a subversive act of playful cleverness

Thu, 12 Feb 2004

Today I was irc^Wworking then a friend told me "see slashdot now!", I said ok, then I've found that it seems that Microsoft's source code for Win2k and WinNT has been leaked and is going all over internet. By now Microsoft has made an official statement about it, they said they are investigating.

Besides that, from a free software and also Open Source perspective this could be a dangerous thing, in one hand we have those which are saying "hey, it's cool now we can see how to implement Microsoft's propietary things in FLOSS projects", there are also those who say "Well, the thing is out there, anything can happen, so I'll take a look on it then forget about the bussiness". There are a few ones who are clever enough at this time to figure this thing out. I'd like to talk about this last ones and why we should listen to them.

We all know the SCO case and all threats that such corporations are doing to FLOSS, now we all know that the number of propietary software for GNU/Linux platform is growing. Now, this 'code release' will benefit or not to FLOSS projects? I, as those ones I talk about, think that it will not. Why? because there's a danger a very hidden danger most people don't realize, besides the technical issues, which are not my focus, there are legal and ethical issues.

What can happen? If one developer of a FLOSS project takes any piece of code from this source he/she is doing a potential harm to the project, becuase they can claim it's copyright ownership over the piece of code, over the "yet another patented software" and do too much harm to FLOSS comunity. We should avoid to download even see it, since it's supossed to be under copyright protection and NDA (for those who had the granted access) they may start "yet another witch hunt", so I ask you please to think about it before do it. Think about why and how FLOSS comunity worked to have what we have now, all the effort they and we made.

Finally I want to address this "oh yes once again the zealot" issue, which is propietary programs running on top of free OSes. Besides the goods that is to have companies putting and investing on Linux and writing/porting their programs to this platform, there's an important issue which is the freedom. It started free and since there step by step it's getting contaminated for non-free software, why we should allow this people to do that? there are no free alternatives? there are no work needing free software projects?.
By allowing or installing non-free software you are not caring anymore for your freedom, you are permiting those ones who you pint out as "the enemy" to be on your home and rule over your information, thus restricting your freedom. So if you *do* care about it please think three times before installing a non-free software.

We don't want the free software which has been built with lots of effort and meant to keep it's freedom being contaminated and eventually extinted due such things as I've wrote here, so please if you haven't thought about this before do it now, think about what's more important to you, your freedom? your information? your comodity? Keeping our software free we allow coming people to have a free choice and world.

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