350 karma · joined December 21, 2017
I'd guess that GNU Linux-libre project maintainers have no objection to distributing free software firmware as part of Linux-libre.
From what I'm told, the Skype for Business back-end is not enterprise-ready, by which I mean the back-end is written to assume that one user or one set of users has admin control over all the lines set up in the system. So one user or set of users remains in charge of all of the telephony details (role-based accounts, response groups, etc.). A proper enterprise-ready program allows the admin capabilities to be limited to groups of users and delegate functionality to those groups for certain lines. This arrangement lets you have multiple simultaneous admins edit different non-conflicting details (such as setup for two different response groups) simultaneously with no problems. This means large organizations with lots of somewhat independent groups have to set up work queues where someone in each group files a request for the Skype for Business admin(s) to work on requests (e.g. Please make 123-555-1234 a response group set up in the following way...). This slows down an admin in any of those groups considerably as those admins wait for their work requests to be fulfilled or further questions to be sent back in response.
Also some of the limits in Skype for Business strike me as silly: one of them concerns response groups (a Skype for Business term for how inbound calls are routed to a series of receptionists called "agents" in Skype for Business parlance). If you want a response group where some of the agents are allowed to decide whether they want to receive the calls (known as a "formal login" response group in Skype for Business parlance), and other users are required to receive the calls (an "informal login") you can't have both of these kinds of agents in the same response group. You have to set it up so that, say, the informal login agents get the call first and (if they don't take the call after a few seconds) the call is passed to the formal login agents.
From what I'm told, Skype for Business doesn't handle nested directory service groups properly when those groups contain sets of agents (which I understand Skype for Business treats as distribution lists when one uses Microsoft's directory server Active Directory). If that's so, this means that organizations that keep tidy directory service hierarchies can't reuse their groups efficiently.
On to addressing points raised in the essay:
"If you have been following Amazon at all, you have probably heard what sounds like code language when we talk about how we get our work done. As I have mentioned before, our work like a kind of short-hand for the types of qualities that make people effective here. And they aren’t just for leaders of organizations, they are for everyone at Amazon. We are all leaders."
No, everyone at Amazon.com is not a "leader". Leaders get to set the terms by which they and others will do some job. Reports of worker exploitation (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html#exploiting for links to relevant stories to back up the claim) make it clear that not everyone has the freedom to determine how their own job should be structured. Even if those changes would result in allowing workers to live in reasonable conditions, earn a living wage, work under conditions that don't make them ill, work without "spout[ing] the ideology of devotion to the company" (as Stallman rightly put it on his personal website linked above), and work a full-length career not a short-stint part-time or "contractor" job that will leave the worker to have to find another way to make ends meet all while delivering goods and services in a reasonable time-frame. I'll give you a hint as to how this could play out for boxing goods at Amazon.com: it's fine if Amazon.com's customers waited an extra day or two in order to let the "pickers" take bathroom breaks, longer working breaks, and avoid on-the-job hazards like constantly hustling and fainting during the working day.
"You may have heard that Jeff Bezos dislikes social cohesion. It’s a detriment to business success because it causes people to stifle ideas and objections for the sake of keeping the peace. I’m the kind of person who can have a concern or objection sidetrack my attention and I need to get it out; at least have it heard."
I doubt many who work under someone else believes this. This is what the manager class tell each other and tries to believe themselves while the worker class (people with the least say in the relationship) knows that stifling one's ideas and objections is conducive to helping them keep their job. This applies at every level in the hierarchy -- mid-level managers suffer from this when talking to their bosses and exploit this when talking to their subordinates. But the largest set of people always exist in the least-empowered class.
Managerial glib puffery PR like this usually downplay or ignore why people work these jobs at all: they live in societies that don't pay enough to give the worker the flexibility of choosing where to work. Capitalism pushes people to trade their skills for sustenance and tries to make it seem like that's a right and proper tradeoff, while capitalism also ridiculously over-rewards a few at the top (most notably in the case of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos). Bezos, who might be the wealthiest person, clearly makes enough money to where he could never work again and be fine (as so could many generations of his children). But Bezos is not alone in this over-reward scheme; the gap between rich and poor is the largest it has ever been and it is accelerating.
