Re: New maintainer

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2015 08:15:41 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> >> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> >> Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2015 01:20:16 +0200
> >> Cc: address@hidden
> >> 
> >> You might have missed it, but Windows 10 goes ahead nevertheless.  So
> >> far testers have not been able to find any settings that would not send
> >> a continuous string of data related to keypresses to Microsoft servers.
> >
> > Google did, among its first few hits:
> >
> >   
> > http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/603524/Windows-10-Microsoft-Key-Logger-Record-Privacy
> >   
> > http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/windows-10-doesnt-offer-much-privacy-by-default-heres-how-to-fix-it/
> 
> Ah, but turning those settings off does not really suffice.
> 
> <URL:http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/>

Which includes further advice on how to turn the other stuff off.

Look, this particular point of yours is simply invalid: for any
problem encountered on Windows, there are always solutions and/or
workarounds that work.  It sometimes takes time to discover them
(Windows 10 was released only 2.5 months ago), but eventually they do
surface.  The enormously large number of people using Windows and the
basic user desire to solve problems they bump into, coupled with the
Internet and the efficiency of the search engines, makes any such
malware-like features easily bypassed for those who don't want them.

The basis for the Free Software movement and the GPL, as I understand
it, was, and still is, that denying free access to the software
sources prevents the free flow and exchange of ideas, which is
immoral, unethical, and detrimental to progress, and whose only
justification is greed and the desire to increase profits.  The
supposedly easier way of fixing bugs and adding features by the user
herself is IMO a beneficial side-effect, and is today limited to
adding features (as workarounds for bugs will usually be found by
googling).  The free flow of ideas argument is still very much valid,
although it, too, is not black-and-white anymore, because there's
enormous amount of information out there, both in books and in
articles, that describes the inner workings of Windows (don't know
about MacOS, OS X etc.) to astonishing depth and detail.

Bottom line, I submit that representing the split as black-and-white
chasm-like one is nowadays a misrepresentation.  Things are more like
shades of gray, not in the least due to the fact that the modern
societies are much more open than they were in 1980s.  Which goes a
long way towards explaining why people don't easily see the core of
the GPL's rationale and quite a few are sincerely confused about the
Free Software movement's main principles and ideas.  It also makes our
job explaining those ideas quite a bit harder.  But trying to make it
easier by representing the issues as black-and-white is not TRT, IME,
and it will always fail given an intelligent enough opponent who knows
her ground.  You (not you personally, David) can even be accused in
trying to con your audience by false statements, which then might have
far-reaching effect on our argumentation in general.