“Unlimited” to an ISP means limited to the rest of us.

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Robert X. Cringely blogs about the misuse of so-called “unlimited” usage. Entertaining so long as you’re not a Verizon customer. Apparently 5 gigabytes of data is the limit for their so-called “unlimited” plan. If you download more than that in a month, your connection is cut off and you’re expected to pay a fee for “early termination”.

This is actually two problems:

  1. It’s easy to legitimately download more than 5GB in a month. Anyone who downloads free software operating systems and free media (as I encourage people to do) can accomplish this in a month. If you make media (another worthwhile activity), it’s even easier to generate more than 5GB of data in a month that you’d like to share with others, which requires uploading it to your server. Perhaps you don’t do this routinely, but as far as Verizon cares one infraction is enough to justify ending your service.
  2. Paying a fee to the organization that cut you off for downloading too much is ridiculous on its face. This is akin to the logic a bully would use to try and justify beating you for disobeying capricious restrictions.

Years ago, I once had a similar dispute with a local ISP over this issue. I had a second telephone line I was willing to use exclusively for dialing into the ISP over an ordinary telephone modem. The ISP claimed I was using too much connection time, I told them that their plan indicated the usage could be “unlimited”. They claimed that this was subject to vague terms of using the service “too much” and cut off my access. They never even defined what “too much” was in any specific way, but even if they had it wouldn’t change the fact that their service plan was not “unlimited”.

Apparently it’s too much to ask that people actually use the word “unlimited” for its actual meaning and sell Internet access plans with defined limits on how much one can stay connected (in the case of a phone connection) and/or how much data one may transfer over that connection. You know, actually spelling out the details and abiding by them.

When a proprietor tells you your software isn’t “genuine”…

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Microsoft’s “Windows Genuine Advantage” is a push for encouraging users of illicitly licensed Microsoft proprietary software to pay for legally licensed copies. Microsoft sends out a program with system updates which checks over the entire Microsoft Windows system and informs the user if the program concludes that some Microsoft program is not “genuine”.

Of course, “genuine” is the wrong word to use here. Microsoft’s issue concerns whether the license is issued to the user and legitimately obtained (again, according to Microsoft’s records).

So what happens if Microsoft’s software is wrong? Apparently what happens is you either decide to continue to be treated this way by your proprietor, or you decide to switch to free software instead.

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How’s your proprietor treating you?

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In what is turning out to be an ongoing series here on Digital Citizen, Apple has pulled another stunt on their customers: Endgadget.com says that Apple is upsampling lower resolution videos. In other words, Apple starts with a video at a rather low resolution and sells copies of it. Then they blow up that low resolution video and sell their customers videos that version too. These newer videos have worse pictures than they ought to. Why do this? Because Apple customers can be charged twice for the same thing—once for the low resolution version they sold earlier and again for the version which has more pixels but is really just a blown up version of the old version.

And all with Apple’s proprietary DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) in place, of course.

Like Prof. Moglen said, Steve Jobs gets the prize for being the last manufacturer of the Gilette razor: you make a cheap razor and you sell expensive blades. Apple hardware is not cheap, but the songs are morally and physically expensive, expensive to your belief that you can carry songs with you for the rest of your life as we have been up to now. He’s turned unfree into hip.

Why can’t free software and open source advocates just get along?

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They do for making programs and working on various projects, but the Open Source Initiative has quite a history telling people that it is okay to dismiss freedom talk.

I think highly of people, like Eben Moglen, who are able to work so well with OSI advocates. I think it’s important we all work together to achieve some common goals like the abolition of software patents, freeing people from the anti-user circumstances of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and writing more free software. When I hear Michael Tiemann, current president of the OSI and head of Red Hat, say that he respects freedom (audio) I want to believe him. But there is quite a bit of work for the OSI to do to address what has happened over many years (remember, the OSI which started the open source movement, launched over a decade after the GNU Project which began the free software movement).

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One Laptop Per Child progress report and tips for Free Software hackers

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From FISL7.0: James Gettys of One Laptop Per Child (audio) talking about the project. This recording is distributed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

If you’ve ever wondered about this project or are interested in getting viable modern computers to children around the world, OLPC has an exciting project. OLPC needs your help too. Plenty of information about the status of the project and technical help for hackers who want to see their programs running on millions of computers in the near future.

