Re: <nettime> The Return of DRM

[Rob Myers <rob@robmyers.org>]

On Tue, 4 May 2010 13:51:01 +0200, Florian Cramer
<fc-nettime@pleintekst.nl> wrote:
> 
> Even outside the app store paradigm, Free Software/Open Source is now
> factually dead, or at least irrelevant as a vision for personal
> computing, because the computer and Internet industry has efficaciously
> circumvented copyleft by using Free Software as a productivity stack
> underneath proprietary cloud/web applications and operating systems
> from Mac OS X to Android.  

The Affero GPL and the Franklin Street Declaration are directed at
protecting user freedom in the cloud. There is already software based on
these, notably Status.Net, a Free Twitter replacement.

User freedom in OS X and Android can only be compromised so easily because
the software they are based on uses a BSD-style "permissive" licence rather
than the copyleft GPL. If people stick with the GPL (or the Affero GPL for
cloud software), they'll be much better able to keep the freedom to use
their software. There is a GPL fork of Android, and GNU/Linux is a largely
GPL-based alternative to OS X.

So Free Software is not factually dead. The threats to it have changed, as
they always do. Those threats are recognised and people are working to
address them.

- Rob.





#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org