How Did I Miss This Tripe?

@Jesse

I’m really not sure why you think the FSF made a well struc­tured argu­ment. It’s basi­cally a few facts mixed with bla­tant half truths and out­right lies. But the biggest false hood they attempted to sell was the Freerunner as a viable alter­na­tive to the iPhone, or any phone for that matter.

From http://​wiki​.open​moko​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​N​e​o​_​F​r​e​e​R​u​n​ner “The FreeRunner can be pur­chased from the Online Store as of July 3, 2008. The soft­ware avail­able on the phone makes it suit­able for power users and devel­op­ers only, it is not ready for the gen­eral con­sumer yet. Email announce­ments and found on the announce mail­ing list. For fre­quently asked ques­tions please check FAQ. Approximately twice a month an Openmoko team mem­ber writes an update to the project at Community Updates. ”

Yup you read that right, “not ready for the gen­eral con­sumer yet.” But even if it was, you can’t actu­ally buy it. Once you make your way through the Byzantine web­site (oh and man­u­ally check which model you want based on what bands are avail­able in your area, you would think they could auto­mate that a bit) you find that it’s sold out. Yup sold right the hell out.

So please tell my why the idea of FreeRunner being a viable alter­na­tive to any phone, much less the iPhone, isn’t deserv­ing of deri­sive laugh­ter. Seriously I’m really inter­ested in how a soft­ware and hard­ware plat­form, that has been in devel­op­ment for years, that the devel­op­ers freely admit isn’t suit­able for aver­age users and that you can’t actu­ally buy should even be men­tioned in that screed. Oh right, it fills all the FSF dog­matic checkboxes.

If the FSF want’s to encour­age dis­cus­sion they need to actu­ally try liv­ing in the real world a bit. Foaming at the mouth and spin­ning all their argu­ments is a real turn off to ratio­nal peo­ple. The FSF has fully embraced the “means jus­tify the ends” phi­los­o­phy that has made PETA and Greenpeace jokes. While they may do some good works, the fall­out from the abhor­rent actions of the rest of things they do poi­son their reputation.

So to sum up, when they stop being a laugh­ing­stock I might pay atten­tion. Until then laugh­ing at them is what they appar­ently want.

@Brian: Ok, see­ing as how it’s Friday I’ll go ahead and try and respond seri­ously to this.

First, you have to under­stand that some­times peo­ple hold philo­soph­i­cal opin­ions that are so orthog­o­nal that “rea­soned debate” is lit­er­ally not pos­si­ble. For instance, if I wrote a “5 rea­sons not to get an iPhone” post in which the 5 points were pred­i­cated on the belief that there is no such thing as an elec­tro­mag­netic spec­trum, would you seri­ously try and engage me in ratio­nal debate, or would you just say, “this dude is a loony”?

Having said that, I fun­da­men­tally dis­agree with the Free Software Foundation’s asser­tion that soft­ware “free­dom” is is an impor­tant goal; or even that an abstract entity such as “soft­ware” can be “free.”

So, with that in mind, let’s look at the FSF’s 5 reasons.

The first 2 boil down to “This prod­uct doesn’t con­form to or philo­soph­i­cal model.” To me, and arguably to 99.9% of the con­sumer world, the FSF’s philo­soph­i­cal model has as much rel­e­vance as the Music of the Spheres. Supporting Free Software and eschew­ing DRM Just Doesn’t Matter.

Point 3, that the “iPhone exposes your where­abouts and pro­vides ways for oth­ers to track you with­out your knowl­edge.” is a flat out false­hood and bor­ders on para­noid delusion.

Point 4 is really a vari­a­tion on 1&2, but we’ll take it sep­a­rately. So, the iPhone doesn’t sup­port the FSF’s anointed audio and video for­mats. Guess what, it doesn’t sup­port WMA/WMV either. This only mat­ters if you sub­scribe to the phi­los­o­phy that this mat­ters in the slight­est. Again, to the vast major­ity of the iPhone’s tar­get mar­ket it doesn’t.

