The BBC article and the/. summary make similar mistakes that stem from a non-critical examination of the open source movement—using terminology and telling history in such a way as to refer to much the same software as the free software movement refers to but without the ethical component. This is all done to explain how things are strictly from the perspective of business.
As a result, "Linux" mistakenly becomes an entire operating system; not even a share of the credit for GNU, a primary contributor to a GNU/Linux system. Linus Torvalds gets primary credit for lots of work he did not do. If this article really "sums up the rise of non free software in the 1980s and how people and companies like IBM can make money with free software" as the/. summary claims, we should expect to find something to do with free software, no matter how brief or put off onto a link. Yet the BBC's article gives no credit to anyone involved in the free software movement for anything; no credit to the Free Software Foundation for writing the most popular licenses used in FLOSS (most notably the GNU GPL), no credit for any of the work the free software movement did for over a decade before the open source movement existed. We're supposed to treat the freedom-subtracted message the open source movement advocates as progress rather than point out that our freedom is under attack (for example: software patents, DMCA and other similar laws internationally, hardware vendors who won't tell you how the device works and only distribute proprietary software drivers) and it's much harder to gain back our freedom after we have lost it than it is to work to sustain the freedoms we have earned.
Without any examination of ethics, followers of the open source movement are likely to fall into well-understood traps where they accept non-free software. The open source movement never raises the issue of software freedom. Instead, this movement argues that more people should have access to a program's source code so that the program will be developed more quickly, at lower cost, and with fewer bugs. This increase in access to the source code does not necessarily include the program's users. Such a perspective is not the same as a the free software movement's perspective and simply doesn't go far enough to ensure our software freedom. This lack of political expertise and failure to inform others about the traps threatening our community will hurt us, in the long run.
I have no problem with people making money by developing, supporting, and distributing free software. But there are more important concerns in life. Consider what Richard Stallman calls "businessism": (about 1 hour and 2 minutes into the show)
"Businesses should have free software just as every computer user should have free software. But we [at the FSF] don't focus our concerns on business. And that's a matter of a basic philosophical decision: we don't want to make business the measure of all things. The world is plagued today by a philosophy which is called businessism. Just as humanism meant measuring things in human terms, businessism measures everything in business terms. I'm not a businessist. When I think about how to promote free software, I don't think "above all: business", I think "above all: schools". Schools must switch to free software because they should not be teaching their students to be addicts to proprietary software; to develop a dependency that will be hard for them to get out of."
Your post is rightfully moderated as flamebait, but since your history is wrong I'll try to correct your misunderstanding: the open source movement started over a decade after the free software movement did (the GNU Project, which started the free software movement, began in 1984; the Open Source Initiative, which started the open source movement, began in 1997). So, if there's any "parasitic hijacking" going on, it would have to be the open source movement's doing.
The Free Software Foundation, not the OSI, writes the most important and popular licenses in the free software community—most notably the GNU General Public License, but also the GNU Lesser General Public License, and the GNU Free Documentation License. If these licenses are "open source" licenses at all it is only because they happen to meet the Open Source Definition. Merely complying with a set of terms is nothing compared to writing the licenses and building a community. But these licenses were all written explicitly to pursue software freedom (as the language of all of these licenses make abundantly clear). In fact, both released versions of the GPL were written before there was an open source movement. Software freedom for users is a framing of ethical issues which the open source movement doesn't engage in.
But I prefer to think of the two movements having different philosophies and understand the philosophies for what they are. This way I can better understand the choices the organizations that define the terms "free software" and "open source" make and place them in historical context.
While I agree that free and open source software is fine without the governments help (in fact, we don't need it or want it) [...]
Copyright is established and enforced by governments. If government were truly uninvolved, the free software community would not be "fine" because we'd have no way to enforce the terms of any of our copyright licenses. Without the threat of enforcing one's rights under law, I doubt that proprietary software distributors would refrain from distributing proprietary variants of free software programs. To put a fine point on it, Microsoft (today's 800 lb. gorilla of the proprietary software world) would be able to distribute a proprietary set of GNU programs. Users would be in almost the same trap they are now with proprietary software—users might be able to distribute verbatim copies of programs but users would be denied any way to inspect or modify the binaries distributed to them and the entire free software community would end up treating all proprietary software businesses like charities. This is not a good trade; we would lose far more than we gain.