It's ironic that any discussion of this kind would be raised in a single-point-of-censorship discussion forum such as this; it's so easy for anonymous users to score someone's post low (which affects whether other readers see the post with difficulty or at all) instead of responding. All scoring systems that affect how others see the posts are censorship, without exception. They work that way because that's precisely what they were designed to do. They are a mechanised way of implementing the reality of talking to the boss and run directly counter to the self-deluding lie of "disagree and commit".
That ranking site claims "The DB-Engines Ranking ranks database management systems according to their popularity." but then includes concepts such as "Number of mentions of the system on websites", "General interest in the system", and "Relevance in social networks" as part of the ranking (see https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_definition for details). In fact, the one thing one would typically consider to be "popularity" -- installed base size -- is not considered at all ("The DB-Engines Ranking does not measure the number of installations of the systems, or their use within IT systems."). In fact the paragraph from which I drew that quote highlights how ridiculous this site is: to understand that paragraph's use of the word "popular" you have to use the common definition, the definition they won't use in computing their so-called "popularity" ranking. This tells me that db-engine.com's ranking is not to be taken seriously.
As SQLite's page I pointed to claims, virtually every modern operating system and many popular programs come with at least one copy of SQLite. But then again, understanding the previous sentence requires using the word "popular" in a way that most people use that word most of the time, not the perverse way db-engines.com used the word. Put differently, Oracle, db-engines.com #1 pick, doesn't run on iOS, MacOS, GNU/Linux, and some variants of Windows. That means there are a considerable number of systems that host at least one copy of SQLite and will never host Oracle.
I find it very difficult to believe that there are more running or installed instances of Oracle on the world's computers than there are SQLite. The original article is plainly wrong. MySQL is nowhere nearly as "popular" as is claimed and the backing to believe otherwise hinges on a highly dubious source.
As to "spend[ing] 2 hours in a conference explaining why people should use free software": Be careful about the trap of concision as explained by Herman and Chomsky in "Manufacturing Consent". It takes time to lay out new ideas, ideas which mainstream media never discuss. Software freedom is still (even 30+ years after the fact) regarded as a new idea.
Regarding saying something about someone else's computer: I don't clearly understand your point. Are you sure this isn't giving someone convincing reasons to favor free software? Can you point to an example of where RMS is a service user and makes demands of that service beyond recommending what they ought to do to get the software freedom they deserve?
"I agree with the logic of your argument, but it sounds like a lawyer's argument : it's ok by the law eventhough i'ts not super "ethical"."
What's not ethical about not having control over someone else's computer?
The author ends up advocating for a comparable line by not pointing out what a trap "choice" can be. We're told "openness" and means having "choice" ("openness, if you believe in choice") but what if the only choices are all powerful, reliable, nonfree software -- which word processor do you want: Microsoft Word or Word Perfect? Which OS do you want: iOS, MacOS, or Windows? None of these choices respect your software freedom, none respect your privacy, and all come with insecurities you are prohibited from fixing or helping your proprietary-software-running friends by sharing a copy of the fixed program (no matter how technically-minded and motivated you are). Time to give up on openness, according to the author, and get on reviewing against a substantially lesser value which ignores software freedom entirely.
Then the author quotes a well-known bolster for software nonfreedom (Walt Mossberg) who misframes his critique of a Google chatting program in terms of being "insecure" instead of the core issue of being proprietary. And the author compounds the problem by critiquing the review badly -- "being “secure” and being “open” are incompatible". I'm not sure if that's so because of the ill-defined and somewhat contradictory way "open" is used (no doubt, on purpose). But there is no contradiction between being insecure and respecting a user's software freedom. We can improve bad free software to make it better. We can't inspect, alter, or distribute (sometimes even run!) proprietary software. The only party allowed to inspect, alter, and distribute proprietary software is the very party we can't trust to work in our interests. So we're always better off with free software, regardless of its current technical quality.