Point 5 is just the blunt asser­tion that the Freerunner is a bet­ter alter­na­tive. Not a sin­gle spe­cific rea­son other than “It’s Fweeeee!” In my view that doesn’t cut it.

So that leaves us with the remain­der of he arti­cle, which was a tin-foil-helmet screed against Apple for some­how lock­ing it’s users into a prison of style and mar­ket­ing. I’m sorry, but that just isn’t worth refuting.

Now, here’s a ques­tion to ask. Why an arti­cle specif­i­cally tar­get­ing the iPhone? Nothing they wrote doesn’t apply to any other phone on the market.

I agree that the arti­cle ref­er­enced is, in fact, “tripe.” That being said, call­ing the person/people behind it names and writ­ing off argu­ments with a sim­ple “no one cares” doesn’t actu­ally refute any­thing. Your response to the “by the balls” com­ment ear­lier doesn’t help you here. It’s a fuck­ing metaphor. You can’t write off your opponent’s argu­ments by ignor­ing the metaphor and sub­se­quently call him on it when he does the same.

The FSF arti­cle is tripe, but so is your response.

Neo Freerunner instructions:

“Adjusting the Volume As of this writ­ing, there is no way to adjust the vol­ume from the screen. For now, run the ter­mi­nal appli­ca­tion or log in via usb, and run the alsamixer appli­ca­tion. The mixer is sim­pler than it looks. Just use the left and right arrow keys to select “head­phone” or “PCM” and use the up and down arrow keys to adjust the vol­ume. You can also adjust your micro­phone vol­ume with the “mic2” adjust­ment. Press ESC when fin­ished. Then exit the ter­mi­nal appli­ca­tion or log out of the USB login. You may need to update con­fig­u­ra­tion files in /usr/share/openmoko/scenarios/ to make the micro­phone set­ting per­ma­nent. Use als­actl –f path-to-statefile store”

MASSIVE FUCKING LOL THE SIZE OF A MONSTER TRUCK

@John C. Welch: Why would I want peo­ple to read my shit? I know I have an unim­por­tant blog. At least I don’t run around half-cocked about some arti­cle about how the FSF doesn’t like the iPhone (let alone get linked-to by a respectable per­son). It’s a non-article. The FSF doesn’t like any phone that doesn’t live up to their lofty goals. I’m not sure why any­one cares that the FSF doesn’t like the iPhone — they also don’t care much for the Blackberry.

My point is that his response is equally absurd because he flies off the han­dle and makes per­sonal attacks his form of counter-argument.

Superior? Hardly. I just have tact.

@Simon

Oh man. I just, BWAHAHAHA, gasp, BWHAHAHA.

Ahem. Well I guess I’m proven wrong on my anti-FreeRunner com­ment. If chang­ing the vol­ume is that easy then what the hell am I doing with an phone that uses but­tons for that?

Now to get a FreeRunner I appar­ently have to stalk RMS, mug him and take his. Oh and I might need all the other stuff so I’ll just rob his house. Hmm, that sounds like an awful lot of work. I guess I’ll just walk down the street and get a phone. With, you know, vol­ume buttons.

P.S. @Steven this isn’t directed at you, more of a rif on your com­ment and my pre­vi­ous one. You just made me crack up in the office with the direc­tions on chang­ing the volume.

@Phuul & The Angry Drunk

If you re-read the arti­cle, you will find the fol­low­ing lines:

“The FreeRunner doesn’t yet do as much as the iPhone and it’s cer­tainly not as pretty. ”

and

“There are bet­ter alter­na­tives on the hori­zon that respect your freedom…”

The arti­cle bla­tantly states that the FreeRunner can­not com­pete with the iPhone right now. Nobody says dif­fer­ent. In fact, if I’m cor­rect you can only buy devel­op­ment ver­sions of the phone right now.

Please see: fal­lacy of the straw man argument.

@Joseph:

> Your response to the “by the balls” com­ment ear­lier doesn’t help you here. It’s a fuck­ing metaphor. You can’t write off your opponent’s argu­ments by ignor­ing the metaphor and sub­se­quently call him on it when he does the same.