Patent law is established and enforced by governments too. Patent-holding organizations (most notably IBM because IBM holds the most patents) would not like that situation either because their patents would have no value. In this hypothetical situation, there would be nothing to stop anyone from dealing in formerly patented ideas. I only mention this because I think it would mean that there would be large numbers of people and organizations opposed to government doing away with copyright and patent regimes.
No matter which way you do this, you're merely switching masters—from the proprietary RealPlayer format to the patent-encumbered MP3 format. Unless there is some new reverse-engineered RealPlayer codec I don't know about, merely decoding the RealPlayer data will require proprietary software.
The first page you linked to is particularly unintentionally funny on this ground: its author boldly claims that there is a "spyware free" RealPlayer program from the BBC. How would most users learn what the program actually does if the program is proprietary? They wouldn't, of course, users are encouraged to take on faith that this program has no spyware; perhaps because other users of this program didn't (somehow) see this program do anything untoward. So these early users simply assume that the program is incapable of doing anyhing undesirable outside the perview of the user. The idea that looking at a program's user interface and not knowing all that the program is doing (or capable of doing under the right circumstances) is apparently thrown out of consideration. Because if that line of logic were taken seriously, proprietary programs would be considered unwise to run by default.
I think it is better to preserve your software freedom, get the $15 audio CD, and rip it with free software into an unencumbered format like Ogg Vorbis. This way you don't have to live with DRM, you don't have to settle for a low-quality encoding of the performance, and you can transcode it into a number of other formats as your whim dictates all without losing much quality.
I concur—it's the marketing. iPods are remarkably overpriced and underfeatured for what you get compared to other portable digital audio players. But everyone knows the name "iPod" because of the TV and print ads.
Even things Apple initiated, like the protocol behind what free software users call "ZeroConf" (what Apple now calls "Bonjour") aren't present in iPods despite the nice service it could help provide to iPod users—with wireless communication hardware built into a portable digital audio player, one could share audio clips, playlists, images, and so on just by being physically near them or on the same local network as them.
If Firefox proponents don't begin to mention software freedom, there will be another reason for MSIE 7 users to stick with MSIE and not download the latest version of Firefox. After all, on Microsoft Windows it is easier to use MSIE than to download and install a replacement web browser. Microsoft can implement all sorts of features that Firefox has today or will get soon, but Firefox respects the user's freedoms to run, inspect, copy, and modify the software and MSIE doesn't. It would be a shame to let this advantage go as if it is less important than feature lists. Paying attention to software freedom is what got us the community that has given us so much. As the FSF has warned us:
Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.
Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea--and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the ``keep quiet'' approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.
"Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea--and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the ``keep quiet'' approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.
At present, we have plenty of ``keep quiet'', but not enough freedom talk. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom--usually because they seek to be ``more acceptable to business.'' Software distributors especially show this pattern. Some GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage, rather than a step backwards from freedom."
It's time, IMHO, for Linus to pull rank and just order it merged.
What rank would he pull? Or do you really mean state his opinion and hope that it is persuasive to convince those who follow his fork of the Linux kernel to continue in that way? In the free software world, nobody has rank. Some people command more attention ostensibly because of their achievements, or because they have persuaded others that they have good ideas. Positing this as rank leaves many unanswered questions including where this rank came from and how it works absent people who believe they must follow it.
Using a proprietary program (as RootkitRevealer looks to be) to fight the ill effects of another proprietary program (such as AIM chat software) sounds unwise to me.
Speaking of which, Jack Valenti has used information like this in his MPAA stump speech. Last year, Valenti was an invited speaker at the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival. He spoke at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Pine Lounge of the Illini Union. He gave his usual emotional arguments including how researchers can transmit a 2-hour movie in some short period of time.