In fact, the problem of insecurity rests squarely with nonfree (proprietary, user-subjugating) software precisely because (as https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ points out) "Power corrupts; the proprietary program's developer is tempted to design the program to mistreat its users. (Software whose functioning mistreats the user is called malware.) Of course, the developer usually does not do this out of malice, but rather to profit more at the users' expense. That does not make it any less nasty or more legitimate. Yielding to that temptation has become ever more frequent; nowadays it is standard practice. Modern proprietary software is typically a way to be had." and then lists so many organized examples to back up this claim that it's safe to say if one is running proprietary software, it's likely there's an insecurity (perhaps a universal backdoor) in it.
As to using someone else's tracker (tracking is what those devices do most of the time, so why not acknowledge that's what they chiefly are by calling them by their rightful name?): this is right in line with understanding that software freedom concerns control of one's own computer. Remote services (such as /., Hacker News, Google mail, and more) might run on nonfree software. That's a bad choice for the computer owner (all computer owners deserve software freedom) but it doesn't say much about use of the service because service users don't have a say about someone else's computer. By the same token, those that choose to own and keep trackers on their person have already divulged the location of the tracker (and thus themselves), and that choice was never Stallman's to make. So the choice for Stallman (or someone using someone else's tracker) comes down to making the call or not.
As http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html rightly points out, "both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are copyleft licenses: each of them says, “If you include code under this license in a larger program, the larger program must be under this license too.” There is no way to make them compatible.". So LibreCAD could relicense to be either GPLv2+ or GPLv3 which would allow making a program with code from LibreCAD and code from a GPLv3 program. Asking a GPLv3 or GPLv3+ project to relicense under a lower version GPL would be heading in the wrong direction for preserving user's software freedom. Asking the FSF to do a worse job of defending software freedom is a silly thing to ask.
GPLv3 has substantial practical improvements over GPLv2 which all GPL licensors ought to consider. A few examples: nicer termination terms than GPLv2 -- under GPLv2, any infringement causes a infringer to lose their rights under the license unless the copyright holder(s) restore those rights. GPLv3, on the other hand, grants an infringer some time to come into compliance to account for accidental infringement. GPLv3 has anti-TiVOization, anti-DRM, and patent licensing language not explicitly present in GPLv2. GPLv3 has a more modern source distribution requirement than GPLv2 (which was written before Bittorrent). Again, as http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html rightly points out, "Further advantages of GPLv3 include better internationalization, gentler termination, support for BitTorrent, and compatibility with the Apache license.".
http://gplv3.fsf.org/ has complete details on GPLv3's advantages and http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html concisely states multiple reasons to switch to GPLv3. There are plenty of good reasons to license under GPLv3 or "GPLv3 or later" to avoid this problem in the future.
Services you should handle yourself on your own computer (like RSS feed reading) can be done for you but when they're done for you they become "Service as a Software Substitute" or "SaaSS" (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... for more on that).
A SaaSS RSS feed reader grants others power over what you're allowed to read, when you're allowed to read it, and that choice also empowers others to track you in your reading. If you don't value your privacy you'll lose it and then you'll likely come to regret losing it after it's too late and you've given trackers enough information to predict your habits.
Open source and software freedom are not the same thing:
This license claims to cover many types of "content" (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Content for why that's a bad idea) including "Technical stuff such as metadata and open-source code (please see point 7)". The Open Source Initiative started over a decade after the free software movement began and promotes a 10-point development methodology built to reject the ethical underpinning of the free software movement. The Open Source Definition is not at all the same as software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published software). Open source advocates sometimes reject that 10-point methodology altogether and adopt whatever proprietary work is available if that work is sufficiently attractive (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... for more on this). The RemArc license is an example of papering over the limitations of proprietary control by using a term people think they understand.
The RemArc license is highly prejudiced against commercial and educational use. Section 7 tells us RemArc-covered works are "only for non-commercial, personal or research purposes". Using the covered work "substantially to do your job – as an employee, contractor or consultant" might require you to pay a fee not listed in this license. And that personal or research use (however that is meant to be interpreted) is further limited to "formal education purposes while you are a student or a member of staff of a school, college or university". So if you're doing your own research/education work or if you're home-schooling, you are not licensed to use the covered work. I can't say if this qualifies as "open source" as the license says, but these restrictions absolutely disqualify this license from being a free software license.
RemArc license is very unclear:
"Don't mess with our content" seems to mean let the copyright holders dictate when you must remove the work upon request. So you are being kept from keeping a copy of the work thus censoring you.