It’s a metaphor for what, exactly? Apple doesn’t have me “by the balls” for own­ing an iPhone, nei­ther metaphor­i­cally nor oth­er­wise. Elaborate.

@Jesse: The open­ing of the FSF’s brain leak says: “There are bet­ter alter­na­tives on the hori­zon that respect your free­dom, don’t spy on you, play free media for­mats, and let you use free soft­ware — like the FreeRunner.”

The com­ment you sug­gested is about 15 para­graphs later.

@Jesse

Ok so don’t buy an phone now. Just wait for some dis­tant future where you can buy a some phone that sat­is­fies the FSF and RMS. On the hori­zon means vapor­ware. Nothing more, noth­ing less. Until you have a prod­uct that you can actu­ally put in peo­ples hands, point­ing to it as the answer is FUD pure and sim­ple. I didn’t raise the straw­man, the FSF erected it on the archery range and I took a shot. Besides they con­ve­niently left out the fact that you can’t fuck­ing by the damn FreeRunner. That is def­i­nitely not a straw­man argu­ment, it’s a fact.

Until there is some­thing out there that actu­ally sat­is­fies their phi­los­o­phy and is avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic they are talk­ing out of their ass. There isn’t one argu­ment they made against the iPhone that couldn’t be made against most, if not all, com­mer­cial phones on the market.

So please tell me again why I shouldn’t be laugh­ing at them?

@Jesse

Ok so don’t buy an phone now. Just wait for some dis­tant future where you can buy a some phone that sat­is­fies the FSF and RMS. On the hori­zon means vapor­ware. Nothing more, noth­ing less. Until you have a prod­uct that you can actu­ally put in peo­ples hands, point­ing to it as the answer is FUD pure and sim­ple. I didn’t raise the straw­man, the FSF erected it on the archery range and I took a shot. Besides they con­ve­niently left out the fact that you can’t fuck­ing by the damn FreeRunner. That is def­i­nitely not a straw­man argu­ment, it’s a fact.

Until there is some­thing out there that actu­ally sat­is­fies their phi­los­o­phy and is avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic they are talk­ing out of their ass. There isn’t one argu­ment they made against the iPhone that couldn’t be made against most, if not all, com­mer­cial phones on the market.

So please tell me again why I shouldn’t be laugh­ing at them?

@Nathan: You know what, you’re a jack­ass. I write for myself, no one else. I don’t know why Gruber links to me. As far as I can tell it’s some per­verse desire to inflict self right­eous prats like you on me as some sort of Biblical pun­ish­ment. Here’s some advice. If you don’t like what I have to say, click the back but­ton and get the hell out.

@Phuul

No doubt you can laugh when­ever you want. It’s untrue that they claim that the FreeRunner is, right now, a com­peti­tor to the iPhone. That’s my point.

@jesse

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.

It couldn’t be because they were doing based on an abso­lutist ide­al­ism that were it about $deity$ would make peo­ple think you were into sui­cide bombing.

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.

Yes. It’s a log­i­cal, well-structured pile of stu­pidty and enti­tle­ment who­rism. Just because it’s calmly stated doesn’t mean it’s not full of shit. Maybe you should stop being sucked in by struc­ture and pay more atten­tion to the actual point.

Then, on the other hand we have a per­son who is not named in that arti­cle, a wholly unre­lated per­son who becomes offended by this and takes it upon him­self to defend Apple. He does this by respond­ing in a fury of insults and absurd attacks. He claims to be ratio­nal about it, while dis­miss­ing points by laugh­ing at them. He sum­ma­rizes the long essay by the FSF, which vis­its many com­plex points, as sim­ply: “But, you guys, why doesn’t any­one lis­ten to me, any­thing we don’t agree with is evil; I’m being super ser­ial.” And he’s actu­ally seri­ous about that.

And then we have you, who came here with no other rea­sons other con­cern trolling and con­vinc­ing your­self of your own supe­ri­or­ity. I’d say you’re first in the sad race.