It was a one-sided venue, by design. Nobody but the audience was there to speak against any of his points. Apparently, Ebert doesn't want an informative discussion expressing an array of views, so he won't invite articulate speakers like Siva Vaidhyanathan, Prof. Lawrence Lessig, or those who back interesting copyright bills like the old HR2601, the Public Domain Enhancement Act. So giving context with some copyright history, responding to his arguments including Constitutional interpretation, and generally explaining the social value of a leaky copyright system is left up to people who happen to be in the room.
From my skimming the website you linked to, it appears that VariCAD is proprietary software. I believe the grandparent and previous posters are referring to free software programs to do CAD work. Hence, I don't think VariCAD will fill the bill.
Don't let Ou's argument dissuade you from freedom.
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
This kind of analysis comes up from time to time. It will come up again. I'll take OpenOffice.org over the proprietary alternatives because OpenOffice.org is free software.
I'd rather have a slow free software office suite than a faster proprietary office suite. If I cared enough to fix this in OpenOffice.org, I could do it or hire someone to do it for me. But I'll never fully learn what the proprietary alternatives do when they run, I'll never be able to fix the things I don't like about the proprietary software, and I'll never be able to help my community by sharing improved versions of the proprietary software. I want fast programs but not at the expense of my software freedom.
When this issue is framed in the terms the open source movement uses, proprietors can often gain (or keep) a client. This movement doesn't object to proprietary software, it claims that when more programmers have access to the program's source code and are allowed to change it, the program may see some improvement. This philosophy is one which places business priorities first. The social and ethical effect on the public—the helplessness one feels with programs they can't inspect, change, or share—is reduced to "ideologial tub-thumping" by the Open Source Initiative, which started the open source movement and defines the term "open source". Free software, on the other hand, places a philosophical focus on caring about society, not chiefly business interests. The free software movement talks about giving me the freedom to decide how the program should work for me. This stresses placing the limitations of what I can do on me: I get to choose how much programming I want to learn and I get to decide someone else to do for me. And, most importantly, the free software movement celebrates the spirit of voluntary cooperation, what keeps society from being a dog-eat-dog jungle. I don't object to the open source movement's priorities in themselves, but I don't think they go far enough to help improve society, and I do think it is computer user's job to care about what kind of society we are allowed to have.
Software proprietors love to frame the debate on money. This keeps software proprietors in the running for gaining, or in this case, maintaining a client. Microsoft is perfectly willing to give copies of its proprietary software to people gratis in order to keep them divided and helpless. There's plenty of money to be had with support contracts and upgrades down the road. This is why Microsoft's rep was so interested in framing Massachusetts' problems around document preservation and future reading on the argument of how much the project would cost the state. If you haven't heard the discussion for yourself, you should listen to it.
Massachusetts wasn't concerning themselves with software acquisition just yet. They made this very clear in their discussion. But it appears that PriceWaterhouseCoopers is. So, it becomes relevant to point out that framing the debate on software acquisition around the freedom to run, share, and modify computer software is a superior argument to the cost of the software. Alas, the open source movement doesn't encourage anyone to think about software freedom; that movement's message focuses on software development chiefly to businesses that develop software. Talking about software freedom to all computer users has been the long-held ground of the free software movement.
You completely ignore the ethical ramifications of non-free software, and you don't seem to have any criticism of corporate welfare either. It's also telling that pursuing free software gets called "zealotry" while a proprietor pursuing its ends gets no such namecalling.
If you're going to make legal analysis, at least try to use the correct terms. It's headlines like these that confuse the public into believing that "movie internet piracy" is something one can be convicted of.
Should fire departments be run as for-profit enterprises, and only purchase fire trucks in jurisdictions where they can make money charging for fire protection services?
In the US, they once were. This is described in the movie "The Corporation", a movie I highly recommend seeing regardless of your take on the power of corporations (including corporate accountability) or patent law. I've seen it a number of times and I'm impressed with its informativeness, candor, and ability to explain the overarching theme of the movie—if corporations have so many of the rights (and so few of the responsibilities) of people, what kind of people are they?.
