From the 18th of May, 2010.
MJ: [W]ould it be okay if I said you use open source because you think it’s cool? I actually don’t know why you do at all. You should tell me sometime.
SD: It is cool. However, not in the high school meaning of cool.
MJ: In what way?
SD: Well, you run Ubuntu right?
MJ: Yes.
SD: Well, take any program you think is cool/useful/fun, [and] if you go to the terminal and type apt-get source program_name in a few seconds/minutes you will have the source of that program. All the cool exciting stuff it does is right there for you to play with, break, fix, improve. Think about the hours and hours of work that has gone into something like Firefox. Instead of jealously guarding the product of all that work, [the] people who make it have just given it to everyone. And not just part of it, but all of it.
MJ: And that is pretty cool.
SD: Something like that. I haven’t had Windows on my personal computer for four years or so. I’m not sure I could go back to a system that’s default was to hide things from me and keep things secret. If I find a good piece of free software for GNU/Linux, I can tell Will or someone else about it and not worry about breaking the law just for giving them a copy.
MJ: What is it the FSF says? The ability to distribute what we use?
SD: Redistribute. Redistribution is one of the “four freedoms” that the FSF talks about. Interestingly, I’ve increasingly found Freedom 0, the ability to run the program for any purpose, to be really important
MJ: Does it come up a lot?
SD: Since so often now, you buy software or other media and find that it is locked down such that it is illegal to run it on a different computer or device. This comes up not just software, but music and other media. People who buy music with DRM from the itunes store. The idea that somebody would want to buy something that can only be used on X numbers of computers and devices made by one company is astounding.
MJ: [Could it be] price [or] availability issues?
SD: Perhaps. Although, I just bought a DRM free copy of this Muse song from the Ubuntu Music Store, so that problem may be gone soon. [The Ubuntu Music Store]’s pretty good and has a decent selection. It is hard to say whether Apple is really being earnest in it’s “we want DRM free, but the labels won’t let us” message. I tend not to try to figure out what companies who are built around secrets are thinking. I mean, it is really easy to get around the DRM of itunes. The problem is, just because I can, doesn’t mean I want to break the law just to get access to something I own. I am still trying to figure out where I stand on certain edge issues such as online services
MJ: Explain?
SD: Well, so when you have software on your computer, it is more or less “your computing” that you are doing, but it is unclear what the boundaries of software freedom are when you are talking about web services because I am explicitly doing my computing on somebody else computer.
MJ: So the question is whether you can force a particular user philosophy on someone else’s computer or if it’s even ethical/legal to use certain things on systems not designed for them or stuff more like facebook, in the sense that they are laying down ownership of data?
SD: See, this is why I am still trying to figure out where I stand. There are a bunch of issues that get tied up together. There is the issue of (1) the software that you are using when you use the web service (i.e., you can’t download facebooks code.), but there is also the issue of (2) why I am handing over my data to some third party.