diebold customer (since before Diebold bought Global Election Systems, if I recall correctly).
This machine compelled me to distinguish between a "paper trail" (which the Diebold reps and the Tippecanoe county demonstrators assured us the machine could generate) and a "voter-verified paper ballot". The former simply isn't good enough.
Actually, the statement was quite clear that the relationship existed "Because it's free". Whether the "free" meant price or some set of freedoms, it's not true. The statement applied to more than just WordPress even though it was in a section of an article concerning WordPress.
But it will be entertaining to watch you prove that absolutely nobody will take money providing any degree of support for WordPress. I expect it will take you some time to exhaustively detail this, so might I suggest starting with the commercial service providers pointed to on WordPress' website just because they seem to be obvious choices for someone looking to pay someone for WordPress service.
It seems like there's a big world of consultants out there and I don't know them all. I'm guessing that there are more than just me who continue to do paid support for a variety of GPL-covered programs.
They're not "value added", they are freedom removed. Users get the software minus the freedom.
I'm surprised your post isn't moderated as troll, calling the grandparent poster's point asinine with no explanation at all. I'm also glad that the free software community doesn't hinge on you to progress.
Running the software for any reason is only a part of software freedom. In fact, it's the first part of the Free Software definition. It's the part that is supplied by just about all programs (but some programs even cut this off after a certain amount of time). What you don't get is the freedom to inspect the program, to learn how it works, or to share copies of the program, to help your neighbors, or to modify the program, to make the program suit your needs. In short, you miss out on all of the other parts of what makes a program Free Software. You could have used a different program to do that job, or written one yourself, or hired someone to write the program for you, then you would have software freedom. But with proprietary software, the proprietor is purposefully denying you your software freedom.
I would hope that the project's principles will allow for more free software to do those jobs. Giving the students free software today can inspire them to develop such free software in the future. We can and should switch to free software to do these jobs (free BIOS, for instance) when it works. We should help those working on such things now. Recent history shows that when we work on such programs and switch to using them we gain the freedom over our own lives.
I too would like free software for all the parts of my computer that run software (as opposed to those that run instructions burned into ROM, which might as well be hardwired circuitry). But progress on these grounds will be made one step at a time. There's an old aphorism about winning a revolution by using the enemy's bullets; of course, the free software community is fighting a non-violent revolution, but using what's available often means using something repressive to build something better. Had the project chosen a proprietary OS where perfectly good free software exists, that would have been a different situation entirely; fortunately for the children using these computers, the project leaders say they aren't choosing proprietary software.
Doesn't it seem like pro-proprietary software zealotry to think that refusing an opportunity to lose one's software freedom is pitched as "zealotry"? No, framing this issue as zealotry won't help you understand what is really going on.
Ease of use is not freedom. Ease of use is a subjective assessment (everything is probably roughly equally hard to learn when you have no experience with computers) that doesn't address educational goals to the degree software freedom does. Any software can be made easier to use and people don't need to rely on proprietors to do it for us. We can and should do it for ourselves and share the results with people (particularly those who will share their improvements with us). This is part of the spirit that got us the free software OSes we enjoy today.
What Apple is offering here is a gratis opportunity to put on some handcuffs and choose between a set of masters. Some of MacOS X is free software but not all of it. Why subject the kids to a computer they can't control completely? Why help them grow an addiction to proprietary software that will be hard to break? I realize that /. readers tend to think this way only of Microsoft, but Apple is offering a comparable deal here: no software freedom, more like "the first bite is free".
For more on this, I recommend reading Why schools should use exclusively free software.
Livejournal previews lie. The preview you get is not what your post will look like when it is posted to a blog entry.
From the article:
Actually, there's nothing stopping anyone from supplying paid support for any GNU General Public Licensed program, including WordPress. And such paid support can be available but not widely enough advertised for most people to know about it. The relationship the author is getting at here is simply not true.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the RIAA and MPAA members will back stiffer penalties wholeheartedly. Yeah, I'm a real soothsayer. But I have a hard time believing that /. readers and moderators will keep this in mind when the next Buffy/Star Wars/Firefly or other corporate-backed fantasy or sci-fi media comes along.
