How Did I Miss This Tripe?

@Yoz: That’s funny, I don’t remem­ber the FSF hav­ing any­thing to do with the devel­op­ment of UNIX or BSD.

Every time you call some­one a name, it weak­ens your posi­tion. Also adding expla­na­tions and all caps doesn’t help.

But I guess it’s drunken, so what do I expect? It’s just that you seem to care so much about these things. Maybe you need to de-stress.

I agree with Jesse. It would really be nice to find a response to the FSF’s post that actu­ally addressed the con­tent of their argu­ment. So far I haven’t found one.

Unfortunately, a rejoin­der like “HAHAHAHAHAHA!” doesn’t give me much insight into why the Neo Freerunner isn’t a “bet­ter alternative…that respect[s] your free­dom, [doesn’t] spy on you, play[s] free media for­mats, and let[s] you use free software.”

The response to point 1 (devel­op­ers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole author­ity over what can and can’t be on everyone’s phones) is to point to the iPhone hack­ing com­mu­nity. But surely the FSF’s point is not at all about the tech­ni­cal chal­lenges of hack­ing the phone but, rather, about the con­trac­tual restric­tions that go along with devel­op­ing for and using the phone. Sure, any­one can break a con­tract (the iPhone’s license is here [pdf]). But the FSF’s posi­tion on hon­or­ing licenses is fairly well known: if they thought it was accept­able for any­one to break a license agree­ment, they wouldn’t have both­ered to author the General Public License. If The Angry Drunk thinks the FSF is wrong, and that it’s accept­able to break con­tracts, I’d invite him to give his reasons.

@The Angry Drunk

I think it’s a pretty non-controversial thing to say that the peo­ple who have worked on BSD over the years and the neck-bearded free­tards you’re bast­ing here run in over­lap­ping circles.

@Brian: I addressed the “con­tent” of the FSF’s argu­ment in the only way a ratio­nal per­son can; by mock­ing it. It just kills you peo­ple that no one actu­ally cares about your pre­cious soft­ware “free­dom” doesn’t it.

@Brian:

Maybe it’s because Freerunner is like a cow hav­ing an explo­sive diar­rhetic inci­dent all over your liv­ing room couch?

@Phoneman

I wouldn’t know, because I don’t own a Freerunner. Do you?

Unfunny. Unoriginal.

Good job. Keep up the drink­ing. It’s really work­ing for you.

@Brian:

Nope but I had the mis­for­tune of try­ing one. Utter garbage.

Heh, some­what amus­ingly, I emailed the FSF after read­ing that arti­cle whilst blind drunk last night. I think I said some sim­i­lar things, although I might have been more rude.

@Ben Darlow: More rude! Shit, I have to try harder next time.

@Brian, Jesse

Please read my posts (#22, #40) above — Apple make it easy to dis­trib­ute open-source apps which any­one can com­pile with­out any ref­er­ence to the app-store. If you pay the $99 for the devkit pro­gram, you can install these open-source apps on your phone too, with­out ref­er­ence to the app store.

The FSF rant is built on a house of straw, because its fun­da­men­tal tenet is just not true.

Does that address their posi­tion sufficiently ?

Yay, the con­cern trolls have arrived to tell me how I can bet­ter present my “mes­sage” and ques­tion my use of time and resources.

@The Angry Drunk: I think the prob­lem is that you’re an unfunny toll being linked to by and oth­er­wise respectable mac blog for rea­sons beyond comprehension.

Apparently I’m unable to spell today, either.

@Yoz: Not true. “Freetard” has noth­ing to do with whether or not you like cod­ing open source soft­ware. I’ve done that myself and enjoyed it thor­oughly. Rather, “free­tard” has every­thing to do with the enti­tle­ment atti­tude, reli­gious zealotry and delib­er­ate blind­ness to real­ity and facts.

Compare Raymond or Torvalds. Both are heav­ily into open source, but I don’t think I’d call either of them freetards.

@The Angry Drunk

I don’t know where you get off call­ing any­one a zealot. You are attack­ing peo­ple for crit­i­ciz­ing a phone and the indus­trial giant that sells it. None of that crit­i­cism applies to you.

On the one hand we have the FSF who makes some points (legit­i­mate or not) about Apple’s tech­nol­ogy and busi­ness choices. They pub­lish a well-structured argu­ment detail­ing their reluc­tance about own­ing an iPhone. Agree with their argu­ment or not, it con­forms to the struc­ture of a log­i­cal proposition.

Who’s zeal­ous?

Frankly, you embody every­thing that’s wrong with the Internet and this coun­try (America). Anyone who can pay $10/month to host a blog sud­denly thinks he’s a genius and that his opin­ion is automag­i­cally made of gold because his blog got linked.

No humil­ity, no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for your attacks, you make no attempt to con­duct your­self in a civil man­ner. You call it your style, but really it’s a crutch and excuse for your actual style: undis­ci­plined rant­ing, blindly spew­ing ver­bal vomit. You are the Internet equiv­a­lent of the ill home­less per­son who stands on the cor­ner yelling at real and imag­ined peo­ple about real and imag­ined grievances.

@justin: Got me by the balls? How? Maybe O2 has me by the balls as I signed a con­tract to them, but Apple?

By your logic, every man­u­fac­turer whose prod­ucts I own, that I can­not hack apart or install ran­dom crap on (in ways I am not inter­ested in doing) has me by the balls.

Samsung, who make my TV. Nintendo, who make my Wii and DS. Sony, who make my PS3. Thomson, who make my microwave. Sky, who make my DVR. Logitech, who make my Surround sound.

