Re: Shannon Dosemagen and the FSF

[Alexandre François Garreau]

Le lundi 2 mars 2020, 20:06:25 CET Leo Famulari a écrit :
> John Darrington wrote:
> > Over the last few years many people have noticed a shift towards
> > extremist support of idealogy which is orthogonal to the Free
> > Software cause.
> Issues like privacy online, software patents, DRM, open document
> formats, etc are also orthogonal to the 4 software freedoms but I do
> think they are relevant enough that it makes sense for the FSF to focus
> on them. If anything it strengthens the cause by bringing more people
> in, people who might not care about free software yet.

No they’re not.  Except for “privacy online” which is really broad, they 
(as well as either forced or monitored advertisement) are all opposed 
notions to free software, as they’re typically not possible to implement 
with free software… or then it’s that it’s not really free software 
anymore: they need respectively to give up on freedoms…
  — #2 (patents forgive you that, as copyright could (without a free 
license)),
  — #0 (you should be able to run software to break the law) and 1 (you 
should be able to extract DRM encryption key from software… so that you 
can modify the software, or decrypt and copy and share the content anyway 
(so no DRM anymore)), and
  — #1 (if you can inspect the implementation, and have stable archive of 
it, the format is open (lack of documentation is imperfection, not 
injustice), other issues are related to patents).

“Privacy online” might be more distant… but yet you cannot achieve it 
without free software.  And you cannot achieve reliable surveillance with 
only free software (as it would then allow for obfuscation (like tor) and 
falsification of data (same holds for advertisement)).