"Don’t use our content for harmful or offensive purposes" is defined using vague and undefined terms such as being "insulting", "promoting pornography" (precisely what pornography is or what 'promotes' pornography is doubly-unclear), "putting children at risk" (of what? They don't say), "anything illegal. Like using hate speech" (which, is not defined in the US and not defined in this license, and would not survive 1st Amendment scrutiny in the US if used by a state-funded institution akin to coming from the state-funded BBC). Also one is not licensed to use the work in a "harmful or offensive" way such as "Using our content for political or social campaigning purposes". Not only is that unclear it could include doing things I don't find offensive, harmful, insulting, or illegal such as educating children about software freedom.
RemArc license is referred to as a contract ("This is a contract between you and us.") and also a license (2nd line). I don't know how English law defines these terms or what the consequences of those terms are, but in American law they don't mean exactly the same thing.
It makes real a myth propagated by anti-software freedom campaigners:
"You have to [u]se the latest version of the content and, where we have it, don’t remove any tagging or tracking" so if they change something, they demand you change your work that includes theirs (presumably without notice). This implements a myth used to argue against strongly-copylefted software covered under the GNU GPL. Ironically, the GPL allows anyone with a copy of the covered code to edit out anything they don't like, so there's no obligation to pass along "tagging or tracking" nor is there any obligation to keep up with changes made in other copies of the same work. But the RemArc license requires you be a bolster for privacy-busting tactics such as tracking. Hardly a nice way to treat people!
It's remarkably restrictive:
"English law governs these terms, and only English courts can make judgments about them." Why would anyone outside this court system want to have their rights determined by English law?
It makes no sense why BBC fee payers would want to be compelled to pay to have taxpayer-funded workers to make works which are so restrictively licensed.
I suspect this license might be someone's well-meaning but poorly chosen attempt at being approachable by non-lawyers. I cringe at the thought of that just as I do when I hear non-technical people describe computer-related problems and say things that make no sense leaving me to try to guess at what they really meant ("I put the floppy disk in the hard drive and switched the monitor on but the game didn't play." which might mean they put something in their computer and only turned on the monitor but not the computer therefore no program ran).
This license and everything covered under it should be avoided.
"the best web browser" -- has no meaning without clearly identifying the criteria by which one considers anything best, worst, or any rating in between.
"If a friend were to ask me what the best web browser is, I’d answer “Chrome” in a heartbeat, so don’t mistake this as a screed against Google’s browser." -- because any deep criticism of a nonfree browser, or a nonfree browser from a spying organization would, by default, be a "screed"? No respect for freedom of speech here, and that's no way to treat your friends. This line and much of the essay comes off as a way to validate the idea that we need not consider anyone who looks out for their own software freedom, the software freedom of their friends and other computer users in general, or their (very much related) privacy interests. The allowable limits of debate are set: technocratic functionality (such as the effectiveness of an ad-blocker, vague notions of competition and "unhealthy growth" without mention of software freedom are considered right and proper to get into. Please restrict any discussion to such proprietor-affirming ideas. Anything outside these boundaries is "a screed against Google's browser".
"I still see it [Google Chrome] as the most fully-featured and trouble-free option for exploring the web." -- so this further reinforces the above: privacy is not a feature and the loss of privacy (where Google decides how much privacy to grant each user) is not to be considered a "trouble".
Nonfree browsers are unethical and problematic for the same reasons which apply to all other nonfree software: we need and deserve to control our own computers. This doesn't just apply to those who write software, but to all computer users. Therefore we all need the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software (software freedom). Users who can't or won't learn to program can either choose to learn or get someone they trust to vet and improve software on their behalf. More technically-capable users can help everyone out by vetting and improving published software for their own sake. They can help their community by sharing their improvements under licenses that respect our software freedom. These are deeper more thoroughgoing reasons to reject nonfree software and run only software that respects your software freedom.
One could write software which runs on the toothbrush and reports back everything it can sense in the area. This grants the upstream provider up-to-date information on the environment where the toothbrush is. It's not hard to see how this is profitable in an age where spying is big business. This need not have anything to do with dentistry. Businesses are typically more interested in making more money than they are in adhering to someone else's vision of consistency.
