good heavens, not this drivel again please [LWN.net]

good heavens, not this drivel again please

Posted Feb 21, 2012 12:21 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)
In reply to: good heavens, not this drivel again please by felixfix
Parent article: VLC 2.0 released

Whether it's the government deciding saccharin is bad for everybody or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs deciding what software I can use on my computer or coriordan deciding what license is best for someone else's software, the common thread is to unilaterally decide for other people, based on "I am ideologically pure".

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to name the rhetorical trick being used here. Last time I checked, Windows was still being bundled on most computers sold at retail, people were still having to take vendors to court to get Windows "unbundled", and Apple were still insisting that you can only use their "App Store" to get software and that they were the ones who decided what should and shouldn't be available. Meanwhile, Ciarán O'Riordan still doesn't seem to have the power to decide which licence people get to use.

And I see that the challenge to raise the standard of discussion was met with pop-culture religion and communism references. It's clearly not so much a matter of putting words into other people's mouths as stuffing a whole dictionary in there.

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good heavens, not this drivel again please

Posted Feb 21, 2012 15:50 UTC (Tue) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Go ahead and read "communism" and "religion" pop culture references into my comment, or fail to see any valid comparison. That's what the FSF does too, cover its ears and pretend its opinions are still relevant. They used to matter a lot more, before they became so shrill and isolated. That's the real message. The FSF and Richard Stallman come across as a wannabe Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, wanting the whole world to do as they dictate merely because they say so. Just because they don't have that power doesn't make their message any less obnoxious.

Sometimes leaders need to look behind them to make sure someone is still following.

good heavens, not this drivel again please

Posted Feb 21, 2012 16:03 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Actually, you weren't the source of most of the blatant references to religious and political clichés, but terms like "true believers" certainly help to keep the discussion civilised, I always find.

And my point that people project undue influence onto the FSF (or other organisations, along with anyone who happens to agree with them in any way) is illustrated very well by your response. I sometimes wonder, in an era when anyone and everyone has an opinion and where filtering out those opinions is a part of everyday life, what motivation anyone would have to complain about the influence of an organisation by comparing it to a selection of large corporations who have far more influence over policy, commerce and the lifestyle of individuals than the FSF with its comparatively modest campaigning.

good heavens, not this drivel again please

Posted Feb 21, 2012 20:31 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

So we don't need to worry about the FSF going off the deep end until they're big enough that it actually matters?

Not sure I agree with that.

good heavens, not this drivel again please

Posted Feb 22, 2012 12:57 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Well, if enough people object to the FSF's views, the growth of the organisation and its influence will be self-limiting, although the campaigns that seem to annoy some people seem fairly innocuous: spelling out the disadvantages to society and the end-user about things like DRM and various control features in, say, Windows is really only about telling people things that they may (or may not) want to hear.

Of course you will always get people who will claim "brainwashing" and that people are somehow tricked into supporting such organisations. Again, this is a laughable assertion when hundreds of millions of people probably have to listen to the Windows jingle every day using products (and being shown advertisements) made by an industry that has systematically reduced choice over the last two decades, with most of these people living in societies where brand loyalty is regarded more highly than objective consideration of any particular set of issues.