Bonum Certa Men Certa

Digital Restrictions (Like DRM) Don't Have Brands, We Need to Teach People to Hate the Underlying Restrictions, Not Companies That Typically Come and Go

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 23, 2024

Caged chickens in an agricultural fair

Conceptually, the hens should fear humans, not the farmer who cages them (but recognising the exploitative farmer helps)

THE rather unfortunate thing is, companies can change name and do reputation laundering campaigns (like Facebook becoming "Meta" after a load of backlash it could not quite stop). Meta is a spying operation, not a "tech giant", and the name change still deceives a lot of people. Many still react in shock when told that "Facebook owns Instagram" or "Facebook owns WhatsApp" (technically or at least legally Meta now owns these, just like "Alphabet" controls YouTube). How about "Threads"? People don't keep up with name changes.

Telling people "Google owns YouTube" or "Microsoft took over GitHub" might not be enough to get them to stop watching/uploading to YouTube, and downloading from/outsourcing to GitHub. The brand alone might not be enough to 'intimidate them' or discourage the engagement.

Concepts matter a lot in scientific literature, which in order to "age well" does not mention company names and brands, just like in patent applications.

Over time companies will come and go. Some will go under, e.g. Novell. So saying "boycott Novell" in 2024 has no real effect; can you boycott something that has not existed in any meaningful form/way for well over a decade?

Bird cages

The issue with systemd isn't Microsoft or "LP" or "GitHub" or "proprietary" or "not UNIX" (UNIX is also a brand); the issues are vast and the lack of modularity results in serious security holes, severe bugs that wipe away configuration files and personal files, and then there's the scarcely-explored danger of software patents on systemd (that goes back to Red Hat, even before IBM).

Despite a valuation bubble (financial fraud), Microsoft was recently dethrones by NVIDIA - riding the hype wave that encouraged GPU buying sprees - and Windows is a perishing platform. We meanwhile see Apple copying many of the same malicious features (antifeatures) seen in Windows and maybe systemd will usher in the same (it already pushes TPMs).

It doesn't really matter whether we call it "Vista" or "FOSS" or "OSPS", if it harms the user (as Mozilla Firefox increasingly does), then we should look beyond the name and talk about the ethical/technical matters. Sadly a lot of self-described FOSS has chosen to imitate rather awful things, even outsourcing to Microsoft.

As psydruid has just put it: "When Windows is dead they will just officially claim GNU/Linux as their own operating system with the help of useful idiots such as Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and now also Debian like a parasite moving from host to host..."

"I'm also worried now because I run Debian Unstable on the Orange Pi; with Microsoft's involvement I may lose the stuff I'm working on, which may necessitate a move away from Debian (and GNU/Linux) sooner than expected."

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