Different people and organizations have widely varying reasons for wanting to share source code. Some of these reasons are selfish, and some are completely altruistic. Many are both selfish and altruistic- one could easily argue that the FSF falls into that category, not that there's anything wrong with that.

The whole point of creating Open Source was to acknowledge that. The GNU philosophy is very, very, very specific in its means and goals and presents a very specific worldview, and plenty of people (maybe even the majority?) who are interested sharing code don't agree with much of it.

You state that Open Source was created "to keep the code sharing parts while shedding the ethical positions of the GNU philosophy", and many of the people who were instrumental in creating the concept would agree with you. But the reason the concept has stuck around has nothing to do with that. It's just a very, very useful concept. It's very handy to have some way to refer to software for which source code is available, redistributable, and reuseable, and not instantly imply all of the metric ton of legal or philosophical baggage associated with FSF-approved projects.

Someone who doesn't agree with the ethical portions of the GNU philosophy isn't unethical, they just have a different point of view. Yet, that's what you imply in your phrasing. Tons of people who contribute greatly to Open Source (or even Free Software!) consider certain elements of the GNU philosophy to be unethical. This whole "with us or against us" attitude is what turns off so many people to the FSF and RMS in the first place. It's like PETA saying that you are either 100% on board with them and everything they do, or you are in favor of murdering puppies, and there's no middle ground or room for more nuanced perspectives or alternative philosophies.

I'm not arguing against the GNU philosophy; I agree with much of it and strongly disagree with some other parts of it. As always, I'm just strongly in favor of a world where people think for themselves, come to their own conclusions, cooperate with others when they have overlapping goals, and don't go out of their way to continually villainize people who aren't 100% on board with every single line item in one guy's personal doctrine.

By the same token 99.9% of consumers don't care about the legalities and 'freedoms' that Atwood talks about - only what they can do with their computers and the ease with which they can do it.

This should not be news, though, right? Consumers can only be trusted to be concerned for their own best interests. More than that -- only about their own immediate and simple best interests (i.e. we consumers will totally vote for a destructive political initiative, if it promises short-term gain for us personally, while crippling the economy for decades).

So, any advocacy of free software ideology which is aimed at the 'masses' and the 'people' is doomed to fail. It has to be aimed at the minority of more responsible and educated agents - who, in turn, can (and should!) care about these more distant and noble and sophisticated goals, while not being angry or judgmental toward the 'consumer', who isn't championing such lofty goals.

You have to walk alone, and should expect isolation and hardship, essentially. Wasn't it always the case?

Though many users do complain about things such as overbearing DRM and other restrictions , which can be a symptom of non free software.

I just hope that some day some popular software developer would become bored with everything to the extent that he would really consider fucking their users with EULA as hard as possible.

"what they can do with their computers" is the whole point of freedom zero.

No, "what a hypothetical user could do, potentially, given unlimited skill in the computing domain" is the whole point of freedom zero.

All everyday users give a shit about is what they actually can do easily, given their shallow understanding of computing devices, to get the shit they need doing done.

This rarely taxes or even approaches the limit of commercial, closed software, so they perforce give zero shits about hypothetical freedoms that for all intents and purposes do not exist for them given their time and skill constraints.

You think the average computer user rarely approaches the limits imposed by proprietary software? You must have never met someone who:

* Wanted to rip a video DVD

* Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another

* Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in

* Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television

These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions, and all violations of Freedom 0. You seem to think Freedom 0 is about technical competence; yet weak technical skills are what proprietary software vendors take advantage of when they impose these sorts of restrictions.

> These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions, and all violations of Freedom 0.

Those problems can not be separated out and analyzed independently like this.

> Wanted to rip a video DVD

> Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another

Without those two limitations you wouldn't have either DVDs and iPods, as the economics of these technologies wouldn't made sense for companies which created them.

> Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in

This sound like an accidental technical limitation.

> Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television

This is, again, the limit that allows you to have those movies in the first place.

I'm all for the open source and Freedom 0, but please don't forget that it's not about Freedom 0 being violated or not. It's about it being violated or not having anything at all.

You seriously think that DVDs wouldn't exist if they couldn't have their little ROT-13? Well I don't think this is going to be a very fruitful conversation.

Oh but while you're here how about you explain the popularity of DRM-free mp3 downloads :)

That's why after DVDs encryption was cracked they stopped making DVDs

I thought that was because better formats came out... With no improvement on the 'encryption' end as far as I can tell, because I can find bluray rips for any movie that's come out on bluray.

He was being sarcastic. CSS (the pathetic 40-bit "encryption" used on DVDs) was cracked in 1999. Blu-ray wasn't commonplace until 8-10 years later.

Blu-ray's AACS actually is much better than CSS ever was, and as far as I know it hasn't been attacked in either a brute-force or break-the-algorithm sense. But like all other DRM, there are inherent flaws it can't work around. You need only extract a player key and you can freely decrypt the data.

First, to clarify, the remote desktop limitation was never accidental. It was a deliberate obstruction built into Windows XP that was meant to stop people from using the OS as a multiuser server. It is no different from Maltab contacting a license server to determine if there are too many people using the program at a time (as was the case at my undergrad university) or a parking garage refusing to release anyone's car because a license expired. The Windows Server version supported multiple simultaneous remote desktop sessions (with an artificial limit imposed by the software, that depended on the license; Windows XP Home/Professional simply had this limit hard-coded).

I think you are lacking citations needed to prove your point that we would not have movie and music players if they were not deliberately restricted. There were digital music players prior to the iPod that were not so restricted. CDs never had any restrictions built in; what makes you think DVDs would never have happened without the restrictions? I know for a fact that you are wrong about HDCP, because the same cable receiver had HD component outputs that had no HDCP requirements.

To put it another way, if people demanded Freedom 0, they would have it -- and there would still have been DVDs and iPods. The MPAA is not going to give up a multi-billion dollar market. They obviously want to restrict how people use their computers, because it increases their advantage in the market, but that market would not disappear if they did not have that increased advantage (if they only had all their other advantages). The same is true of the software market, the music industry, etc.

It is not a choice between Freedom 0 and "some kind of empty void;" it is choice between Freedom 0, and not having Freedom 0, with everything else remaining largely the same.

How is "what a hypothetical user could do, potentially, given unlimited skill in the computing domain" the whole point of Freedom Zero? You think that someone with "unlimited skill in the computing domain" can't run Mac OS X without an non-Apple manufactured computer or replace their gaming console OS with Linux? That's silly. It's all been done before with far less than "unlimited skill."

The point of Freedom Zero is exactly the opposite: It's about eliminating bullshit restrictions that, while given enough time and effort can easily be broken by a smart group of people educated in the field, only prevent the regular user from using their property how they want to.

In the days of iPhones and App Stores, Open Source is almost exactly the same as Free Software.

No; the software is almost the same, since almost all Open Source licenses are also Free Software, and vice versa. But the philosophy and goals of the projects are very different.