Bonum Certa Men Certa

If You Care About Freedom, Don't Support Apple

DRM trap
Picture contributed by twitter



"IF you want freedom don't follow Linus Torvalds," Stallman was sort of quoted as arguing in a rather sensationalist headline from an IDG interview a year and a half ago. But Torvalds is hardly the problem at all. His views may not be as 'strong' as Stallman's, but Torvalds is not the enemy.



Ideally, as Stallman might put it, we must not remain "helpless and divided" because imposition of such constraints is the condition on which crowd control is hinged, where one dissenter is un/able to attract followers and turn consensus upside down. In pursuing morality, it's important to collaborate with those who do not view freedom as hostile. The Linux Foundation and the OSI, for example, are not adverse to Freedom, they just emphasise it less.

“Steve was daemonising freedom at the time, turning it into an argument of cost.”It therefore becomes important to identify the real ferocious forces which disseminate tools that separate people. They restrict collaboration/sharing and in some circumstances stir up infighting [1, 2, 3].

So who are these people or forces which compare collaboration to evilness? In reference to "Linux" (meaning GNU/Linux in this context), Steve Ballmer once said that "it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free." Steve was daemonising freedom at the time, turning it into an argument of cost. Another Steve, Steve Wozniak, was claimed to have slammed Free software last year. A third Steve, Steve Jobs, has never shown much affinity for Free software either, with the exception of use (BSD) where freedom is defined differently. In fact, iPhone engineers wanted to pick Linux for the iPhone but it was Jobs who resisted it* and intercepted the idea because Linux is free as in Freedom (GPL) -- the same licence that Gates insists "we disagree with".

Further to this post from two days ago and the many supportive references, it is essential to remember that Apple is now ruining Linux-based gadgets using patents. In regards to Apple's behaviour in general, opines one blogger:

These moves suggest to me that Apples fears competition, and I'm wondering why.


Another writer, Sam Varghese, remarked about "The ugly side of Apple."

Apple Computer has a beautiful side to its operations. That's the side which comes out with some of the sexiest design in the tech world, the side which crafts those breathtaking interfaces, the side which gives you those applications that a five-year-old finds easy to master in the course of a morning's exploration.

[...]

The argument runs thus: if I'm doing something that doesn't cut into my profits, I must be doing the right thing.

But even Apple should realise that people will ultimately come to the conclusion that golden handcuffs are also a means of restricting choice.


The author refers to a couple of new examples where Apple takes away not only its own customers' freedom; it harms the freedoms of others too, casting them "irrelevant".

A month ago we explained how Apple had helped Microsoft's OOXML and looking at some newer evidence, as stated in one of the comments about Apple's office suite, "Whereas the OpenDocument standards are well-documented, xml-based, platform-independent and reasonably mature. So, I'm not sure why Apple wants to reinvent the wheel with their own proprietary document formats (though I have a theory, see below). [...] My personal theory is that Microsoft slipped some kind of document-format stipulation into a contract with Apple, forbidding them from using or promoting OpenDocument. (If you've done any reading on the kinds of behind-the-scenes shenanigans Microsoft has pulled over the years, this will sound very plausible.) This would also explain Apple's otherwise inexplicable support for OOXML during its ISO standardization debacle (where no doubt a lot of other behind-the-scenes shenanigans were going on)."

Remember ThinkFree? ___ * This is a revelation that came through the grapevine about a year ago.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Open Source Initiative (OSI) Privacy Fiasco in Detail: The OSI Does Not Respect Anybody's Privacy
The surveillance mafia that bans dissent or key people (even co-founders) with dissenting views
The LLM Bubble is About to Implode, Gimmicks and Financial Shell Games Cannot Prevent That, Only Delay It
To inflate the bubble MElon is now doing the classic trick of buying from oneself for a fictional value
 
LLM Slop Piggybacking News About GNU/Linux and Distorting It
new examples
Links 31/03/2025: Press and Democracy Under Further Attacks in the US, Attitudes Towards Slop Sour
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/03/2025: More X-Filesposting and Dreaming in Emacs
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 30, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, March 30, 2025
Links 30/03/2025: Security Breaches, Crackdowns on Dissent/Rival Politicians
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/03/2025: London Soundtrack Festival, Superbloom, gmiCAPTCHA
Links for the day
Phasing Out Vista 10 in Nations Where ~90% of Windows Users Still Rely on It
Recipe for another Microsoft disaster
The Cost of Pursuing the Much-Needed Reform/Shield Against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs)
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
Links 30/03/2025: Contagious Ideas, Signal Leak, and Squashing Lousy Patents
Links for the day
Links 30/03/2025: "Quantum Randomness" and "F-1 Visa Revoked" in US
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/03/2025: US as a Threat, Returning to the WWW
Links for the day
Links 30/03/2025: Judge Blocks Dismantling Of VOA, Turkey Arrested Many Journalists
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 29, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, March 29, 2025
Judges Would Never Rule for Men Who Strangle Women or Against Women Who Merely Wrote Articles About Abuse They Had Received From Men
We don't intend to do "trial by media", so we won't be disclosing claims and defences until it's over
Windows is an Unnatural Disaster, It is Also Avoidable
there's a wide window of opportunity opening
Gemini Links 29/03/2025: Less YouTube and More Station
Links for the day
In Some Countries, Such as Thailand, Firefox is Already Measured at Less Than 2% (One Day Firefox Will Get Blocked, Not Only Lack Support)
Web consolidation around Chrom-isms will doom the Web as we know it
Killing the News With Spam and Slop Benefits Those Whose Desire is an Uninformed Population
adoption of Free software depends indirectly on political activities/activism
Links 29/03/2025: Trademarks Battles, Fires Destroy More Than 3,000 South Korean Homes
Links for the day
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Privacy Fiasco in Detail: An Introduction
Perhaps tomorrow or perhaps next week we'll share more information about what happened and what was reported to the California Privacy Protection Agency
Links 29/03/2025: More Crackdowns on Science, "Hey Hi" Slopping is Flopping
Links for the day
IBM's BS (Bait, Switch) Regarding Ways to Stay Onboard
PIPs, RTOs, and forced relocations are just an illusion of choice (or ability to recover)
Costa Rica Almost Bankrupt Because of Microsoft
the incidents in Costa Rica are Windows incidents
Gemini Links 29/03/2025: Art of Looking, Wireguard, EMacs
Links for the day
Links 29/03/2025: Attacks on Social Security and War Updates
Links for the day
Banned evidence: Ars Technica forums censored email predicting DebConf23 death, Abraham Raji & Debian cover-up
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 28, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, March 28, 2025