How this data is used is, as always, up to those who possess a copy of the data, and utterly indefinable now. For all we know, it might be handy to know that a Bluetooth device with ID XYZ was present near a given set of global coordinates at a certain time of day and date. Asking how the data is useful is hard to say specifically like asking why a library (public or private) would have a copy of a particular work -- that copy might be useful to someone someday and it is easier than ever to get the public to cooperate in their own loss of privacy by framing every issue around convenience.
The benchmarks seem unfair to me because they compare code that either in code choice (specific instruction sets) or algorithm design could favor the Intel/AMD systems. Larabel addresses this but still publishes these results as if we could use them as a reasonable baseline for future comparisons when the software is optimized for POWER systems.
Also on performance, I imagine most computer users will find that any modern computer will do what they need it to do quickly enough to get real work done. Check out the videos this POWER system team put together for their other systems (systems that aren't radically different from this one) like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05NNFJj3Mrw (use youtube-dl or avideo to avoid running YouTube's nonfree software) or at https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/op_ue4_gl.php ; you'll see games run well, multi-monitor setups run well; and users can expect to get plenty of work done. The bottleneck is usually elsewhere: how quickly a server gives the user data, how much space the computer has to store data (either in RAM or permanent storage), and other more complex delays imposed by some other part of a process well beyond one's own computer. Most computer users simply don't do tasks akin to what's being tested here. The most mathematically challenging thing they do is decode video and that's often designed to be faster than encoding that same video. Even video encoding is somewhat overrated as this is typically done far fewer times than decoding that same video. One can't get a computer fast enough to avoid purchasing many computers to do large encoding jobs; it's not a matter of switching to some modern Intel/AMD system.
As you said, the respect for privacy and software freedom is underrated to a fault in this Phoronix article. I'm also disappointed in how readily the readership that posts about this article buys right into the framing of the debate around performance and ignores or minimizes the importance of software freedom and respect for privacy. By the metric of software freedom -- which systems respect a user's software freedom? -- modern Intel/AMD chipsets simply fail. There's no contest but there's plenty to talk about and teach about. Intel/AMD systems come with backdoors (pitched as sysadmin conveniences) we are prohibited from altering thus preventing most computer users from truly owning their computers, regardless of programmatic skill or desire. Larabel acknowledges this in a paragraph toward the end but that hardly gives this important issue its due attention. Particularly when one buys a computer they'll use for years, making a bad decision here pays off for those who want to spy on you for years to come regardless of which OSes are run atop that system. Finally, I think those that discount the importance of privacy are flatly lying; everyone has something to hide and most people reading this rely on networked computing in their daily lives. It's critical we have computers we can trust for all of our computing needs.
How could this have been implemented in a way that obviates all of these show-stopper failings? Respect users' software freedom by offering users one or more programs to do the conversion jobs with reasonable default settings. Distribute complete corresponding source code alongside the rest of the site so as to let the user host an instance of the site on their own. Users so inclined can set this up for themselves and others, or use their software freedom to end up with a conversion service they don't need to guess about.
Corporate media has been giving passes with one-off coverage that often neglects to mention any proposals for remedying long-term public ramifications. But the public's interest isn't well served by corporate media nor is public interest properly evaluated by corporate media.
Let's also stop thinking the stock market is a proper means of evaluating something applicable to most people's interests, because that's never been true. The stock market has more to do with wealthy people than most people.
The corporate death penalty seems right and proper for very egregious offenses like credit rating agencies because the public will suffer the most and for the longest time (possibly the rest of their lives) when these records are insecure. Organizations will continue to lazily make evaluations based on these records but the records could have been tampered with. And judging by Equifax's successful lobbying, the ratings agencies get away with scarce punishment and therefore have little reason to care about fixing what they broke. Relatedly, it's time we stopped trusting so few organizations with something so precious. The market just isn't designed to handle truly important things, so we should stop trusting it to do so.
No, let's not give them or any other organization passes, but let's also realize that most of these organizations use proprietary software (untrustworthy by default) to keep that data secure where nobody (including the organization) simply can't do effective audits. How proprietary software works is a secret, so such software is structurally incapable of ever being reasonably considered a sound choice for data safety. And organization's choices affect user's data safety, so users have an interest in this but not enough control over how their data is stored.
