Green groups and social justice orgs fight DRM
Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, sez, "An international coalition of environmental and social justice
groups have signed a statement condemning DRM and specifically the DRM in Microsoft's Windows Vista, looking to promote awareness of computer user freedom.
Groups and individuals who support the statement are being asked to add their own signatures at http://freesoftwarefreesociety.org. The coalition hope that this statement will help raise awareness to these important issues amongst social activists and NGOs outside of the technology field."
Link, Link to Linux.com's background on the statement (Thanks, Peter!)
In January and February of this year, the Green Party and Greenpeace issued warnings about the tremendous threat posed to the environment by the disposable computer mentality promoted in Microsoft's $500-million Windows Vista marketing campaign. Vista's steep hardware requirements mean that to use it, most people will have to throw their current computer into a landfill and buy a new one.While these environmental consequences alone are sufficient reason for many to reject Vista, the disposable computer mentality is a symptom of a larger problem--one that should concern all social activists. That problem is the dependency of activists on software owned and exclusively controlled by entities that design their software in ways directly opposed to grassroots social change. No matter what kind of specific change they are working for in society, activists need the freedom to organize and communicate. Yet each time an activist turns on a Vista computer, she is nominating Microsoft and Big Media as exclusive gatekeepers to this freedom.
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So they're saying that we should never upgrade our machines, or is it only bad if we're upgrading to a machine with a proprietary OS? And why aren't they promoting donating old machines to charities and other nonprofit groups instead of throwing them into landfills?
I agree that Vista sucks, but they really seem to be trying to tie too many different causes together here -- I was half expecting them to say that migrating to Vista means that you support the war in Iraq and the institution of a Christian theocracy.
"That problem is the dependency of activists on software owned and exclusively controlled by entities that design their software in ways directly opposed to grassroots social change. No matter what kind of specific change they are working for in society, activists need the freedom to organize and communicate. Yet each time an activist turns on a Vista computer, she is nominating Microsoft and Big Media as exclusive gatekeepers to this freedom."
Can someone explain exactly what the above paragraph means? Don't all of these criticism apply to any non-opensource operating system (everytime you turn on your Mac, you're nominating Apple as the exclusive gatekeeper?) How is turning on Vista any different from turning on Windows XP/Mac OS X?
@Brian: Well, yes.
At the moment, Microsoft Windows is particularly visible because (a) it has a large market share and (b) the new version, Vista, contains DRM to a much greater extent than previous versions did.
On the other hand, as far as anyone can tell Apple would use DRM just as much if it thought it could get away with it; certainly their iTunes service is very much run that way.
So, as it says in the title, you should prefer Free Software... (Which in practice means Open Source, even though the underlying principles differ greatly.)
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Australian Greens:
The Vic Greens have a good policy on FOSS, http://vic.greens.org.au/
The Australian Greens have this:
http://greens.org.au/election/policy.php?policy=44
which says:
"encourage government use of open-source software, and require the use of open and publicly documented file formats."