Could there be a law to protect the free choice of operating system?

xdrudis xdrudis at tinet.cat
Mon Apr 1 15:54:33 UTC 2013


On Mon, Apr 01, 2013 at 04:02:06PM +0200, Hugo Roy wrote:
> Le lun. 01/04/13, 16:30, xdrudis <xdrudis at tinet.cat>:
> 
> The average found by the study was 76 days. But what you can
> conclude from this is that it is completely impractical to read
> (not even understand) the terms of service you subscribe to
> online. To make the conclusion that people don't care about what's
> in them is completely out of proportion. We have no research that
> I'm aware of that can measure how much people care about their
> rights online. But the fact that FSFE, EFF or projects like
> tosdr.org get funded by individuals and sustain is one sign that
> actually enough people *do* care.
>

Thanks, I didn't know tosdr.org. Looks useful. 

I still think the normal thing to do when you (often) find impractical
to read and understand TOS is not to use the service. So the fact that
many people use them without reading them for me is some measure that
they don't care (I don't believe the option of not using a web service
is so onerous, in fact it frees time). 

But I agree I'm disgressing and we should not care too much what
other people care about. We should care for what we care about. So 
sorry if I was sounding discouraging.
 
> In the end, I think it is useless to ascertain whether people care
> or not about the law. This is too broad and difficult to measure
> for us anyway.
>

Yes, and too meaningless. Even if we could measure it we would still 
not change our mind only because others think different. It takes
arguments to change one's mind.
 
> What we do konw is that *we* care about our rights and freedoms
> and there's definitely enough legal ground to make a meaningful
> proposal that people should have the right to be in control of
> hardware they buy. So let's focus on that.
> 
> There have been some proposals here, and I'd like to see more
> ideas coming :-)
> 

Of course, I didn't mean to get in the way, sorry.

My intention was only to link the topic with the fact that closed
hardware is being more closely tied with closed software and closed
services for content that it used to be. And I think that changes the
issues at stake from what they used to be, because hardware economics
is different to software economics (and I guess content/services
network effects are a little different to software too, but maybe not
so much). So thinking in including open hardware, open cloud (if I
understood it) open culture and open knowledge in software freedom
quests is increasingly appropiate. Which doesn't mean that people
focusing in one of those aspects is any less helping the whole lot, of
course.

I understood Alessandro's point of proliferation of appliances
in detriment of general purpose computers as being very relevant
to commercialisation of computers, that's all.



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