Submitted by “In the physical world, we have the right to print and sell books. Anyone trying to stop us would need to go to court. That right is weak in the UK (consider superinjunctions), but at least it exists. However, to set up a web site we need the cooperation of a domain name company, an ISP, and often a hosting company, any of which can be pressured to cut us off. In the US, no law explicitly requires this precarity. Rather, it is embodied in contracts that we have allowed those companies to establish as normal. It is as if we all lived in rented rooms and landlords could evict anyone at a moment’s notice.” Recommended reading. I’m no fan of Stallman, but despite a bit too much dramatisation towards the end, this article aptly illustrates in layman’s terms why the ‘net needs to be free, open, and unregulated.
We needs ALL to protect our kids from pr0n ! Assange is a rapist, let’s censor him : QED !
Kochise
1. Assange is not accused of rape, but of sexual assault. That is definite not the same.
2. He is accused, not yet convicted.
That was sarcasm, I think.
French-flavored I may add
Kochise
sarcasm aside.what happens if the situation goes the way of Hans Reiser and ReiserFS , its a curse and a blessing that Open projects identify so strongly with their founders , does WÄ°kileaks survive or do we go back to square zero.
Well, I think that the main benefit of foss is forking (beside the meritocratic conspiracy) and able to go beyond the original authors’ limitation. Reiser, while being a decent coder, has his own personal problems, so do everyone of use to some deeper or lesser extend. I think the web is nowhere more than that, a platform on which people behaves and shares common knowledges and/or curses. Would regulating the web solve the irl problems ?
Kochise
we never left square zero …
the fact that we are discussing this is the best prove of it
One count of rape, one count of sexual assault. He is accused of penetrating a woman while she was unconscious. That’s definitely rape in the US, I imagine it is in Sweden too.
That’s not exactly true. He is being accused of having sex with a woman without a condom. While still a serious crime (if true), it’s not nearly as bad as what people usually think of when they hear “rape”.
I didn’t know sex without condoms was illegal in Sweden. How do they procreate?
Edited 2011-01-03 17:59 UTC
It seems Thom left out the important bit: “Without her approval after the fact”
Requiring approval after the fact? Now that’s interesting law.
I agree, what if you have a bad day and she decides after the fact that it just wasn’t worth her time… Swedish men must have a lot of performance anxiety.
Edited 2011-01-03 21:27 UTC
One of the accusations is that he started to have sex with a woman while she was still asleep, i.e. being woken by or after the inital penetration.
Which would already make this non-consentual since a sleeping person cannot give or withdraw consent.
And I think another detail of that accusation was that she insisted on use of a condom on the evening before, making it highly likely that she would do so again on the next morning. Or would have done so if been given the opportunity to actual participate in this decision.
Edit: I wanted to apologize for continuing this offtopic thread branch, since the article is about kettling Wikileaks by cutting it off from its distribution and supply channels
Edited 2011-01-04 12:13 UTC
Whoops, you’re right. That OBVIOUSLY needs to be in there.
The condom too.
as did his penis.
… sorry, too easy.
What do you mean unregulated? I thought RMS and Thom support Net Neutrality?
Unregulated, not having interference from officials (government, law, lobby, whatever) However having KP banned is the exception. Then add terrorism, piracy, dictatorship, money regulation. Plus moralism, religious, drm, etc, enforced. Pour, boil, stir, taste, and you get an unregulated web.
Kochise
Net neutrality *is* about an unregulated internet. A lot of right-wingers think “unregulated” means “The government makes no rules so the corporations can make whatever rules they like, screwing the public if they will” but true non-regulation includes having no regulation at the direction of a ISPs or backbone providers.
Hint: It’s not unregulated if Comcast can tell me I can’t run an SMTP server and that certain websites require “premium” fees to access, even if the government hasn’t told them to do that.
I find the following quote from the article interesting:
You know, it’s interesting… when people attempt to defend piracy (or copyright infringement), they say it is not the same as walking into a store and stealing the physical content, because digital and physical content are not the same. On the other hand, some of these same people cry and scream when they can’t sell digital content, because afterall, if I can sell a physical book, why couldn’t I sell a virtual one? I mean, they’re the same thing, right? Well, you’re gonna have to decide whether physical/digital goods are the same or not. You can’t claim the two are the same/different only when it’s convenient. (Same logic applies to content owners as well).
As for Amazon’s DRM on ebooks, I have one word for you – unswindle. Look it up. I don’t have a problem with buying DRM’d content, as long as I can crack it
Ah, Stallman. He’s just as pushy and painfully-transparent in his agenda as any marketdroid or propagandist in history, and yet he gets lauded for it. Aside from grooming habits, the only real difference between RMS and Steve Jobs is that Jobs gets paid to be an obnoxious ideologue.
