Sinabro

Well, this is it. I no longer support RMS’s crusade.

According to Stallman, the Pirate Party’s proposal of a five-year limit on copyright would remove the freedom users have to gain access to source code by eventually allowing its inclusion in proprietary products. Stallman suggests requiring proprietary software to also release its code within five years to even the balance of power.”

Somehow, I had always believed that RMS and, by extension, FSF’s goal was to limit the destructive power of copyright in software business by using its own rules against itself. I had believed that, given the choice between strong, draconian copyright, with GPL taking all its power from the same law, and having no copyright at all for software (or something very short like 5 years), RMS and FSF would choose the latter.

I was wrong. I have said before (not here, ‘probably on Slashdot) that if I ever find out that RMS’s (and, by extension, FSF’s) position was pro-copyright (even if it’s for strengthening copyleft), then I would stop supporting him. This is it.

I do, in general, like free software and will continue to use it, but as a political force I am opposed to the free software movement, now that I know for sure that the movement is led by a statist liberal whose central agenda is forcing others to his will (i.e. forcing proprietary software authors to release the source code, even if they didn’t use any copyleft codes).

As one of the immediate consequences, my FSF associate membership will not be renewed at the end of this month.

P.S. I had been getting fairly annoyed with RMS’s bashing of libertarians (I count Gov. Palin as one, although she may not know that yet) and capitalists (insurance companies and banks) recently anyway. He had, before this, the merit of … being seen as having the right opinions and position on one issue I deeply care about (copyright), but apparently I was wrong about that.

Edit: After all, there is no reason to force arbitrary obligation upon proprietary software authors. Just as the way original patents worked, copyright can be a two-way street. If the authors want copyright protection, they can submit the source code along with copyright registration (as apparently they already have to do, at least for small programs), and this will be public record once the work passes into public domain. If they want to keep the source code secret, then they can do it the same way it’s done in every other industry: keep it a trade secret and don’t tell it to anyone, including the copyright office (and since it was never “published”, it won’t be under copyright protection).

The very first thing we should do with this copyright mess is probably requiring copyright registration (say, within 1 year of original publication, as is done with patents) for copyright protection. If it wasn’t worth registering, then it’s not worth protecting.

Aww … crap.

/etc/cron.monthly/vrms:
Non-free packages installed on plato

sun-java5-bin Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 (architectu
sun-java5-jre Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 (architectu

Contrib packages installed on plato

java-package utility for building Java(TM) 2 related Debian package

That’s not true! Java is free now! It’s even GPL’d.

Oh, well. I guess it’ll take some time for license change to trickle in, even into Debian testing (although, since it was a big news when that happened … I would be very surprised if Debian doesn’t eventually put sun-java into the main depository, rather than letting it sit in nonfree).

novakyu@plato:~$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on plato! rms would be proud.

Sigh. Only if that were true.

Oh, it is true, as in, because my /etc/apt/sources.list only lists the main repository and not the nonfree or the contrib sections, as far as the installed .debs go, there are no non-free softwares on my system.

But, of course, I know my system better than a piece of software, and it so happens that my system has two discrete pieces of non-free software. The first is ATI’s proprietary driver for Radeon (fglrx driver, as they are called). The second is the firmware I need for my internal wireless (yeah, the same problem I had with the ipw2200).

Part of this … compromise is a result of poor research on the hardware I was buying—when I chose the miniPCI wireless card, I should’ve done better research than looking up “linux compatibility”—damn those ndiswrapper users listing a hardware as “linux compatible” because you can trick the hardware into thinking that it’s running under Windows.

But another part was … well, especially for the graphics, I simply didn’t have a choice. Supposing I had free choice of the graphics chipset separately from the CPU (an absurd assumption, but let’s suspend our sense of reality for the moment), I could choose from ATI or nVidia (Intel having been eliminated by the boycott I started recently). Here, my impression was that ATI had better record of working with free driver developers.

But of course, such discussion is academic, since, given my choice of AMD for the CPU, it would have been rather silly to get a system with nVidia graphics. AMD CPU, ATI chipset simply has to mean ATI integrated graphics.

Well, this is getting long-winded, but my only hope is this: Ralink (the chipset manufacturer for both my wireless devices) and ATI are still known to cooperate well with free software developers. For these hardwares, the developers do not need to reverse engineer existing proprietary drivers to get the specs—ATI and Ralink will release what they need. So, one day (perhaps a year from now), there will be a free implementation that provides what I need (which isn’t much—just wireless connectivity and 1280×800 resolution), and I’ll be rid myself of this shame.

But, until then, if I have to commit sin, I’ll do my own dirty work. Using non-free or contrib repositories would make me feel like I am adding to my sin of using non-free software … the sin of having others prepare those non-free software for me. Like committing murder and being an accessory to murder at the same time.