Posted on 08/15/2002 4:54:26 PM PDT by Bush2000
Linux users march on city hall
A small but enthusiastic crowd of Linux lovers hit the streets of San Francisco on Thursday, hoping to trumpet the virtues of open source to lawmakers and voters.
Led by Michael Tiemann, chief technology officer of Linux seller Red Hat, the group marched the mile-long stretch from the LinuxWorld conference to San Francisco City Hall. There Tiemann unveiled the Digital Software Security Act, a proposal that would prohibit the state from buying software that doesn't open its code. Tiemann, wearing a red fedora and clutching a map so he could find his destination, said he also wanted to point out the hypocrisy of the state, which is one of the holdouts in the antitrust battle against Microsoft even as it runs the company's software in government offices.
"While they're spending money suing the monopolist, they're also feeding the monopolist with the other hand," Tiemann told the crowd.
The march attracted the zealous, the fearful and the merely curious.
One marcher, a hotshot Linux programmer who goes by the name of Tack, said it's important that government types listen to open-source advocates before passing laws dealing with technology. He said he's already suffering from federal laws that outlaw certain types of programming that could crack copy protections. "Instead of being able to focus on developing a new technology for my client, I have to think like a lawyer, said Tack, who described himself as a "freelance tech guy." "I don't want to land in jail."
Another marcher, Tim Sullivan, said the event is a chance for programmers to actively protect their right to code.
"I think this is a good chance to stand up for our freedoms," said Sullivan, 22, a computer science student at Oregon State University. "I'm not really a policy person, but it's pretty evident that it's ridiculous to stop people from writing software."
Forming a band of two dozen bobbing red hats, the group snaked through downtown San Francisco, stopping periodically to hear Tiemann cite rights eroded. He spoke of foreign programmers afraid to travel to the United States, content companies with too much power in Washington, and governments financially strangled by their reliance on proprietary software.
Hoping to reach regular folks, marchers wound up Market Street and past rows of outdoor chess players and department store bag-laden tourists. They stopped briefly at the Metreon shopping center, at a cable car turnaround, and finally, on the steps of city hall. Occasionally they chanted "Balance the budget. Switch to Linux." Few outsiders looked up from their activities to acknowledge the crowd.
At one point, marchers came across a historical plaque that was sponsored by Microsoft. They groaned and quickly papered over the software giant's name with a bumper sticker poking fun at proprietary software that doesn't allow programmers to tinker. "Why would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" it read.
Turnout was on the low end of the 20 to 100 people Tiemann expected. Some programmers complained of the early 10:30 a.m. start time. One said he had to drag his friend out of bed. Others cited the fast clip of the gangly Tiemann, who took off promptly from the conference hall and rushed up the street, forcing some programmers to jog breathlessly behind him.
But open-source guru Bruce Perens, who marched alongside Tiemann, lamented that most technologists simply aren't paying attention. "It's obvious only a tiny bit of people from (LinuxWorld) turned out, and that presents a problem," he said. "Either they don't understand the issues or they have a business partnership that doesn't allow them to talk about it."
City officials did not greet the marchers when they arrived at city hall. Tiemann said he picked the city hall destination--despite the fact he's pushing his proposal at the state level--because it was the closest major government landmark to the LinuxWorld show. No state legislators have expressed official support for the bill, but Tiemann said he has some meetings planned with lawmakers in the next few days. State Assemblyman Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, has met with proposal author Walt Pennington but took no position one way or the other, spokesman George Balgos said.
The move comes as several government entities across the globe are considering legislation that would require considering open-source alternatives to proprietary software such as Microsoft's.
Not surprisingly, proponents of proprietary software are acting swiftly to quash such endeavors. The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a computer industry lobbying group that along with Microsoft has campaigned against open source, said a mandate to pick open software could drive IT companies out of business, endanger 200,000 technology jobs in the state, and restrict choice.
"Such purchase decisions should be made on the basis of objective criteria without a presumption that proprietary, hybrid or open-source software would be the best solution in every case stated," Grant Mydland, CompTIA's director of state government relations and grassroots programs, said in a statement Thursday.
Just one problem: MPAA/RIAA insists on region encoding as part of the standard. We don't accept that, and will go on hacking our DVD players and buying the backstreet Asian models that don't have this "feature" until RIAA goes broke.
I hear ya man. All the bastard grocers around here pull the same sh!t with their food sales. Well to hell with their policies. I'll just keep stealing it, until they either come to their senses and start giving it away, or go broke.
It's for the people, after all.
Do you really believe that crap, or are you just typing out of your copy of the Communist Manifesto?
A "slap on the wrist"? Oh, there go my damn sides again!
How does this differ from m$ licensing 6.0, where you do not own any m$ products but only borrow them by the grace of m$, m$ can freely monitor/take your information without consent, effectively giving them complete control over all your information, and lobbying congress to enforce crap laws like the DMCA to prevent people from finding out how bad their products are and creating better ones.
