Posted by Mike on Oct 12th, 2006
It would be hard to resist posting both of these stories found on digg today:
Posted in the order I found them, working “up” from page 1 in the technology category.
Quite honestly, neither of their arguments was very persuasive for me, but others might see things differently.
There’s a long standing debate between myself and a friend on IRC about Richard M. Stallman (RMS) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and this is the sort of thing that give me a bad feeling about the FSF from time to time.
GNU makes some great software. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME), EMACS (Editing MACroS), and really way too many to even begin to list here!
My problem isn’t with the developers from GNU, or even open source software, it’s from the people who deal in the politics of it all.
Yes, it’s great that people can get the source code to projects, modify them, and distribute those changes to the world. Yes, I agree that DRM evil and should be called “Digital Restrictions Management”, since it certainly infringes upon consumers rights. And, yes, I think that Microsoft needs some serious competition again so that they might actually cleanup their OS.
But no, I don’t think that Mozilla’s request is unreasonable. Heck, as people have pointed out, Debian does the same thing with their logo.
But no, I don’t think the way to win fights against DRM is to put language into the General Public License to stop it. I don’t think there’s a reason for that, because I think DRM will have to go away at some point for reasons that are way beyond the scope of this article.
No, I doubt many people use GNU software because of the “freedoms” it grants, they do it because it’s good software. People use Linux because it’s stable, fast, and has many features. People call it Linux because it’s quick and easy, not because they have some secret desire to slight GNU.
I personally will probably not use IceWeasel, because, well, I have FireFox installed on my computer right now. I have it installed on all of my computers, in fact. Now, if someone wanted to fork FireFox or create a plug-in that allowed for manipulation of requests, etc so that I could develop with it better, I’d be all for that.
But just a copy of FireFox with a different “free” logo and minor changes? Nah, I’ll stick with what I have, thanks.
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Let the weasel live!…
First you should read up on five reasons to kill or support the weasel.
IceWeasel is Debian’s (and therefor Ubuntu’s) reply to the issues with Mozilla and their trademark policies which prohibits Ubuntu to distribute Firefox. IceWeasel is …