Anti-DRM Free Software Foundation membership drive

Holmes Wilson from the Free Software Foundation writes, "We're at a crucial moment in the fight against DRM. This year--thanks to the strength of the movement you've built and been a part of--we defeated DRM on music. But DRM on books, games, and other digital media is a bigger threat than ever. Meanwhile the Free Software Foundation, the organization behind Defective by Design, is engaged in a broader battle: fighting for our rights to control the technology we use by promoting free software. The FSF is a member-supported nonprofit. Please consider donating or becoming a member today. FSF membership is $10 a month or $5 a month for students.

Join the FSF!

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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kytyn

Anti-DRM Free Software Foundation
Anti DRM Free Software Foundation
Anti DRM-Free Software Foundation

hmmmm……
Anonymous

Dewi Morgan,

What are the limitations to gpl compared to public domain?

The only ones I think of are good given the status of copyright law and attitude so…
Dewi Morgan

I am a staunch supporter of the Public Domain.

I won’t be joining the FSF.

I strongly disagree with the ethics of their GPL; they make Bush-like redefinitions of the terms “free” (=”copyrighted”) and “compatible license” (=”overridable by GPL”); they strongly discourage people from releasing into the public domain; they strongly discourage people from using their own LGPL because it’s too open; they lobbied to move US Gov’t contracted code into the GPL rather than the public domain where it belongs; they encourage people to sign patents over to them; they encourage people to write copyrighted code; and so on.

The GPL is viral: if applied to a fork of a public domain project, it will eventually have to be applied to the main project, as changes in the fork cannot legally be reapplied to the trunk, but trunk changes can be applied to the GPL fork.

The GPL has hugely damaged the public domain programming community that predated it. Once there was a healthy base of public domain code: now everything’s released under copyright.

Far better, then, to give money to other causes: ORG, EFF, CC, et al. These are organisations that fight against DRM and for open source, without treating the public domain as an evil to be exterminated. Sure, Creative Commons does use viral copyright licences, but it also embraces the Public Domain, and offers it as an option at the same level as any other.
the Other michael

I finally joined the FSF last month; I’ve been using Emacs for several years, and a host of Gnu tools in various environments. Time to pony up!