One of the interviewees in the movie, philosopher Mark Kingwell, describes that fire fighting services were privatized in the US. I'll do what I can to summarize what he said: Homeowners would purchase an agreement with a firefighting organization and their house would bear a placard alerting anyone what firefighting organization would put out a fire on that house. This meant that if one's house was on fire and a competing firefighting truck saw the house in flames, it would roll on by. After all, you had a contract with a different firefighter. Eventually, people figured out that this was a silly arrangement and we collectively paid to fight fires in the country regardless of where they were; we nationalized firefighting.
I'd add that some point out that it is only a matter of time until more Americans reach a comparable epiphany regarding health care service; reaching the same conclusion that other countries have reached—we should all pay for these services and deliver health care to all citizens, focusing on how to keep people well throughout their lives so that we don't spend so much on expensive things like emergency care.
A software licensed under the GPL does not have to provide notice of any changes made from the original work.
While section 2a of the GNU GPL requires "the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change", this clause (like most of the GPL) only kicks in if you distribute the changed program. Whether you distribute the changed program is entirely optional under the GPL.
"Notice of any changes or modifications to the Original Work, including the date the changes were made.
Any modifications of the Original Work must be distributed in such a manner as to avoid any confusion with the Original Work of the copyright holders."
The context in which you quote this makes this quote appear to have come from one or more of the new Microsoft licenses. But I don't see this text in any of the three new Microsoft licenses. Where did it come from?
Giving up your software freedom for some features is unwise. The free software community would not be where it is if the people who wrote and distribute free software behaved as you're advocating now. Proprietors would love to tell us how we can do the jobs they will allow us to do with computers. I understand why you would be attracted to features you miss—you've never been taught to value software freedom for its own sake hence you see nothing wrong with trading it away—but it is better to improve the GIMP to meet your needs.
Please explain what "politics" you're referring to and how they are not in play right now. Some of the biggest businesses in the world are already heavily involved with Linux kernel development. Last I remember, people who don't like the strongly copylefted GNU GPL dismissed it in part on the grounds it was a "political" license (yet they also fail to explain precisely what that means and how that is a bad thing). Also, explain how the license of the Linux kernel (GNU GPL v2 plus linking permission, if I recall correctly) would be somehow obviated by increased involvement by business along the lines the GPL grants.
Free software isn't anti-business, it never was. The free software movement encourages businesses to participate in the freedoms we're all granted so long as they do so as equals, not entities with superior rights. I don't see how organizing to set standards for these issues endangers our software freedom.
And those non-free codecs may do things users don't like (spyware, for instance). Copying those non-free codecs might constitute copyright infringement (depending on the license for the codec), patent infringement, and they just plain won't work if you're not running GNU/Linux on a compatible architecture. Finally, it's great that your relatives and girlfriend enjoy the Linux kernel. I hope they enjoy the rest of the operating system as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC article and the /. summary make similar mistakes that stem from a non-critical examination of the open source movement—using terminology and telling history in such a way as to refer to much the same software as the free software movement refers to but without the ethical component. This is all done to explain how things are strictly from the perspective of business.
As a result, "Linux" mistakenly becomes an entire operating system; not even a share of the credit for GNU, a primary contributor to a GNU/Linux system. Linus Torvalds gets primary credit for lots of work he did not do. If this article really "sums up the rise of non free software in the 1980s and how people and companies like IBM can make money with free software" as the /. summary claims, we should expect to find something to do with free software, no matter how brief or put off onto a link. Yet the BBC's article gives no credit to anyone involved in the free software movement for anything; no credit to the Free Software Foundation for writing the most popular licenses used in FLOSS (most notably the GNU GPL), no credit for any of the work the free software movement did for over a decade before the open source movement existed. We're supposed to treat the freedom-subtracted message the open source movement advocates as progress rather than point out that our freedom is under attack (for example: software patents, DMCA and other similar laws internationally, hardware vendors who won't tell you how the device works and only distribute proprietary software drivers) and it's much harder to gain back our freedom after we have lost it than it is to work to sustain the freedoms we have earned.
Without any examination of ethics, followers of the open source movement are likely to fall into well-understood traps where they accept non-free software. The open source movement never raises the issue of software freedom. Instead, this movement argues that more people should have access to a program's source code so that the program will be developed more quickly, at lower cost, and with fewer bugs. This increase in access to the source code does not necessarily include the program's users. Such a perspective is not the same as a the free software movement's perspective and simply doesn't go far enough to ensure our software freedom. This lack of political expertise and failure to inform others about the traps threatening our community will hurt us, in the long run.