Who’s zeal­ous?

All pale com­pared to your desparate need to be rec­og­nized as a sooper-genyous

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.

Unlike you, who can’t even pay the ten bucks. So you’re not only inane, but you’re a cheap bas­tard too. Double Word Score for you!

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.

Yes, we should all take your exam­ple, and go from link to link dic­tat­ing behav­ior to all we see. All hail Jesse, the most smartest per­son on teh intartubes.

@jesse

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.

It couldn’t be because they were doing based on an abso­lutist ide­al­ism that were it about $deity$ would make peo­ple think you were into sui­cide bombing.

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.

Yes. It’s a log­i­cal, well-structured pile of stu­pidty and enti­tle­ment who­rism. Just because it’s calmly stated doesn’t mean it’s not full of shit. Maybe you should stop being sucked in by struc­ture and pay more atten­tion to the actual point.

Then, on the other hand we have a per­son who is not named in that arti­cle, a wholly unre­lated per­son who becomes offended by this and takes it upon him­self to defend Apple. He does this by respond­ing in a fury of insults and absurd attacks. He claims to be ratio­nal about it, while dis­miss­ing points by laugh­ing at them. He sum­ma­rizes the long essay by the FSF, which vis­its many com­plex points, as sim­ply: “But, you guys, why doesn’t any­one lis­ten to me, any­thing we don’t agree with is evil; I’m being super ser­ial.” And he’s actu­ally seri­ous about that.

And then we have you, who came here with no other rea­sons other con­cern trolling and con­vinc­ing your­self of your own supe­ri­or­ity. I’d say you’re first in the sad race.

Who’s zeal­ous?

All pale com­pared to your desparate need to be rec­og­nized as a sooper-genyous

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.

Unlike you, who can’t even pay the ten bucks. So you’re not only inane, but you’re a cheap bas­tard too. Double Word Score for you!

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.

Yes, we should all take your exam­ple, and go from link to link dic­tat­ing behav­ior to all we see. All hail Jesse, the most smartest per­son on teh intartubes.

@Nathan

My point is that his response is equally absurd because he flies off the han­dle and makes per­sonal attacks his form of counter-argument. Superior? Hardly. I just have tact.

“He argued in a non-passive way that wasn’t com­pletely unopin­ion­ated and inof­fen­sive to every­one, he sucks”

Tactfully full of shit is still full of shit.

@jesse

“There are bet­ter alter­na­tives on the hori­zon that respect your free­dom…” The arti­cle bla­tantly states that the FreeRunner can­not com­pete with the iPhone right now. Nobody says dif­fer­ent. In fact, if I’m cor­rect you can only buy devel­op­ment ver­sions of the phone right now.

“One day, we’ll all live in giant fly­ing zep­pelins, and eat pills instead of food. We’ll travel to Mars for our vacations”

If they didn’t want to draw direct com­par­isons between the state of both devices, why bring up the Freerunner at all?

I know…it’s an attempt to get some free marketing.

Please see: fal­lacy of the straw man argument.”

Please also see the fal­lacy of call­ing every point you don’t like a straw­man. The orig­i­nal arti­cle brought the Freerunner into play, there­fore, it is com­pletely legit­i­mate to point out it’s shortcomings.

@Steven Fisher

I’m sorry to see that you and the author here have so much in com­mon. I was lik­ing your style, too bad you had to take it so personally.

On a larger point, is it an acci­dent that every­one who finds it nec­es­sary to defame the FSF also needs to sling some truly ter­ri­ble insults at any­one who dis­agrees with them. Most notably, John Welch, who ought to be a co-author on this site.

No, I don’t think it’s an acci­dent. It’s pretty clear to me that you all suf­fer infe­ri­or­ity com­plexes of a high-degree and other kinds of strange com­pul­sions that require the world around you to sit in com­plete agree­ment with your hate­ful, small minds.