Read the contitution, it says we the people, not we the corporations. IP laws are a compromise between the people and businesses; the people will grant companies exclusive rights to a work preventing someone else who may have produced the same work from capitalizing on it in return for future inovations and enhancements from the business. Corporations would love to lock all IP down and make sure no one knows how their product works so they would not have to innovate to stay competitive and lay back and collect royalties. If corporations don't hold up their end of the bargain and screw consumers, than turn about is fair play. I don't want big brother or big bill in my house, they are both unwelcome.
If I buy a DVD off eBay from Japan, I fail to see why it's a crime to want to be able to play it in America.
This license states that you are not buying a product, something that you posess, but a service. This service comes with a license that says m$ can do whatever they want with your computer and data, and you have no recourse if they botch something up, deliberate or not. This flys in the face of consumer protection and consumer rights. If I want to play a WB DVD in a panisonic DVD player, even though WB is a partner with sony and has signed an exclusive DVD player deal with them, as a consumer I should be able to do it since I purchased the intellectual property. I shouldn't have have to consult a lawyer everytime I install a piece of software to make sure I don't break some obscure clause stating I can only run the software on tuesdays because that is Andy Griffith's favorite day. Software should be treated as any other intellectual property, such as a book, where one can do anything they want with it except reproduce it. I mean, one can even <*gasp*> quote from it using the fair use clause. How much fair use do you think we will ever see from any m$ product?
If you don't like the license agreement, don't use the product! It's as simple as that. Nobody is forcing you to use them. But the thing here is that you don't have any intention of using the products. You're using this little forum to prop up your ranting soapbox diatribes against MS.
Yeah, you are right, I will never buy any of their products and avoid using them as much as possible. However, I have never be swindled by a con man who sells $5,000 dance lessons to elderly old women but I still believe that consumers should be protected from them. Yes, the snake oil salesmen could turn quite a profit if left to their own devices, but the consumer has rights (what a concept) and they deserve to be protected.
It's rather hypocritical for you to offer up the Constitution as validation for your point of view and then rip it up like a ragged cloth when it doesn't suit your purposes. The Constitution clearly recognizes the concept of intellectual property. This isn't new. Patents aren't new. But they certainly are inconvenient concepts for those who want to shred the Constitution because it happens to conflict with their world view; namely, that they should be able to rip off private property from the "evil corporations". Sorry, like it or not, DMCA is Constitutional until the USSC says it ain't. Go fish.
I have <*never*> contested that IP should not be protected or that all IP should be somehow socialized. I am however completely against the idea that companies somehow have the right to control usage of their product once somebody buys it in the marketplace. If I go to barns and nobles and buy a book, I can take it home and read it, throw it away, burn it, use it for toilet paper, read it to friends, borrow it to friends, etc. Now imagine that random house emplaces the same legalistic EULA's like m$'s so I when I take the book home I have to read the first 100 pages which is the license. Then I must abide by the rule that I must read the book every night for ten minutes before I go to bed or the Feds will come in and confiscate all my books because I broke the EULA. Or Imagine I "buy" a toyota camry (in the future you do not own anything, you only lease items or property from companies) and as I cross the california state line the car suddenly dies and and message pops up on the dashboard saying that toyota is in a contract dispute with the california government so all toyota cars will not function within it's boarders.
The difference between you and me is that I don't believe corporate ownership and manipulation of a product beyond the point of sale is good for the consumer. I don't see that corporate ownership of everything is any better than the government ownership of everything. I believe that if you buy a product, you own it, you just don't have the right to reproduce and sell it. Our IP system has worked fine for two hundred years with a balance of ownership and fair use, heck we even have a library of congress that contains an enormous amount of information. Will we ever see software stored there? The current extortion of the laws regarding digital media only hinders innovation through legislation and only aids corporations and not the consumer.
Yo, Ralphie!
I hear they're gonna bring back the Corvair.
Boo!
Hey, I had ya goin' there for a minute, didn't I, ah ha ha ha ha ha!!!!
Just kidding. Your tripe is far far far to the left of anything Nader ever puked up. You sound like an aircheck tape from a Pacifica station.
OK, thanks for being up-front and honest about your inability to understand this arguably complex concept.
I'll type reaaaaal slow for ya: it's a crime because it's illegal.
Now go take off the day.
More communist agitprop.
Shouldn't you be getting into the bodypaint and crazyman costume to go protest a WTO meeting?
Totally immaterial to the argument at hand. You do not "buy" software (unless you're talking about a scenario where you pay me to write you some code under "work for hire" conditions), and you never have "bought" software. You are buying restricted rights to use it.
Get that through your thick liberskull!
This coming from a Bush supporter, a republican president whose peacetime spending has outstripped Clinton's. Go be a compassionate conservative with someone else's rights.
People like you are the reason why few intelligent people take the threat of Communism seriously. You see Communists under every rock, in every tree and around every corner. It never occurs to people like you that the fight of Capitalism versus Communism is irrelevant. It has always been a fight between liberalism and authoritarianism. Most people lean toward the latter, not the former. Your corporation-worship puts you squarely into the latter. Every institution in society must be held to the same ethical standards. Corporations exist because the states allow them to. They are a way of getting around the idea of the owners *gasp* actually being accountable for the actions of their companies.
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