I have no problem with people making money by developing, supporting, and distributing free software. But there are more important concerns in life. Consider what Richard Stallman calls "businessism": (about 1 hour and 2 minutes into the show)
Your post is rightfully moderated as flamebait, but since your history is wrong I'll try to correct your misunderstanding: the open source movement started over a decade after the free software movement did (the GNU Project, which started the free software movement, began in 1984; the Open Source Initiative, which started the open source movement, began in 1997). So, if there's any "parasitic hijacking" going on, it would have to be the open source movement's doing.
The Free Software Foundation, not the OSI, writes the most important and popular licenses in the free software community—most notably the GNU General Public License, but also the GNU Lesser General Public License, and the GNU Free Documentation License. If these licenses are "open source" licenses at all it is only because they happen to meet the Open Source Definition. Merely complying with a set of terms is nothing compared to writing the licenses and building a community. But these licenses were all written explicitly to pursue software freedom (as the language of all of these licenses make abundantly clear). In fact, both released versions of the GPL were written before there was an open source movement. Software freedom for users is a framing of ethical issues which the open source movement doesn't engage in.
But I prefer to think of the two movements having different philosophies and understand the philosophies for what they are. This way I can better understand the choices the organizations that define the terms "free software" and "open source" make and place them in historical context.
Copyright is established and enforced by governments. If government were truly uninvolved, the free software community would not be "fine" because we'd have no way to enforce the terms of any of our copyright licenses. Without the threat of enforcing one's rights under law, I doubt that proprietary software distributors would refrain from distributing proprietary variants of free software programs. To put a fine point on it, Microsoft (today's 800 lb. gorilla of the proprietary software world) would be able to distribute a proprietary set of GNU programs. Users would be in almost the same trap they are now with proprietary software—users might be able to distribute verbatim copies of programs but users would be denied any way to inspect or modify the binaries distributed to them and the entire free software community would end up treating all proprietary software businesses like charities. This is not a good trade; we would lose far more than we gain.
Patent law is established and enforced by governments too. Patent-holding organizations (most notably IBM because IBM holds the most patents) would not like that situation either because their patents would have no value. In this hypothetical situation, there would be nothing to stop anyone from dealing in formerly patented ideas. I only mention this because I think it would mean that there would be large numbers of people and organizations opposed to government doing away with copyright and patent regimes.
No matter which way you do this, you're merely switching masters—from the proprietary RealPlayer format to the patent-encumbered MP3 format. Unless there is some new reverse-engineered RealPlayer codec I don't know about, merely decoding the RealPlayer data will require proprietary software.
The first page you linked to is particularly unintentionally funny on this ground: its author boldly claims that there is a "spyware free" RealPlayer program from the BBC. How would most users learn what the program actually does if the program is proprietary? They wouldn't, of course, users are encouraged to take on faith that this program has no spyware; perhaps because other users of this program didn't (somehow) see this program do anything untoward. So these early users simply assume that the program is incapable of doing anyhing undesirable outside the perview of the user. The idea that looking at a program's user interface and not knowing all that the program is doing (or capable of doing under the right circumstances) is apparently thrown out of consideration. Because if that line of logic were taken seriously, proprietary programs would be considered unwise to run by default.
I think it is better to preserve your software freedom, get the $15 audio CD, and rip it with free software into an unencumbered format like Ogg Vorbis. This way you don't have to live with DRM, you don't have to settle for a low-quality encoding of the performance, and you can transcode it into a number of other formats as your whim dictates all without losing much quality.
I concur—it's the marketing. iPods are remarkably overpriced and underfeatured for what you get compared to other portable digital audio players. But everyone knows the name "iPod" because of the TV and print ads.
Even things Apple initiated, like the protocol behind what free software users call "ZeroConf" (what Apple now calls "Bonjour") aren't present in iPods despite the nice service it could help provide to iPod users—with wireless communication hardware built into a portable digital audio player, one could share audio clips, playlists, images, and so on just by being physically near them or on the same local network as them.
