I agree. I think they used the term 'open source' in reference to the freedoms that open source licenses often afford. I'm sure RMS doesn't like the inclusion of this sentence.
> The rules of open source were first introduced by computer scientists in the GNU Manifesto and lead to development of the General Public Licence (GPL) and Creative Commons Licence, which are often used instead of copyright.
From their unordered list of items on the technical roadmap they include the following.
- Make it safer for passengers and drivers
- Add drivers/passengers rating
- Make it easier to use and safer for moms/dads and children
- Make it easier to use for people with disabilities
Who knows if they'll do those things. They seem to be aware of some of the challenges. In regards to #2 they are probably planning on relying on donations in the short term.
Same here. I'll gladly downgrade some specs if it means I can run all free software on my phone. Trying to get google off of an unlocked android phone is still an uphill battle. Root access out of the box means I can install the software I want and remove software I don't (a novel idea).
The Purism team has accomplished an impressive feat with the Librem 5. Porting GNU/Linux onto a smart phone is a huge win for free software. I hope the transparency and upstream patches continue long in the future.
> It seems like you are recommending teaching something which is entirely different to what the vast majority of learners will come into contact with on a regular basis in their future lives. That is not useful and it does not prepare people for the real world.
Many free software replacements for proprietary software are quite similar to the locked down alternatives. Maybe if people learned a different program in school then they would continue to use it in their future lives. That would increase the number of users and the chances that other people would encounter it in the real world.
Proprietary software encourages dependence on a single company and discourages learning, the primary goal of an education institution. Realistically it is near impossible to live today without encountering proprietary software, but educational institutions should be more responsible about how they frame students' relationships with it.
> In the United States, it is the done thing to file taxes through a proprietary software portal (as the result of extensive lobbying). [Yes, this state of affairs is a travesty] Should schools, therefore, avoid teaching people how to file taxes?
Areas where centralization and high levels of security are important such as tax filing, flight booking, and online banking will likely use proprietary software for the foreseeable future. Rather than taking the strict stance that these activities must not occur on school grounds they should teach students how to protect themselves from potential harms of proprietary software (e.g. by running programs in isolated environments).
Another class of instruments that has evolved in all of the ways you named is the synthesizer. Certainly vocal performance is a very old tradition but to write off synth vocals as superficial is in my opinion throwing the baby out with the bath water. Sound synthesis has gone from an experimental and avant-garde playground to one of the most expressive and versatile fields of music composition.
Techniques like additive, FM, and physical modeling synthesis have opened up whole new worlds of musical possibilities to explore. The combination of synths with vocals only widens the expressivity, range, color, and ultimately individualism that voice alone can accomplish. For every autotuned vocal track in bad taste there are just as many creative uses of vocoders, talk boxes, filters and samplers that enhance creative expression.
Internet radio may be able to solve your problem. Music podcasts, and internet radio sites/apps mean geographic location is no longer the limiting factor for what you can listen to.
There are big names like iHeartRadio and SlackerRadio but lots of smaller radio stations have internet streams and/or apps. Podcasts are nice because they can focus on niche genres or provide more information about artists/releases. Mixcloud is one of my favorite sites for listening to radio shows.
The concept seems obvious, but often times free software activists forget or are unaware of lessons like this. Because free software activists are willing to make sacrifices to preserve their freedoms, they sometimes forget that others are not willing to make those same sacrifices.
Getting end users and often developers interested in your project isn't easy. The vendor lock in proprietary software companies use makes it even more difficult to get users even if a free solution is better. The goal of a project should be to grow the community outside of just the free software community by improving the software until it's eventually better than proprietary alternatives.
I've seen two arguments on why to trust Wikileaks.
Wikileaks itself likes to say nothing they have published has been disputed as being incorrect. Since 2006 they have never published a retraction/correction and Wikileaks claims that no one has proven a factual inaccuracy in any of the documents they published. I don't know of any factual inaccuracies myself, but if you know of any I would be interested to hear about it. I think most can agree that this is uncommon in most media (mainstream or otherwise).
Another weaker argument is the incredible lengths various governments have gone to suppress Wikileaks. The demonization of Wikileaks (especially in the media) is sometimes cited as a reason to trust its publications. The argument goes that because Wikileaks is attacked by such powerful and arguably corrupt institutions that Wikileaks must be a perceived threat to these institutions. On its face, this argument is much weaker than the previous one. Censorship of InfoWars makes the comparison you made seem quite apt in this regard. Another counterargument to this point is that apparent opposition can be purely theatrical similar to professional wrestling. Lenin's quote on controlled opposition is appropriate in this context.
This was my position as well. I haven't pre-ordered the phone but the closer it gets to April the more I'm excited to have a freedom respecting phone. Even if the reviews are bad I'll probably still buy one to hack against and contribute back to.
I'm not sure about the identification of users and universal ID issue, but I can speak to the installation pieces.
The license the project uses (AGPLv3) requires any server running a modified version of the software must include the source code. While it may not be possible to verify the source code running on someone else's server, you have the freedom to run the program on a server that you control. This ensures the version you are interacting with is not tampered with. Because the source code (and any modified code you can access on a network) are available, you or others can audit the code for security vulnerabilities.
This isn't a perfect solution because not everyone knows how to set up a server, but it definitely reduces the potential for abuse.
I am happy to see someone mention freedom in this thread. I believe the term "open source" distracts from the more prescient issue of user freedom.
One of the issues with SSPL is that it intertwines the ideas of an AGPL style copyleft with an allowance for SaaS use cases, specifically in section 13 of SSPL. I would argue this is more pernicious than an openly proprietary license for precisely the wolf in sheep's clothing reasoning you mentioned. People adopting MongoDB and its endorsement of SaaS may believe they're supporting the values of "open source", but they're sacrificing user freedom as Stallman points out in this blog post.
This guy seems like he is genuinely trying to discover what occurred. But where is the evidence that Russia was responsible for the DNC hacks? Metadata analysis seems to indicate someone inside of the DNC was responsible for the leaks.
https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/2018/12/18/guccifer-2-...
> Everyone who's ever sat in traffic. It's a miserable experience and it is indeed a fundamentally better thing to be able to use that time in a more productive or entertaining fashion. Few people care if the steering wheel is entirely absent, so long as it's not needed and it's not in the way.
I'm sure many car enthusiasts care whether the steering wheel is entirely absent. Some people enjoy driving, albeit usually in times/places without much traffic. If someone who found driving therapeutic instead spends their commute time staring at a social media feed on their phone because that's their default action when they aren't sure what to do, would that be fundamentally better for them?
> Who is defining progress that way? Everyone I know who wants a self-driving car wants it to go where they tell it to.
Of course everyone wants self-driving cars to go where they tell it, but that is different from having control over where the car goes. What if the AI that controls the self-driving car takes 99% of people to their destination, but rounds up a few political dissidents and whisks them away to an unknown location. Most everyone would get what they want, but none of the passengers are able to control where the AI takes them. Like Stallman says, "Either the users control the program or the program controls the users."
