sins of our father
- August 27th, 2009
- Posted in Legal . Technology
- Write comment
The Free Software Foundation today launched a campaign against Microsoft Corp.’s upcoming Windows 7 operating system, calling it ‘treacherous computing’ that stealthily takes away rights from users. At the Web site Windows7Sins.org, the Boston-based FSF lists the seven ’sins’ that proprietary software such as Windows 7 commits against computer users. They include: Poisoning education, locking in users, abusing standards such as OpenDocument Format (ODF), leveraging monopolistic behavior, threatening user security, enforcing Digital Rights Management (DRM) at the request of entertainment companies concerned about movie and music piracy, and invading privacy. ‘Windows, for some time now, has really been a DRM platform, restricting you from making copies of digital files,’ said executive director Peter Brown. And if Microsoft’s Trusted Computing technology were fully implemented the way the company would like, the vendor would have ‘malicious and really complete control over your computer.”
No one who uses windows cares about how treacherous their computers are, they are willing slaves! I just spent a non-trivial amount of time getting GNU/Linux up and running on my laptop so that I could avoid Mac OS X, but I still boot into Windows XP occasionally to play directx games.
The bottom line is that most people can’t be convinced into taking precautionary measures if the alternatives require any amount of work and fail to provide an immediate and tangible improvement to their lives. They simply view a computer as a utility and as long as it does what they want at that particular instant they could care less about the details, philisophical issues or any other secondary effects. Sad but true.
I hope the campaign does reach the people who would be receptive to this sort of argument but I think further gains have to be made in the quality of the software itself and at the retail level (open, linux based cell-phones and netbooks are a great step in this direction) before people will start taking privacy/security/monopoly issues seriously.