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Ruminations on software freedomRuminations on software freedomPosted Aug 30, 2007 12:15 UTC (Thu) by ssharkey (guest, #4451)Parent article: Ruminations on software freedom
Frankly, I hope that we will see more and wider-spread problems like this, sooner rather than later. Most people DO NOT understand the degree to which their freedom has already been encumbered, but incidents like this one will make people aware of the problem better than anything we in the open source community can do.
The problem with the WGA initiative, as well as most of the "phone home" DRM schemes is that this kind of outage is inevitable, so the sooner they happen, and the more widespread the disruption, the sooner people will be shaken out of their complacency and start campaigning to eliminate these schemes.
So, if the failures are gonna happen (and I believe they will), I hope
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Ruminations on software freedom Posted Aug 30, 2007 13:19 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] the more widespread the disruption, the sooner people will be shaken out of their complacency and start campaigning to eliminate these schemes.I'm not that optimistic. The PC is nearly 30 years old and people are too well used to see it crashing, halting, freezing, locking up or generally becaming unusable. Actually my brand new laptop is doing this with Linux too.
Ruminations on software freedom Posted Aug 30, 2007 18:36 UTC (Thu) by pcharlan (guest, #29128) [Link] This is wholly different than computers not working well. I have been watching computers lock up for 30 years, but a couple of months ago while syncing my iPod, iTunes removed an album from my iPod because it decided that I didn't have permission to listen to it.
That album is the only thing I had bought from iTunes. In other words, the one product that it should have known I *did* have the copyright holder's permission to listen to, it erased from my iPod without asking and didn't even tell me how to resolve the situation. (Re-"authorizing" the computer eventually resolved it.)
What makes this different from a crashing computer is that it's not merely being flakey. It's not going to sleep. Rather it's WAKING UP and taking control of things that I'm normally in control of, and I'm utterly at its mercy.
This has happened a couple of times. The first time it happened shocked and outraged me to the point that I won't buy DRM'd music again, no matter how convenient. Because you don't "own" jack squat, and you never know if the computer's going to "let" you listen to it.
Jake, really great article. It should be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
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