being a sharecropper in your own mind [Re: [conspire] Off Topic: Looking for a Bay Area group that supports Microsoft desktop/laptops.]

[Don Marti]

begin Tony Godshall quotation of Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 09:51:02PM -0800:

> Oh, wait.  I went and read Don Marti's article.  Further
> down he makes it clear that everyone does *not* love snarky.
> Particularly it seems those who've made other choices.  I
> guess flame is snarky carried too far.

I'm going to quote the great Dr. Phil here.

"When you choose the behavior, you choose the
consequences."

When a user clicks "OK" on that proprietary EULA,
he or she is choosing to leave the normal human
world -- free markets, academic freedom, and all our
"kindergarten values" such as sharing and taking
turns -- for the dismal, authoritarian, micromanaged
EULA-land, where information cannot change hands
except under the watchful eyes of the EULA.

I'm for making the inhabitants of EULA-land play
by their own chosen rules, and not sneaking in to
prop up their broken system.  I won't be impolite
about it, but it's not like the EULA-landers are
North Koreans being starved out by their broken
top-down system -- they just have computer problems,
and they won't get shot at for going over the wire.
(hint: https://shipit.ubuntu.com/)

> > ...and the original observation by Robb Beal about coding
> > for the Apple OS...
> > 
> >   http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/06/DC-Day4

I said something like that about the Be and Amiga
platforms in 1999.

http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/1999-October/020620.html


Just in case you feel like thinking about this kind
of stuff, here's some (pre-Sony spyware) thinking
out loud -- with links to Seth Schoen, Karsten Self,
and Jakob Nielsen -- that leads toward, but doesn't
quite pin down, the idea that the spyware problem and
the proprietary software problem are the same problem.

http://zgp.org/~dmarti/blosxom/freedom/user-education.html

-- 
Don Marti
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org