Digital Citizen

Illuminata Analyst Gordon Haff is quoted as saying

If people get the impression that even inadvertent license violations will get them involved with lawyers, you could well see some making the call that it’s safer to stay away from open source

The GNU GPL is not an “open source” license except that the Open Source Initiative organization placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. This is trivial in comparison to writing and maintaining the license. The GPL was written by the Free Software Foundation, an organization which tells us that they “are not against the Open Source movement, but we don’t want to be lumped in with them” because there are real and significant philosophical differences between the two groups, differences that sometimes lead to radically different conclusions about the harm of proprietary software.

The language and development of the GPL proceeds along the line of defending freedom, something which the Open Source Initiative rejects due to its philosophy which aims to convince businesses and programmers that developmental efficiency is essential. The most recent revision of the GPL (GPLv3) is the first version any open source proponent had a hand in helping to write. The previous versions of the GPL were written before the OSI existed and before there was such a thing as the open source movement. To frame this issue as if “open source” is somehow generic term is merely an attempt to make that philosophy seem more entrenched than it really is (or to define its freedom-eschewing philosophy as the norm).

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Buy Nothing Day encourages you to buy nothing today—”Participate by not participating”.

When AdBusters tried to advertise Buy Nothing Day on television, MTV rejected their ad.

MTV, the channel that markets itself to hip youth, has decreed that our Buy Nothing Day public service spot “goes further than we are willing to accept on our channels”. Gangsta rap and sexualized, semi-naked school girls are okay, but apparently not a burping pig talking about consumption

Visit the AdBusters Buy Nothing Day webpage and tell MTV you object.

According to CNN, Sen. Barack Obama didn’t want him on the ballot.

The Democrats are being shown up by Colbert’s short-lived presidential candidacy. A recent Colbert Report episode features recent corporate news coverage of his campaign and one of the clips shows Colbert polling ahead of a few Democrats. I doubt the Democrats like exposing how managed the elections really are. If anyone is going to take out some of the Democratic Party candidates, it’s going to be the Democrat elite.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Obama’s people pressured the SC Democrats to keep Colbert off the ballot. Obama could easily believe that the high school/college student audience would vote for Obama, given no other choice on the South Carolina Democratic Party primary ballot. So by working to keep Colbert off that ballot, Obama has one less competitor. I believe that Colbert viewers are would-be voters, that they went in with two choices in their head–vote for Colbert or don’t vote at all. Hence, Obama can’t lose voters he never had.

The SC Democrats told Colbert he wasn’t a serious candidate. In other words, he wasn’t viable. If he had spent more time campaigning in SC, maybe the Democrats would allow his name on the Democratic primary ballot. Even Colbert briefly stepped slightly out of character to debunk this one when he interviewed a guest noting that this is how we choose a president?

We’ve heard that line about viability before. It’s the way the Democratic Party faithful describe candidates that aren’t pro-corporate enough or pro-war enough (but I repeat myself). Every 4 years Ralph Nader is insufficiently viable. The particulars of the defense depend on the year. In 2000 and 2008 (if Nader runs again) Nader’s widely-held ideology isn’t enough to engage the electorate to risk not voting out of fear. In 2004 we got that excuse plus the bigger-fish-to-fry excuse: we’re in such a pickle (due to our fear-based voting the previous election cycle) that we need to focus on getting the current president out of office. In 2004 this meant replacing one corporate-funded, pro-war, Skull-and-Bonesman with another. Usually someone will bring up that not voting for the winner means wasting a vote, but nobody states the corollary: millions who voted for Sen. Kerry wasted their vote because Kerry did not become president. And where’s the anger at voting shenanigans? Where’s the huge effort to demand voter-verifiable paper ballots which are retained for any and all recounts, and are hand-counted no matter the delay until results are known?

Don’t worry about voting your values instead of voting your fears: in 4 years the issues will be more serious than they are now because there will be more poverty, more disasters with insufficient relief, and more wars killing your neighbors kids. So better to ignore those who tell you the US can’t afford your-favorite-candidate.

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Free software hacker Jamie McCracken wrote that the One Laptop Per Child machine, known as the XO, shouldn’t allow its users to run non-free operating systems on it. I believe this stems from the common frustration that proprietors are wealthy enough to effectively undo some of the good that comes with a machine like the XO.

Background

The XO will ship with a free software GNU/Linux distribution based on Fedora GNU/Linux. The plans for the XO have always been to allow its users to learn from the machine as much as learn about the machine, so the software that runs on the machine by default will respect the user’s freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify the software. The XO has started a backlash amongst proprietors who have been working on plans to get their proprietary software to run on the XO (as with Microsoft’s Windows) or offer XO target countries an alternative computer that ships with a lot of proprietary software.

A strategy aimed at doing what we should do more of anyways

While it’s certainly frustrating to see a so-called educational machine prohibit its owner and user from making the machine do whatever the user wants, there’s a better way to achieve a comparable result to what McCracken advocates. This method involves a lot of hard work that, historically, few have demonstrated they are interested in doing: teach people the values of software freedom, teach the philosophy behind why the free software movement exists, and help people favor freedom even when faced with robust and capable non-free alternatives. This method will not only give them reason to favor the XO’s software as it ships (or some free alternative), but this method will arm them for when anyone tries to tempt them to give up their freedom. Freedom and community are worth it for their own sake. Dependency and separation from one’s fellows doesn’t help any computer user, regardless of where they live or their income.

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