Hi fellow FSMers, On Mon, Apr 27, 2015, at 07:16, Ben M wrote: > Thanks for the feedback for our "Day Against DRM" letter to Mozilla. I > have made a new revision based on that and have posted it to the wiki. > There's still about a week to go so any further feedback or > refinements welcome.
Thanks everyone for your comments and work on the letter. I'm afraid, though, I'll have to be a dissenting voice on this one. Given the state of the world we live in, I think the Mozilla people have adopted a difficult but justifiable compromise — giving users the option of interacting with DRM if they choose, from a free-software browser, with sandboxing to minimize abuses. I think that much the same arguments being made against Mozilla's stance on this could be applied to say that you shouldn't port Firefox to non-free operating systems, like Windows or even MacOS. (Or, in extreme, even that you shouldn't port free operating systems to machines that don't have entirely free firmware and entirely open hardware design.) You might strongly believe those arguments, but having free software (like Firefox, LibreOffice, The Gimp) ported to non-free operating systems has greatly increased the number of people using and aware of free software, and provides for ordinary people a transition path to using more free software and free operating systems. Even in the early days, porting gcc and GNU tools to proprietary Unixes prepared the way for Linux. For a long long time, free software will have to inter-operate with non-free systems. If we believe free software is a good thing, then we should work towards getting more people using and benefiting from free software. And that means providing transition paths for ordinary people, even though those paths might not be entirely "pure". This is going to be the work of decades. We need to build a ramp so many people can move towards greater freedom, not a high wall that only the few can climb. If free software is only some kind of ascetic practice for the few, then we're not really advancing freedom. I'm reminded of the saying, "It is permissible to walk with the Devil to get to the other side of the bridge." I think our efforts would be better spent working against DRM itself (and more important the distorted copyright system underneath it), rather than firing a shot at an ally who's made an uncomfortable (but in my opinion justifiable) compromise. Just my thoughts on the matter. If the letter represents the prevailing view of FSM, then at least it's giving those views an airing. — Smiles, Les. _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