If Firefox proponents don't begin to mention software freedom, there will be another reason for MSIE 7 users to stick with MSIE and not download the latest version of Firefox. After all, on Microsoft Windows it is easier to use MSIE than to download and install a replacement web browser. Microsoft can implement all sorts of features that Firefox has today or will get soon, but Firefox respects the user's freedoms to run, inspect, copy, and modify the software and MSIE doesn't. It would be a shame to let this advantage go as if it is less important than feature lists. Paying attention to software freedom is what got us the community that has given us so much. As the FSF has warned us:
Why should Sony be able to get away with blaming it on an errant employee?
Yet another proprietor trying to separate you from your software freedom. From the FSF:
Proven by whom, using what source code? And can you answer this without argument by authority?
What rank would he pull? Or do you really mean state his opinion and hope that it is persuasive to convince those who follow his fork of the Linux kernel to continue in that way? In the free software world, nobody has rank. Some people command more attention ostensibly because of their achievements, or because they have persuaded others that they have good ideas. Positing this as rank leaves many unanswered questions including where this rank came from and how it works absent people who believe they must follow it.
Using a proprietary program (as RootkitRevealer looks to be) to fight the ill effects of another proprietary program (such as AIM chat software) sounds unwise to me.
Speaking of which, Jack Valenti has used information like this in his MPAA stump speech. Last year, Valenti was an invited speaker at the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival. He spoke at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Pine Lounge of the Illini Union. He gave his usual emotional arguments including how researchers can transmit a 2-hour movie in some short period of time.
It was a one-sided venue, by design. Nobody but the audience was there to speak against any of his points. Apparently, Ebert doesn't want an informative discussion expressing an array of views, so he won't invite articulate speakers like Siva Vaidhyanathan, Prof. Lawrence Lessig, or those who back interesting copyright bills like the old HR2601, the Public Domain Enhancement Act. So giving context with some copyright history, responding to his arguments including Constitutional interpretation, and generally explaining the social value of a leaky copyright system is left up to people who happen to be in the room.
From my skimming the website you linked to, it appears that VariCAD is proprietary software. I believe the grandparent and previous posters are referring to free software programs to do CAD work. Hence, I don't think VariCAD will fill the bill.
What if you miss a payment?
This kind of analysis comes up from time to time. It will come up again. I'll take OpenOffice.org over the proprietary alternatives because OpenOffice.org is free software.
I'd rather have a slow free software office suite than a faster proprietary office suite. If I cared enough to fix this in OpenOffice.org, I could do it or hire someone to do it for me. But I'll never fully learn what the proprietary alternatives do when they run, I'll never be able to fix the things I don't like about the proprietary software, and I'll never be able to help my community by sharing improved versions of the proprietary software. I want fast programs but not at the expense of my software freedom.
When this issue is framed in the terms the open source movement uses, proprietors can often gain (or keep) a client. This movement doesn't object to proprietary software, it claims that when more programmers have access to the program's source code and are allowed to change it, the program may see some improvement. This philosophy is one which places business priorities first. The social and ethical effect on the public—the helplessness one feels with programs they can't inspect, change, or share—is reduced to "ideologial tub-thumping" by the Open Source Initiative, which started the open source movement and defines the term "open source". Free software, on the other hand, places a philosophical focus on caring about society, not chiefly business interests. The free software movement talks about giving me the freedom to decide how the program should work for me. This stresses placing the limitations of what I can do on me: I get to choose how much programming I want to learn and I get to decide someone else to do for me. And, most importantly, the free software movement celebrates the spirit of voluntary cooperation, what keeps society from being a dog-eat-dog jungle. I don't object to the open source movement's priorities in themselves, but I don't think they go far enough to help improve society, and I do think it is computer user's job to care about what kind of society we are allowed to have.
Software proprietors love to frame the debate on money. This keeps software proprietors in the running for gaining, or in this case, maintaining a client. Microsoft is perfectly willing to give copies of its proprietary software to people gratis in order to keep them divided and helpless. There's plenty of money to be had with support contracts and upgrades down the road. This is why Microsoft's rep was so interested in framing Massachusetts' problems around document preservation and future reading on the argument of how much the project would cost the state. If you haven't heard the discussion for yourself, you should listen to it.