Fedora Core is the GNU/Linux distribution to keep your eye on for this. From what I can see, FISL is turning out to be the premier event in the free software world.

Why software freedom and “open”ness are different and how that affects you.

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I found Daniel Olivera’s part of this talk (audio) interesting (I only speak English, so I can only discuss the English parts of it), but I’d like to expand on the last part some more. This video is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license.

The initial versions of the Apple Public Source License (APSL) are a specific example of the difference between the Open Source and Free Software movements. When Apple initially published the APSL, the Open Source proponents concluded it was an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license. The Free Software Foundation did not, they called this license a non-free license because it did not uphold certain freedoms. This difference is a direct result of the definitions of “free software” and “open source”.

I would have also pointed out that it is curious why anyone would want to say that the OSI supports software freedom when they call such effort “ideological tub-thumping” in their FAQ. The FSF shows that differences between the movements can be described respectfully without name-calling. The OSI was set up to not have to talk about software freedom; software freedom talk was getting in the way of OSI representatives talking to their preferred audience: businesses. So the OSI was founded to frame the debate for free software by throwing out the name “free software” and taking on motivations that would appeal to business: faster, cheaper, and less buggy software development. These consequences of software freedom were taken as chief reasons to adopt what they came to call “open source” software. Hearing someone (perhaps it was Michael Tiemann of Red Hat?) ask about this makes me think if there’s interest in further supplanting the free software movement by getting someone sufficiently high up in an FSF branch to say that the OSI fights for our software freedom like the FSF does, thus allowing the OSI to echo this anytime someone points out an uncomfortable history filled with episodes where software freedom was forgotten in the pursuit of developmental goals.

Finally, it seems that every week there are a few examples of where free software and open source proponents view the situation differently. The recent dust-up about “Open Source DRM” is another example.

Generally, Open Source proponents look at nothing but technical merit whereas Free Software proponents look at what effect a program has on society. There’s a quote from Stallman I’ll have to look for, it goes something like this: If a proprietary program that functions well comes along, an Open Source proponent is likely to look at it and conclude that they’re surprised such a program could be written without involving more developers, but they can’t argue with the technical success the programmers achieved. So they’re compelled to run the program and recommend it to others. The Free Software proponent says that taking away their freedom is not an option. They will not recommend this program to anyone and will only run it for the purpose of making a free replacement.

Germany confirms the validity of the GPL…again.

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GPL-violations.org has the scoop and Groklaw has commentary worth reading as well: Harald Welte, and his lawyer, Till Jaeger, co-founder of the Institute for Legal Issues of Free and Open Source Software have enforced the GNU General Public License (the preeminent free software license) in Germany again, this time against D-Link Germany GmbH. The first time was in Munich in 2004.

D-Link’s lawyers argued that the GPL is invalid. This is a trap of an argument because the GPL is valid, and because if the GPL can be shown to be invalid the natural response is “By what right did you copy, modify, or distribute the covered software?”. There is no suitable response; if any copyright license were shown to be invalid, the copyrighted work would revert to the default for copyright which (put simply) is to disallow all regulated behavior.

Pamela Jones points out the trap on Groklaw:

Moglen has explained for many years that the way the GPL works is this: if you don’t accept it or violate its terms, you have no right to distribute at all, and if you do distribute anyway, it’s a copyright violation, because only the license gives you any distribution rights.

Well, that’s what the German judge said to D-Link, that if you don’t accept the terms of the GPL, where’s the permission to distribute at all? Even if you could prove the license wasn’t legal or binding, you gain nothing, because you thereby lose all rights to distribute. Some seem to think they get to misappropriate the code if they could just get that pesky GPL out of the way. Nope. It’s a package deal. And that is exactly what Moglen told you, but some just wouldn’t listen.

Prof. Eben Moglen on enforcing the GPL is well worth reading. If you license or distribute GPL-covered software, you’ll want to know that you’re using a license you too can stand behind in court, if need be.

It’s sad to see any GPL dispute go to court because it means that the litigants could not resolve their differences and reach an amicable end. But now we’ve got multiple cases in multiple countries to draw upon whenever someone tries to raise fear, uncertainty, or doubt of the GPL’s validity.