Italian universities started to sell students' privacy to big corps through email accounts

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.org.uk
Sun Aug 23 19:37:02 UTC 2015


[Replying to list explicitly...]

On Sunday 23. August 2015 14.39.40 Florian Weimer wrote:
> 
> Seems rather speculative to me.
> 
> A lot of free software aficionados are also happy Gmail users, and
> have agreed to terms that are, on paper, extremely far-reaching and
> obnoxious.

Yes, but they agreed to those terms as an individual choosing a mail service: 
it wasn't part of them signing up to do something else.

> > And also, the use of Free Software is directly impacted by this
> > cloud-pushing agenda, meaning that the viability of Free Software is
> > affected since, just as it is when people decide to spend large sums
> > on proprietary software, beneficial investment is withheld from
> > improving Free Software that competes with those cloud
> > products.
> 
> That's a separate discussion, but I fail to see how it relates to
> privacy.

You claimed that the original topic, or least its focus on privacy, had 
nothing to do with Free Software and wasn't worthy of discussion on this list. 
I was only noting that the phenomenon observed (that happens to raise privacy 
issues) does have an impact on Free Software. Is that not worth discussing 
either?

> And as far as I can tell, the FSF (US) does not consider a
> healthy community of developers are primary goal, the priority is end
> user freedom.

And is using proprietary cloud services with potentially unacceptable terms 
that you may not even have had a reasonable chance to disagree with good or 
bad for user freedom?

> The GPL v3 even contains an explicit permission to use
> cloud providers tu ron proprietary, GPL-derived software.

And the part of GPLv3 that says this is...?

Paul



More information about the Discussion mailing list