Guardian journalist attacks TPM and everything else

Posted by Ken Y-N on August 20th, 2010 at 03:51pm

The Guardian recently decided to publish an article from apparently a journalism student entitled We should all be using free software, but the article was not much more than a hastily cobbled-together from Wikipedia overview of Free Software worthy of a third-rank Linux blog, not a national newspaper’s web site. Let’s look at a few of the more objectionable bits:

Lifelong free software activist Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman believes in free software and freedom for source code, but he doesn’t believe in the freedom for developers to choose not to make their source code free.

The reason most companies restrict those freedoms is because, in their assessment, there is more money to be made if their own freedom and control over devices is maximised.

That’s capitalism for you.

Software developers routinely leave "back doors" in their products. A good example is RIM’s recent agreement with the Saudi government to make the encrypted communications of BlackBerry users accessible for surveillance.

No, RIM does not have a backdoor in their encryption – they are apparently relocating the encryption hub for Saudi Arabia to Saudi Arabia.

Microsoft, in co-operation with hardware manufacturers like Intel, has included a "trusted computing" system ("treacherous computing" to Stallman) in Windows 7, which gives them the power to interfere with users’ systems remotely.

Perhaps I should design a Free Software vocabulary for Buzzword Bingo – I think the paragraph above would win the game. Oh, and the implementation of a TPM can be Open Sourced, even under the GPL 2.0 license, I believe.

Opening up the source code of software like Windows, RIM’s BlackBerry OS, or Apple’s OS would enable the online community of programmers (real "hackers") to examine it and expose unfree elements.

What? I thought the argument for open source OSes was to find critical bugs, not to do a witch hunt for proprietary code.

This would not compromise a product’s profitability – most people wouldn’t have the knowledge or inclination to spend hours compiling source code into a usable program.

Hint – only one person needs to compile it, then everyone can just download it.

Making source codes available would not only be a safeguard for users, but hasten the end of software patents.

I don’t like software patents myself, but having source code available does not affect software patents, as a patent by definition is open for examination.

The best example of this is Apple’s ongoing lawsuit against competing smartphone manufacturer HTC based on its patents – including "unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image" – something so obvious and fundamental that success in the suit would effectively give Apple a monopoly.

I’ve not examined the Apple patents in detail, but a workaround would be a software or hardware push-button instead of a gesture, hardly enough to give Apple a monopoly.

What needs to be done to get more people to adopt free software? People need to start evangelising

If there’s one thing I never see online, it’s a free software evangelist.

Thankfully, the majority of the commenters, including free software supporters, give the article the thumbs down.

Tags: guardian

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