Need a keep list­ing things?

Why do you believe you have the right to be encour­aged to use things in alter­na­tive ways? You do have the right, and the facil­ity, but its not up to Apple to sup­port you doing it. Why would it be?

1] Ogg, Theora, etc are great. Would be nice to see them sup­ported on the iPod/Phone. However, I’m not exactly heart­bro­ken about the lack of them, because they don’t have some “killer app” fea­ture that makes me want to use them –instead– of MP3/MP4s.

2] Free/OSS is also great. OS X wouldn’t really exist with­out that BSD sub­sys­tem that NeXT bor­rowed from the OSS move­ment back in the day, and I’m quite glad we’re not using some shitty “in-house” core sys­tem like Mac OS 9 and most ver­sions of Windows use. I don’t need to describe to this audi­ence that those suck; we all know.

However, the FSF is really off their gourd, here.

1] The loca­tion busi­ness is no dif­fer­ent than any other cell­phone; and is in fact actu­ally bet­ter because apple enforces the users abil­ity to decline an apps per­mis­sion to use it.

2] The iphone has no lim­i­ta­tions that “all other cell­phones” don’t have.

3] The app signing/sandboxing is also no more lim­ited than any videogame con­sole. As with the con­soles, the whole point is RELIABILITY. This is not a soft­ware devel­op­ment sand­box, this is a tool. The reli­a­bil­ity of most com­puter sys­tems, whether mac, win, or linux, is com­pletely unac­cept­able for this kind of use. For most peo­ple, it is an absolute neces­sity that their phone’s soft­ware be guar­an­teed to always work, and sandboxing/signing the apps does exactly this. You can’t get laid but remain a vir­gin — like­wise, you can’t “give apps the power to screw up the sys­tem” but “ensure apps won’t screw up the sys­tem” at the same time. I’m glad apple’s doing this, and fur­ther­more, I’m glad it’s opt-out, rather than opt-in, because only those who under­stand enough to opt out of it are those who would find any ben­e­fit from opt­ing out — every­one else would be hurt by that freedom.

4] Steve isn’t lying about not sup­port­ing DRM; rather, he’s tak­ing a dif­fer­ent strat­egy at elim­i­nat­ing it than the FSF is. Rather than boy­cotting it, he’s try­ing to stron­garm the record indus­try into drop­ping it, which unfor­tu­nately requires suck­ing up to it long enough to become such a huge part of their bot­tom line that they have fol­low his requests. It’s only because of his actions that ANY online music is sold with­out DRM.

5] You can com­pletely do the Open Source thing on an iPhone with­out pay­ing a dime (except for the phone+service). You can write the soft­ware, and you can fol­low the ‘old stan­dard’ of OSS which is build­ing from source. The only thing you have to pay a one-time $100 fee for is dis­trib­ut­ing bina­ries, which I do seem to remem­ber runs con­trary to the OSS mantra of dis­trib­ut­ing the source.

Okay, it’s “pro­fan­ity”. Not “swears”. “Profanity”. Anyone call­ing pro­fan­ity “swears” is too fuck­ing stu­pid to say shit about any­thing, and lord knows, can’t be taken seri­ously unless they’re call­ing bingo num­bers at church. Even then, you want to double-check.

The argu­ment is the same one they have against any­one not lick­ing their asses. “You don’t do it our way, you suck”. The only thing that changes is the com­pany they’re yelling at.

When one of your refu­ta­tions is to laugh and dis­miss the point, that smacks of the same kind of elit­ism you seem to imag­ine them entertaining.

When something’s fuck­ing stu­pid, you point and laugh.

@The Angry Drunk:

I think mock­ery can be a use­ful tool, and great fun to boot (you’re clearly hav­ing fun), but I dis­agree that it’s the only way “a ratio­nal per­son” can respond to the FSF’s argu­ment, or any argument.

I’m not sure to whom you’re refer­ring by “you peo­ple.” I don’t think I gave any indi­ca­tion of my own views about “free soft­ware” in my com­ment. In fact, I thought I indi­cated that I actu­ally wanted to read a more sub­stan­tive response to their argu­ment. If I were a par­ti­san of the FSF, why would I want that? Wouldn’t I just be happy with what they said?

If you mis­read my com­ment as merely an attempt to score rhetor­i­cal points for the FSF, then I apol­o­gize for being unclear. I assure you that noth­ing I said was intended as an endorse­ment of their views. I did, cer­tainly, attempt to clar­ify what I think their views are. My invi­ta­tion to clar­ify your views regard­ing a spe­cific aspect of the FSF’s phi­los­o­phy was quite sin­cere. A ratio­nal per­son must have some ratio­nal rea­son for find­ing an argu­ment laughable.

Oh lord. Funny, but I think there were free com­piliers before GNU and there would have been free com­piliers with­out GNU.

@nathan

Not nearly as big a prob­lem as you try­ing des­per­ately to be supe­rior to him. Maybe you should try get­ting peo­ple to actu­ally read your shit instead of rag­ging on some­one else’s stuff.

That’s actu­ally a pretty hefty assump­tion. In fact, you’d prob­a­bly find some pretty huge philo­soph­i­cal dif­fer­ences between the FSF peo­ple and the BSD peo­ple. OS X is squarely in the BSD camp.

IMHO, it’s almost like Catholics vs Protestants. Yeah they both believe in Jesus but damned if one is gonna believe in the Pope.

@Phoneman:

Aha! An actual rea­son to avoid the Freerunner! Someone actu­ally tried it out, and it was garbage. Hurray for empiricism!