I choose not to do business with them. I try to surround myself with media I can share. I've stopped listening to the corporate-backed stuff in part because of the restrictions which put me in an ethical dilemma when my friends want a copy of something I've got: Do I do the ethically correct thing and infringe upon some organization's copyright by making and distributing illicit copies with my friends (who have done me no harm, and therefore I have no reason to treat them badly)? Or do I obey the law and treat my friends badly by rejecting their request? I've chosen to get out of this quandry by working toward surrounding myself with media I can share, whether I have to buy it or not.
This installer is only graphical in the most technical sense of the term. The screenshots of Etch's beta installer I've seen will not satisfy most users who want a "graphical" installer.
To my eyes, Anaconda is looking like a more approachable installer for those who aren't technically inclined. But Anaconda could ask fewer questions and place technical stuff behind "Advanced..." buttons.
Actually, all proprietary software is unauditable. There's no way to know what the software will do in any circumstance until it does something. Believing that you have seen all the program can do is unwise. Tracing calls that go from Skype user to Skype user can only be done with the help of the Skype service provider. If Skype is uncooperative you've only got what your logs tell you. If the call is encrypted (as we're led to believe with Skype, although proprietary encryption is inherently untrustworthy for the aforementioned reason) you won't have much to go on.
However, one could raise comparable practical problems with any other proprietary program, such as those running many businesses today. That doesn't make Skype any better (in for a penny in for a pound doesn't make foolish behavior sensible) it means that businesses should run exclusively free software.
There are ways to cut down the costs—archive.org (the Internet Archive) will host any file, allow unlimited downloads, and mirror it internationally over reasonably fast connections for free. 6GB of transfer and 400MB of storage space can be had online for $12/month (and I'm guessing plenty of /. readers know better deals than that). This is certainly a lot of storage for some fixed (X)HTML+CSS and an RSS file. If one can reliably get free Internet access whenever one needs to upload files, one could make a nice site that is regularly updated and features an RSS feed for less than $80/month.
So, I'm not entirely convinced that one needs to have ads here.
I have access to a Brother HL-2070N laser printer that uses Zeroconf (or "Bonjour" or "Rendevous" if you use the Apple terminology) to let computers on the LAN know that it is available. For those of you who don't know, this protocol Apple made is very useful for automatic discovery of various things on a network (instant messaging buddies, hardware devices like printers, other computer services like file transfer services, etc.). FLOSS should get into this in a big way because the protocol is unencumbered to share and there is software to make use of this which is licensed to share and modify.
I can print to it with the previous Ubuntu release after some configuration (nothing terribly technical, but nowhere near as easy as it ought to be). Even if enable "discover LAN printers" (or somesuch) in the printer control program, the previous Ubuntu Live CD never saw the Brother HL-2070N printer.
Hence my question for those of you who have tried the new Ubuntu: does it use Zeroconf for automatically discovering and setting up services such as printers?
Funny how the grandparent poster was "a bit of a zealot" yet those who distribute the movies exclusively in formats that can't yet be read with free software merit no mention at all. Such one-sidedness in examining the issue effectively stigmatizes free software advocacy and endorses proprietary software without explicitly calling attention to the one-sidedness. Perhaps we should call refer to such files and programs as "freedom subtracted" or somesuch, and explicitly frame the debate along the lines of software freedom instead of letting proprietary software inducements pass as the uncommented norm.
I visited www.share.org and I couldn't find any document from the 1950's indicating the use of the term "open source". Is there a specific document you can point me to? I'm willing to try to be more careful in my use of the term if I can see evidence of the unbroken line of usage you're talking about.
Regarding Shankland and CNet News' unwillingness to call GCC a free software compiler instead of an open source compiler: I'm not talking about TeX, X, most shells, or window managers. I wrote about a specific program—GCC—and how RMS kindly explained why he would like the program to be called free software. What should matter here is not reflecting the desire of the reporter or their news organization, but respecting the wishes of the programmer. People extend this courtesy to Linus Torvalds when describing the Linux kernel, I think fairness demands the same for RMS.