This is painfully stupid. To get a book released to a market of any significant size, you need a publisher/printer, a distributor, and retailers – any of which can be “pressured to cut us off.”
There are 2 possibilities here. Either Stallman is being disingenuous, or he’s truly unable to grasp the reasons why an electronic transfer of money (possibly crossing international borders) differs from an in-person cash transaction. The guy sounds so paranoid, he probably thinks that the “Memo” field on cheques are part of some Big Brother-esque conspiracy to spy on him.
Wow. So software designed specifically and solely for malicious use is A-OK in Stallman’s eyes, just so long as it’s Free Software(tm)? But not closed source software, because it might, potentially have hidden malicious functionality?
At least we now know the origin of the “all proprietary software should be assumed to be malware” idiocy that lemming2 was spouting recently. It’s exactly the same reasoning as “if you want privacy, then you must have something to hide”, just applied to source code.
Very transparent trolling, given that your name is “Ballmer Knows Best.” 3/10. Try again some other time.
You think that RMS isn’t paid? What do you think he eats? Wait, don’t tell me, bugs, right? And he probably is homeless so he sleeps in the dirt! That explains his grooming habits! Grow up.
To get published initially there are barriers in both places. However, once a book has been published in the physical world it is far, far harder to ‘retract’ it, whereas in the digital world it’s pretty easy (streisand effect notwithstanding). Did you miss this obvious point deliberately or are you just not paying attention? Oh wait, I forgot you’re just trolling. Nevermind.
Because he notes a difference between the online transfer of money and the meatspace transfer of money you think he must be being disingenuous? On what basis? He says “It’s different” and you say “I KNOW IT’S DIFFERENT.” I’m really trying to figure out your point here. Stallman’s is pretty clear: Anonymous monetary transactions *should* be possible online, and they’re not. Dare I assume that you at any time *had* a point by asking what it was?
Obviously you don’t grasp the difference between you attacking someone and someone else attacking you. If I take open software and use it maliciously, I’m harming someone else deliberately. That’s on me. If I run closed software, innocently or maliciously, someone else is harming me. Stallman isn’t trying to prevent you from behaving criminally, though it’s a shame, he’s trying to protect you from others who are making a specific kind of attempt to harm you.
Edited 2011-01-03 19:26 UTC
And yet, you still replied.
Why would I want to do that? If the purpose of my post & username was trolling, then it’s clearly worked on you.
As you have some problems with basic reading comprehension, allow me to repeat that sentence, this time with emphasis on the part that you conveniently ignored.
“the only real difference between RMS and Steve Jobs is that Jobs gets paid to be an obnoxious ideologue”
The detail that completely invalidates your point is “notwithstanding”? Well how wonderfully convenient!
Get your own material, kid, I don’t need you riding my coattails.
Stallman’s being disingenuous by trying to imply that, in contrast to the internet, anonymous transfer of money is the norm in meatspace (that wasn’t true even before credit cards, last I looked cheques and money orders aren’t anonymous either).
And how exactly do you suggest we implement anonymous online funds transfers? Or for that matter, how do you suggest we make ANY non-cash funds transfer truly anonymous?
So you’re saying that you consider the “harm” caused by non-malicious closed source software to be worse or on par with the harm caused by software such as LOIC (which is specifically and blatantly intended to be used maliciously), so long as the source is available for the malice-enabling applications? Do you have any notion how ridiculous that sounds?
Oh, and I have to pick out this little gem:
Hahaha, seriously? And can you give any specific example how that harms you? Sorry, but the “evils of proprietary software” rhetoric starts to ring a bit hollow when you’re comparing them to actual, tangible harms (such as the harm caused by DDoS attacks)
Without getting into the wider argument, there are many good ways that have been proposed to allow anonymous fund transfers online, such as using blind signatures. Here’s a brief explanation about it: http://tinyurl.com/blindsig (PDF). There have been a whole variety of other approaches proposed with varying characteristics too.
There might be good legal reasons why you might not want to set up a scheme like this (e.g. money laundering), but technologically it could be done.
I was pointing out that it was badly transparent, not that I wasn’t going to feed you.
Who do you think pays RMS and what do you think they pay him for? He is paid for what he does. If you wan’t to call it being an obnoxious ideologue, fine. He still gets paid to do it. Which makes him no different from Jobs.
Not really sure why you tried to offer a defense that supports my point, but thanks.
It certainly does not. If I thought it invalidated my point I would not have brought it up and would have put the burden of bringing it up convincingly to you.
There is a certain amount of the streisand effect in play even in meatspace: A censored book might be hoarded, copied or republished by another party in an attempt to thwart censorship. Regardless, it’s tangential to the point; even on the internet the effect is not a universal cure for all censorship. Even taking the effect in to account it’s far easier to take a web site than to retract all copies of a particular book that may have been sold.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of “notwithstanding”? It means “In spite of” not “Not counting.”
If plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery I think you ought not to object to that which, therefore, was the only part of my post that could be considered complimentary.
In meatspace the anonymous transfer of money is possible, common and accepted. Anonymous transfer of money on the internet is only theoretically possible at the moment, not common and is viewed with suspicion. Whether or not it is the norm for most transactions in meatspace is irrelevant and does not make Stallman disingenuous; only your biased interpretation does that.
You ask this as if it’s such an imponderable that no reply is possible. I will just point my finger toward Google and let any potential reader trivially disprove your implication himself.
It must take a very ‘special’ kind of intellect to read something so far fetched in to my comment. I specifically said that any malicious behavior on my part is my fault, having nothing to do with the license of the software. There are groups who work to prevent and punish malicious use of software and Stallman, without endorsing such behavior, is not a spokesperson for such efforts.
The only person trying to compare the morality of “using closed source software” and “using LOIC” is you. No one else is attempting to compare them. I was merely pointing out that Stallman is trying to protect you from others who attempt to harm you by giving you closed source software and not trying to protect you from harm you may do to yourself, or protect other people from actions you take (unless the action is giving someone else closed source software), again without endorsing those harmful actions. Free software is neither good nor evil and does not discriminate against fields of endeavor, even criminal endeavor, and that is not an endorsement of criminal behavior but merely a statement of fact.
Whether or not using LOIC is moral, or better, or worse than using closed source software in general, none of these things entered in to the topic until you brought them up.
If you want to debate the relative morality of these things that can be done, but to say that Stallman was making a declaration of opinion on a topic that you brought up later is ridiculous and representative of your desire to confuse people and incite negativity toward Stallman, and is not any reflection of reality.
Edited 2011-01-06 12:54 UTC
I would sign on some words but do not attach GNU license here. Yes, we need to fight for our rights in Internet to match their equivalent in the real word. But I can not sign on the statement, that Stallman’s initiative with software is a kind of freedom. GNU license is restrictive, it limits creator in what he can do with his creation, like all other proprietary licenses do. So, this article becomes a kind of commercial: “fight freedom, buy from us”.
Edited 2011-01-03 23:52 UTC
I have to second this: the GPL is obviously less free than a BSD for instance. The GPL **warrants** that I also publish as GPL in case I use anything GPL-licensed. I see this as a limitation of my freedom to publish my work as CC or Apache or BSD or whatever else license I want and this is why I don’t use any GPL code.
I guess it depends on which you think is more important: the freedom of an individual to make use of your code as he or she chooses, or the freedom for society in general to access the source code of the software it uses.
Personally I’m not sure either are a right, but they both strike me as types of freedom (both of which are worth promoting).
True, and not so true. Keeping the code open never prevented people from making a bussiness out of GPL, several companies do ‘sell’ GPL-code. In fact, they sell the services to maintain the code and having it open ensure the client to 1/ control what’s is inside the code 2/ switch maintainer if original publisher/maintainer disapear (bloody raging captalism)
Having GPL code is not *THE* problem all along, provided your product *CAN* be as open. No, *THE* problem is where the product have to *HIDE* something from eyes, like secret cryptography or receipe, drm, whatever. Thus using GPL should in some extend obligate you to open your code in GPL as well. On the other hand you could always give the finger salute to RMS and protect your ‘privacy’ bits inside a dll or similar. However RMS is a pitbull when it comes to defend his dogma…
I do (and prefer) using/releasing in zlib/png licence, which is pretty close to public domain ou MIT, to sum up : do whatever you want, close the code, open it, burn your guitar, listen to meatloaf, … You ethic as a coder shouldn’t be driven by someone’s paranoid beliefs in “openess” but by providing the *BEST* solution to a problem, period. So do people’s ethic shouldn’t be dictated by religious means or similar tubes, common sense and citizenship should be enough. But that’s another story…
Kochise
There are three ways in which this statement is incorrect:
Firstly, the GNU license (aka the GPL) is chosen by the creator to apply to a piece of his/her software. If the creator does not want the GPL license to apply, then it does not.
Secondly, the creator of a piece of software can choose to license it any way he/she wants to, including the possibility of dual-licensing the one piece of software as both proprietary and GPL, with different restrictions under each license.
Finally, license restrictions are restrictions that the creator of a piece of software imposes on the recipients of said software. These restrictions do not apply to the creator.
In the physical world, we have the right to print and sell books. Anyone trying to stop us would need to go to court. That right is weak in the UK (consider superinjunctions), but at least it exists. However, to set up a web site we need the cooperation of a domain name company, an ISP, and often a hosting company, any of which can be pressured to cut us off…
To publish and sell a book, you need a publisher, printer, wholesaler, retailer and willing purchasers – any of which can be pressured. I am sure there are many aspiring novelists out there who will tell you that publishing and selling books is not a right.