I know I have the minority opinion, but I believe that a FSF world is the way go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open source, and an unfettered Internet will have long term advantages.
Edit: typo
- You do not have choice of service providers. All providers are government department and there's nearly no competition.
- Try to use Google in China, lots of fun!
- Try to access any popular web site in China like Youtube, facebook, etc. Good luck.
- If you say something bad about the government on Internet, you may have the risk of being kidnapped by some unknown person and thrown into some unknown mountain area. (No kidding, one of my friend had this experience.)
Specific to RMS: I'm the translator of Free as in Freedom (Chinese edition.) Until now, I have no idea if the word "free" (自由) could appear in the title when we publish it.
Edit 1: grammar
I desire a highly secure and unfettered Internet, and I just get frustrated by countries, and companies, that get in the way of achieving this goal.
Try to access the internet in China. Good luck! (But Baidu always works)
Would you elaborate? This is very interesting. How did they get out of that situation?
Like one said, the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it
Yes, only FSF doesn't use the term "open source," except to disavow it.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...
Another explanation of this is included in the "rider" that someone linked earlier this week:
Is that really the case on Hacker News? I often feel like a rebel outcast here for thinking that technology being proprietary is a desirable thing.
That's easy. DRM for machine-to-brain interfaces. Who's going to stop that from happening? Mozilla?
The scary part will begin when they'll be able to delete our memories remotely, because we "stole" their media, or perhaps the content owner simply withdrew the license from the distributor, and now you're not allowed to "own" it anymore and keep it inside your brain.
Or think about what happened inside the DoD when the Snowden leaks or the Wikileaks ones came out, and banned all employees from reading the articles about it. If you think that in the future we won't need "computers" anymore, because our brains will act as the computers of today, I could see the government setting up "infrastructure" to ban such leaks from getting accessed by people, or also deleting them remotely.
And if people have no choice, there is still jail-breaking. And if jail-breaking is forbidden, I'll do it anyway. And possibly start a career as a runner. That would probably get me killed, but if I don't, I may not be able to look at my reflection in a mirror.
It's like saying all of us can at some point make cars, houses, electricity and so on.
Working memory for instance is closely associated to fluid intelligence, which is kinda required to program seriously. What if we stick a chip in your brain that doubles it?
Finally, programming is not a specialized skill like making cars. It can help you do anything, provided you understand whatever you are doing. This is as general as it gets. Anyone who can learn programming should learn it, eventually.
We can memorize copyrighted media now, without needing brain-machine-interfaces. I have hundreds (probably thousands) of copyrighted works memorized. My memory is not perfect, but it retains enough of these works that if I were to recall them and write down my recollections and distribute that, I would be infringing their copyrights.
I don't foresee copyright law needing to be or actually being changed in response to the development of more efficient ways to get copyrighted media into our brains, such as brain-machine-interfaces.
Thus, you can spread copyrighted material. Big difference.
If I were Chinese, the license of the software I was using would be far, far down my list of "Freedoms" that I was concerned about.
(It's already 9pm here in Beijing; the event was scheduled for 2pm-5pm.)
Having just checked the FSF website, there will be a similar function on May 19th, at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Admission open to the public, with or without registration. http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou
For readers unfamiliar with Chinese academic institutions, both UCAS (May 17th) and Zhejiang (May 19th) are institutions noted nationally and internationally for graduate and research programs especially in sciences and engineering.
Below is my comment on this news:
Two years ago, when I left China for US college, I feel most people around me don't care about FOSS, or respect originality & copyright. - They use cracked software. You can buy a disk that installs cracked Windows for less than 1 dollar. Cracked Photoshop & MS Office & whatever licensed software are all over the internet. - They download music & movie for free. - China's internet is full of copycats because the original websites aren't available due to censorship. (Like FB & Twitter). One of the largest IT Company, Tencent, is full of copied products.
But now I feel China is making some progress. Like: - Online streaming companies are paying for copyrighted material, and you can't easily download movie/anime for free as you do in the past. - As Apple becomes more popular, many people start paying for music in iTunes. To my delight, websites like http://mou.li/ even let people buy Sublime Text & Alfred & 1Password easily in China. I really can't believe people would pay over $50 for a text editor two years ago, but now some of them do. - A recent example. A very large company in China named Guokr launched a website: http://www.15yan.com/ . It's a blatant copy of medium. And in their about page, they are literally saying something like "Our product is currently a copycat of Medium, and we'll adpat it to Chinese market to make it better". Shortly after the website went public, someone asked a question in a Chinese Q&A website: "Can we tolerate such blatant plagiarism?" Take a look at it: http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374 . I know you can't read Chinese but take a look at the pictures in the highest upvoted(2130)[1] and third highest(756)[2] answers. Two Chinese Web-Devs compared the CSS and HTML of these two sites, expressed their anger, and described the copycat as "humiliating" and "disgusting". Nearly all the answerers requested this copycat going down immediately and said they'd never use it.
I'm really happy China is really making some progress on this matter.
[1]: http://p3.zhimg.com/69/e3/69e3f847236c2257d925ff11cbb14cc4_m... [2]: http://p3.zhimg.com/2f/6b/2f6b6e698413e0db745efdcb8be73867_m...