Finally, if "what is in common is a belief in code sharing and community", then there are some strange bedfellows in this group. Linus Torvalds recently stopped using Bitkeeper, the proprietary revision tracking software. For quite some time he was happy to endorse the proprietary program for other Linux kernel hackers in word and deed. At about the time Torvalds' Bitkeeper license was pulled, it became known that Andrew Tridgell was working on what was described as a free software program to get data from Bitkeeper repositories. Tridgell reverse engineered the proprietary Bitkeeper protocol as part of the work to write this program, and Torvalds reportedly disagreed with this and defended a software proprietor. Communities are denied the ability to do code sharing when proprietary software is involved. Torvalds strikes me as a pragmatist—he'll use whatever software is convenient to get the job done, apparently he's not someone who shares the aforementioned belief in code sharing or community if it is inconvenient or a challenge to a proprietor.
Where is the post from RMS you mentioned? What's your source for the IBM usage? No citation was given. I'm familiar with IBM mainframe OS software being shared and modified, but this was the norm then and therefore there was no social movement to defend this way of doing things on the computer.
There is nothing "neutral" about the distinction you describe. Any software that cannot be redistributed leaves users helpless to build a community by sharing copies of programs even if they are allowed to improve the software. This is oppressive.
RMS did not choose for the open source movement to begin at all. He had already started his movement, a social movement he called the free software movement. In reading the OSI's website, it seems that it was part of their purpose to remove any discussion of ethics from their framing of issues before business because they believed that ethical discussion made people uncomfortable.
It seems remarkably one-sided that so many in the business press are reluctant to mention free software at all (despite the term being used for the better part of 20 years and an important body of work being done in that movement's name), and didn't mention open source until the OSI popularized the term (despite the OSI not being around as long). This clearly conveys the impression that they stand with the open source movement, not the free software movement. Which would be fine if they were describing software written in the name of that movement; people and organizations should be able to choose their affiliation. But to describe software written explicitly for software freedom and credit it to the movement that never talks about software freedom strikes me as disrespectful at the least.
RMS did not define "open source", the Open Source Initiative did that with their 10-part definition. Anyone who understands "GPL" to mean all free software is sorely mistaken and does not understand licensing; this misunderstanding has nothing to do with advancing or agreeing with RMS' argument justifying a user's software freedom. Finally, there's plenty commercial about the GNU Project. Not long after RMS wrote some of the earliest GNU programs, RMS himself was distributing copies of GNU software for a fee—a commercial endeavor—and later large and small businesses have enhanced and distributed free software for a fee.
I notice that your explanation of terms doesn't come with any pointers to back up your claims. I'd like to read instances of these terms being used as you say they're being used, in particular by those who know what these terms mean—RMS using the term "open source" to refer to ESR's attacks, for instance.
Fancier file permissions won't protect users against what proprietary software can do running in that user's name, with that user's privileges.
The real threat of spyware is the threat proprietary programs pose—they are uninspectable, unmodifiable, and undistributable. So even the most skilled can't really tell all of what they do, can't change them in any significant way to do something else, and if they somehow figure out how to change the binary they can't legally distribute the improved version to their community. Free software spyware doesn't suffer these problems because when the spyware is found, the program can be legally modified and shared, and the community can switch to the improved version.
GNU has nothing to do with open source. The GNU Project predates the open source movement by over a decade and started the free software movement, a movement with a different philosophy than the open source movement. RMS has spent a lot of time in his talks and essays explaining that the work he has done for the past two decades was not done in the name of open source.
One particular example of this came up recently. Lots of people miscredit GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, as an "open source" compiler. RMS, the initial author of GCC, has said quite clearly that GCC is a free software compiler. RMS gently but forthrightly corrected CNet.com writer Stephen Shankland on this issue, but Shankland still got it wrong a few months later. Hopefully CNet can bring themselves to mention the phrase "free software" in the proper context as often as they mention "open source" in the proper context.
The open source movement has made their name quite popular but I doubt you'll be able to find people who understand what it actually means. The FSF wrote about this in their essay on the differences between the two movements.
This discussion is weakened by moving along the framing of the open source movement. That movement says nothing about software freedom, in fact it was built in part to talk about much the same software as the older free software movement minus the ethical discussion. This is a serious philosophical difference between the two movements and it has practical consequences--do users get freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify any time they want for whatever reason they want? Some of the choices the open source movement has made indicate that the answer is of secondary interest to whatever a business wants.