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

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Luis Villa<luis tieguy org> wrote:
> 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.

And I think this goes without saying, but it may bear repeating:
because our goal is a desktop for average users as well as lovers of
freedom, GNOME can't exist in a cultural vacuum. We should do
everything we can to work against DRM, to support sources of Free
culture, and to educate users about Free culture, DRM, and
non-patent-encumbered media formats.[1] But we also have to make
compromises sometimes, so that users of our desktop can still access
and interact with the broader culture they live in. On the grand scale
of these compromises, this seems like a particularly small and easily
acceptable one.

Luis

[1] I imagine we'd welcome continued suggestions on how to better
educate users about these compromises, as usual?