FSF starts anti-Vista campaign

[Tsuroerusu]

Title says it all, and so does the FSF: http://badvista.fsf.org:
"Boston, MA—December 15, 2006—The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today launched BadVista.org, a campaign with a twofold mission of exposing the harms inflicted on computer users by the new Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free software alternatives that respect users' security and privacy rights."

"“Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new 'features' in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care”, said FSF program administrator John Sullivan."

Couldn't agree more!

[allix]

I have mixed feelings on this, its a great way to promote free and open software but hammering away at a product is pretty childish. We are grown up adults ( well most of us ) and this kind of tit for tat is something we don;t really need to get into.

Its like stevel balmers or whoever said linux was a cancer, its just plain playground talk.

Wheather promoting GnewSense over any distro is debatable, the distro has only just started, there needs to be some reviews beforehand.

[Tsuroerusu]

I have mixed feelings on this, its a great way to promote free and open software but hammering away at a product is pretty childish. We are grown up adults ( well most of us ) and this kind of tit for tat is something we don;t really need to get into.

Its like stevel balmers or whoever said linux was a cancer, its just plain playground talk.

That is not what the FSF is doing, unlike Steve Ballmer who said that "Linux is a cancer" and gave no legitimate reasons for it, the FSF is bringing to attention some issues that Vista brings with it. Great examples of these issues are things such as DRM/TPM (Digital Restrictions Management and Treacherous Computing, both terms coined by FSF related people as replacements for "Digital Rights Management" and "Trusted Computing", respectively), restrictive licensing etc. etc.

Wheather promoting GnewSense over any distro is debatable, the distro has only just started, there needs to be some reviews beforehand.

Well, gNewSense, currently, is just Ubuntu Dapper Drake without all the proprietary drivers and firmware, and Dapper Drake is already a solid distro. Just removing some unnecessary components doesn't hurt stability, in fact, in theory, it would enhance stability and security to remove the proprietary drivers and firmware. The reason for this is that by not depending on a certain group of people to test the components and fix bugs, you gain more stability. Remember, the kernel you get from kernel.org has been tested by many kernel developers, and both Red Hat and Novell have full time people to work on the thing. But, if you then introduce a component that may not have been tested with the latest kernel or has some new system call that causes a conflict then you have problems. This is the good thing about having a driver in the mainline kernel, because it will just work with any newer kernel as long as the driver is not like obsoleted or somehow deprecated.