Massachusetts wasn't concerning themselves with software acquisition just yet. They made this very clear in their discussion. But it appears that PriceWaterhouseCoopers is. So, it becomes relevant to point out that framing the debate on software acquisition around the freedom to run, share, and modify computer software is a superior argument to the cost of the software. Alas, the open source movement doesn't encourage anyone to think about software freedom; that movement's message focuses on software development chiefly to businesses that develop software. Talking about software freedom to all computer users has been the long-held ground of the free software movement.
You completely ignore the ethical ramifications of non-free software, and you don't seem to have any criticism of corporate welfare either. It's also telling that pursuing free software gets called "zealotry" while a proprietor pursuing its ends gets no such namecalling.
If you're going to make legal analysis, at least try to use the correct terms. It's headlines like these that confuse the public into believing that "movie internet piracy" is something one can be convicted of.
In the US, they once were. This is described in the movie "The Corporation", a movie I highly recommend seeing regardless of your take on the power of corporations (including corporate accountability) or patent law. I've seen it a number of times and I'm impressed with its informativeness, candor, and ability to explain the overarching theme of the movie—if corporations have so many of the rights (and so few of the responsibilities) of people, what kind of people are they?.
One of the interviewees in the movie, philosopher Mark Kingwell, describes that fire fighting services were privatized in the US. I'll do what I can to summarize what he said: Homeowners would purchase an agreement with a firefighting organization and their house would bear a placard alerting anyone what firefighting organization would put out a fire on that house. This meant that if one's house was on fire and a competing firefighting truck saw the house in flames, it would roll on by. After all, you had a contract with a different firefighter. Eventually, people figured out that this was a silly arrangement and we collectively paid to fight fires in the country regardless of where they were; we nationalized firefighting.
I'd add that some point out that it is only a matter of time until more Americans reach a comparable epiphany regarding health care service; reaching the same conclusion that other countries have reached—we should all pay for these services and deliver health care to all citizens, focusing on how to keep people well throughout their lives so that we don't spend so much on expensive things like emergency care.
Please do specify who you're talking about and provide some quotes to back up this namecalling.
While section 2a of the GNU GPL requires "the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change", this clause (like most of the GPL) only kicks in if you distribute the changed program. Whether you distribute the changed program is entirely optional under the GPL.
The context in which you quote this makes this quote appear to have come from one or more of the new Microsoft licenses. But I don't see this text in any of the three new Microsoft licenses. Where did it come from?
Yes, I now realize that my "anonymous" post undid my moderation. Oh well.
Giving up your software freedom for some features is unwise. The free software community would not be where it is if the people who wrote and distribute free software behaved as you're advocating now. Proprietors would love to tell us how we can do the jobs they will allow us to do with computers. I understand why you would be attracted to features you miss—you've never been taught to value software freedom for its own sake hence you see nothing wrong with trading it away—but it is better to improve the GIMP to meet your needs.
Please explain what "politics" you're referring to and how they are not in play right now. Some of the biggest businesses in the world are already heavily involved with Linux kernel development. Last I remember, people who don't like the strongly copylefted GNU GPL dismissed it in part on the grounds it was a "political" license (yet they also fail to explain precisely what that means and how that is a bad thing). Also, explain how the license of the Linux kernel (GNU GPL v2 plus linking permission, if I recall correctly) would be somehow obviated by increased involvement by business along the lines the GPL grants.
Free software isn't anti-business, it never was. The free software movement encourages businesses to participate in the freedoms we're all granted so long as they do so as equals, not entities with superior rights. I don't see how organizing to set standards for these issues endangers our software freedom.
And those non-free codecs may do things users don't like (spyware, for instance). Copying those non-free codecs might constitute copyright infringement (depending on the license for the codec), patent infringement, and they just plain won't work if you're not running GNU/Linux on a compatible architecture. Finally, it's great that your relatives and girlfriend enjoy the Linux kernel. I hope they enjoy the rest of the operating system as well.