Re: Stormy's update: Week of July 13th

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Richard Stallman<rms gnu org> wrote:
>    Created some Amazon affiliate accounts in US, UK, Canada and Germany so tha=
>    t
>    Jaap can set up stores and a Firefox widget that will enable people to
>    direct Amazon referral fees for their purchase to GNOME.
>
> It is not a good thing for the GNOME Foundation to support Amazon in
> this way.  Amazon is one of the main perpetrators of DRM
> (see http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/orwell-2009-dystopia).

Amazon was also the first significant provider of mainstream
commercial music to offer a 100% DRM-free music store, and also the
first (as far as I know) to offer a GNU/Linux client (albeit a
non-libre client) for their music store. So their record contains
significant strengths as well as significant weaknesses- certainly
glaring weaknesses, but probably more strengths (from our perspective)
than any other purveyor of commercial mainstream culture.

This is not to say I'm rushing out to buy a Kindle; I really want one
but haven't pulled the trigger exactly because of the DRM. But using
Amazon affiliate codes to raise revenue for the Foundation is a world
apart from endorsing Kindle's DRM.

Luis