Thus, John Welch accuses any­one who strongly dis­agrees with him of think­ing them­selves supe­rior, because he is, in fact, an infe­rior per­son. Or Steven, who resorts to insults in an oth­er­wise ratio­nal exchange. And so does the author here, the angry drunk, feel com­pelled to jump in to defend a billion-dollar multi­na­tional from crit­i­cism by insult­ing rea­son­able peo­ple dis­cussing mat­ters reasonably.

You all are my own num­ber one rea­son to avoid own­ing an iPhone.

I think you missed Gina’s point:

When the FSF refers to “free soft­ware,” it doesn’t mean the free apps in the iTunes App Store. Those are “free as in beer,” essen­tially give­aways, when “free as in speech,” is soft­ware built with the belief you have the right to man­age your own data and use it and mod­ify it the way you please.

They’re not con­flat­ing the iPhone with the App Store at all. Otherwise, I agree with your position.

@Jesse: You’re either a troll or an idiot; and you’ve repeated your­self enough. Stop posting.

@Dan: Read the com­ments, I know exactly what the FSF means by “free.” I just don’t care.

@Dan

Actually, I think they are con­flat­ing the phone with the app-store. They’re not tak­ing into account the other way of dis­trib­ut­ing apps (the ad-hoc method). At http://​blog​.gor​nall​.net/​f​i​l​e​s​/​c​6​1​b​b​f​0​b​a​5​0​b​9​a​7​7​0​3​1​b​c​4​3​3​f​5​1​4​b​1​7​6​-​2​7​.​h​tml, I point out just how easy it is to develop open-source apps for the iphone. Trivial, in fact.

@: a href=”#comment-581″>The Angry Drunk:

Woo-hoo! I got The Angry Drunk to be seri­ous! Does a lit­tle vic­tory dance.

Seriously, that was quite cogent (and well struc­tured; note the dif­fer­ence, Phuul), and I’m glad you took the time. I espe­cially appre­ci­ate that you explic­itly laid out your fun­da­men­tal dis­agree­ment with their phi­los­o­phy of “soft­ware free­dom” as “an impor­tant goal.” The idea that soft­ware may be too abstract an entity to be “free” is intrigu­ing, but prob­a­bly too hairy an issue to get into here… For what it’s worth, I think the word “free­dom” is the more prob­lem­atic (not to men­tion loaded) part of the FSF’s phi­los­o­phy (or dogma). The GPL is actu­ally a pretty restric­tive license, mak­ing me won­der: Whose free­dom? Freedom to do what? (Public Domain soft­ware – now that’s free!)

For my own part, I ques­tion not so much the value of the goal as its (com­plete) attain­abil­ity: as a user it’s nice to have both com­mer­cial and free (as in free­dom or as in beer) options, and as a pro­gram­mer it’s nice that so many of the tools that come with my Mac (yep, I’m one of “you peo­ple”) are free (what­ever that means). Some of them are, in fact, FSF/GNU prod­ucts (bash and gcc, for exam­ple). If their philosophical/political zeal is what inspires them to make use­ful prod­ucts, great: it’s ben­e­fited me.

Tangentially, here’s a minor point regard­ing the whole Freerunner issue: I don’t think they’re say­ing that it is a bet­ter alter­na­tive to any phone. They put it among the “bet­ter alter­na­tives on the hori­zon.” [empha­sis added!] As an ear­lier com­menter noted, the open­moko web­site (some­where) says that the phone is “not ready for gen­eral con­sump­tion.” And as Phoneman put it so suc­cinctly, the phone as it exists right now is utter garbage. Clearly, using the word “bet­ter” is debat­able. They prob­a­bly con­sider that its “free­ness” is what makes it bet­ter, not its usabil­ity, but in that case the debate would be about basic philo­soph­i­cal issues again, not Freerunner’s ugli­ness or unus­abil­ity or some other aspect of its com­plete and total suckitude.

@The Angry Drunk:

Whoops, not sure what hap­pened there. I’m going to blame it on the “Edit in TextMate” plu­gin. That was sup­posed to be in response to this com­ment.