vote with more than your feet

Posted Sep 24, 2006 23:51 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: DRM is not evil, just useless. by JakeG
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

Voting with your feet is not enough. Purchasing preference is not the only interaction we have in the free market, there is also participation. The options presented to us in the market are simply not granular enough for us to use preferences as a method of economically controlling the suppliers.

In 1983, when it was not possible to run a computer with only free software, instead of lobbying government or campaigning against proprietary software companies, Stallman participated in the free market by writing software and licensing it in a way that would give recipients some useful freedoms.

Back then, the problem was that software was being distributed as binary blobs. So GPLv2 said that distributing the source was required. Today, a new problem is rigging computers to require keys, so GPLv3 will say that if this is done, distributing a suitable key is required.