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The annoyances of proprietary Firefox extensions
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| As a regular browser of the Firefox Add-ons site, I'm troubled by the
| apparent proliferation of proprietary extensions in the last year. Maybe I've
| simply exhausted the free-licensed extensions that interest me, but recently
| every interesting-looking extension seems to be a proprietary one --
| especially in the recommended list. Nothing, of course, in the Mozilla
| privacy or legal notice prohibits proprietary extensions simply because they
| are proprietary, but I find them not only contrary to the spirit of free and
| open source software (FOSS), but, often, annoying attempts to entangle me in
| some impossible startup.
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http://www.linux.com/feature/155919
A balance of freedoms
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| We balance freedoms (sacrifice one freedom for another) everyday. We
| sacrifice the freedom to do whatever we want to live in a society where laws
| keep us safe. And we'd rather be safe than do the things that are illegal
| (well most of us anyway). So we sacrifice a freedom we wouldn't exercise (to
| commit crimes) for ones we do want to exercise (to live without being the
| victim of crime).
|
| Software example: Skype
|
| You could sacrifice the software freedom so that you can have the freedom to
| communicate with family and friends who use skype.
|
| OR
|
| You could sacrifice the freedom to communicate with friends and family via
| Skype so that you can retain software freedom - the freedom to
| use/study/modify/share the code.
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http://www.fsdaily.com/blog/balance-freedoms
Software sucks, or why I don't trust proprietary closed source software
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| Now, can somebody really trust proprietary software at this point? The only
| way I can trust Free Software is by making sure I can fix it, but there are
| so many forks and copies and bundles and morphings that evaluating the
| security of the software is difficult even there; on proprietary software,
| where you cannot be really sure at all about the origin of the software, the
| embedded libraries, and stuff like that, there’s no way I can trust that.
|
| I think I’ll try my best to improve the situation of Free Software even when
| it comes to security; as the IE bug demonstrated, free software solutions
| like Firefox can be considered working secure alternatives even by media, we
| should try to play that card much more often.
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http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2008/12/18/software-sucks-or-why-i-dont-trust-proprietary-closed-source-software
Recent:
No Secret Software!
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| This is very closely aligned to the struggle for the use of open-source
| software where appropriate, but “Open Source” is a term of art and is
| associated with ill-groomed inarticulate geeks who have odd opinions about
| lots of things. “Secret software” is a term that anyone can understand
| instantly, and it sounds creepy and dangerous; because secret software in the
| public sector is creepy and dangerous, and simply shouldn’t be allowed.
|
| Ms Peterson gently chided the Open-Source community for having let the
| e-voting debacle happen in the first place; it was foreseeable and should
| have been headed off. I think she has a point.
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http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/07/27/No-Secret-Software
Backdoor in Skype? We need an open-source replacement
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| Deliberate or just flawed?
|
| So, assuming for a moment that the claim of the Austrian police is correct,
| there are two possibilities now: (a) Either Skype made a mistake somewhere in
| the implementation of their encryption algorithms and thus allowed a
| successful attack on their protocols. Or (b) they have deliberately provided
| a backdoor for law enforcement or other agencies.
|
| [...]
|
| And of course, Skype is ubiquituous. If you want to talk to people, you need
| to use what they are using. And everyone is using Skype.
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http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/5472
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