freedom category archive

Inertia prevents Bruce Schneier from moving to GNU/Linux

When you don’t see new posts here, it probably means one of three things:

I’m busy with other things in my life, such as:

Family
Work

I’ve lost interest in the blog.
I’m actually doing the free software thing! I’m learning about free software or getting things set up in support of the move.

While #1 is almost always true, the past week has also seen some of #3, and I’ve been enjoying it. And as always, I’m trying to think about how to write about it. I do want to write about it, hopefully in a way that is useful and possibly entertaining for others. But it takes so much time. So maybe I should learn to just post some hasty blurbs here.

And I’m still wondering how much technical detail to go in to. …

Techdirt doesn’t get the Children’s Machine (aka the $100 laptop)

I’ve been reading Techdirt for a few months and usually find the entries there to be thoughtful and insightful, but I wouldn’t use those words to describe this post about the Children’s Machine. The post and many of the comments make me sad.

If you’re not familiar with it, you can read about the Children’s Machine at Wikipedia and at the One Laptop per Child homepage. The goal is to make a rugged laptop, suitable for use in remote environments, and to get the cost down in the $100 per laptop range. OLPC is a charitable organization and is raising money to manufacture and give these laptops to poor children.

One line of disagreement in the Techdirt post and …

Red Hat Film: ‘Truth Happens’

I thought it might be fun to try hosting one o’ thems fancy YuuuwToob videos here. Don’t know if it’s something I’ll want to do that often. I’m leery of relying on another web site to provide a major component of a post, especially in this case where I don’t know how long-term I can depend on a YouTube video to be available with all the take-downs happening and sure to come. I’d hope that the owner of the copyright on this particular clip wouldn’t demand its removal, but you never know. Another potential problem: Can you even view YouTube videos with free software?

This is a companion piece to this week’s Free Software Magazine entry, and related to the Gandhi quote in this recent post. Beyond that, I’ll let …

Cell Phone Seduction

The picture here at the top of the post is the cell phone that my wife and I have been using for the past five years. (Well, not this cell phone, but the same model, a Nokia 5120, and we each have our own.)

Pretty old and clunky, huh? They’ve worked great for us. It may not be surprising to hear this from a guy who is interested in “free” software, but I can be frugal about a lot of things. (Cheap! My friends and family might say.) And these phones and our plan have been fairly cheap. They were free through a corporate discount plan and then $30 per month total for both phones and 60 anytime minutes each. We probably average about 5 minutes per month. They’re …

Thomas Jefferson on Patents and Freedom of Ideas

Started reading Unbounded Freedom and ran in to a great excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson in 1813 about the nature of ideas. It’s not the first time I’ve run across it, and like my Ben Franklin quote it has seen a lot of use in patent discussions, but it’s the kind of thing I think needs to be found on movingtofreedom.org. Looking at more of the letter:

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be

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Standing on the Corner with Pamphlets in Hand

Welcome to my street corner. I recently listened to a speech by Eben Moglen called “Freedom and the Future of the Net: Why We Win.” It’s good stuff. Very interesting. I unfortunately haven’t been able to find a transcript of it, but as a value-added service to the MTF community, I transcribed this, where he is discussing how the “artificially large person” (e.g. Christina Aguilera) is manufactured for the purpose of selling things, and:

But all of this depends upon denial. Exclusion. You can’t have it unless you pay. And it’s not actually the

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