The real way to avoid the problem of non-freedom and deny the admins/programmers the power to control your reading is to use free software RSS feed readers instead of hosted services you don't host yourself or proprietary programs. Choose RSS readers that respect a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program. https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Internet-application... points to some.
Need evidence? The centralized nature of websites is structural evidence -- any service can offer you a "delete" button and let you think you're causing that item to be deleted. In reality, service admins control what happens to the data. Hacker News post revisions, for instance, could be kept at HN admin's discretion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724962 is a discussion about "Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted".
Any time you rely on someone else's computer ("the cloud") to store your data, you rely on them to act in accordance with your choices. This is basic 'how information flows' stuff and it's still valid and still true.
Centralization is popular with admins because of the power it grants them. The issues are much the same for "deleting" an account on some service as they are for censorship power on web-based discussion sites because the same underlying centralized structure is at work.
Website discussion forums are single points of censorship (including this one); the same site deployment choices are made in order to allow the elite few (site admins and those they choose to grant some morsel of censorious power -- moderation point holders) to decide which posts are hidden (moderated down so they're silently obscured) or promoted (moderated up so the thread shows in default settings). And all of this is designed to be done in a mostly unaccountable way by people whom you'll never identify. The differences from one discussion site to another tend to be relatively minor, the running theme of "don't you dare deviate from the narrative!" persists across implementations.
So be careful; your past edits and ability to be heard are more in the hands of people you don't know (and therefore can't trust) when you use sites like these.
Trust comes into play when users are denied these freedoms; users have nothing else on which to make an informed decision. Therefore users are left to evaluate promises such as the promises you made. Belief in those promises essentially boils down to uninformed trust. It's no secret that many other proprietors do spy on their users (Microsoft purposefully changed Skype protocol to better allow spying, according to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-co...). I'm pretty sure Microsoft wants to have a good reputation despite their behavior.
As you said in the post you linked to, "Although this is my current mindset, it can change in the future.". This could apply to the promises you made (or strong convictions you posted about on github.com) as well.
The question of maintaining Marta is another issue I think is misstated in your response here and on github.com: with free software users can maintain software too. They could even choose to hire you to do the job. And they can certainly host their own discussions regardless of Marta's license. The underlying issue has to do with whether users will be able to make the software they run on their computers do what they want the software to do (which is the issue with which I raised my first post on this thread) and thus retain control over their computer.
So far WikiLeaks' publications are what they claim the publications are, and WikiLeaks has released a number of "insurance" files such as:
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/8823724/WikiLeaks_insurance...
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/8823728/WikiLeaks_insurance...
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/8823733/WikiLeaks_insurance...
https://archive.org/details/WikiLeaks_Insurance_File
which I understand we're all encouraged to share widely in the event the key to decrypt one or more of them is released. I don't know what's in any of the insurance files.
I'm impressed with the number of people who think that JS on most people's webpages is a good idea. Or that any JS was necessary to announce this font. It wasn't and wasn't carried off well here (nothing for the no-JS crowd).
A far easier page to write up and one that would have looked better could have been done with nothing but HTML, CSS (demonstrating the font in real-world usage even), and perhaps some PNGs to show bitmaps of the font (useful for those who, wisely, don't load every font the page says to load).
https://github.com/IBM/plex has the free font.
One's IP address should be detectable to at least some degree with data from the packets making the request for the webpage. Some of this is remedied with what appears to be duplicative information further down the page.
DNS Address detection is done better by https://dnsleaktest.com/.
Geolocation detection is likely done by looking up what geolocation is paired with one's IP (and sometimes this data is wrong), so there's no real need for Javascript here either. It's not as if the requesting computer should supply this information, else it becomes even more easily spoofed. Some of this is remedied with what appears to be duplicative information further down the page.
Torrent detection is also needlessly JS-driven, and done better at http://dev.cbcdn.com/ipmagnet/.
There are also some grammar errors confusing singular and plural in the text at the bottom of the page.
In my view, "moderation points" are censorship. Moderation points are censorship where the rules are even less clear than Reddit's. The rules for what's allowed are always changing, and no site has come up with a way to handle moderation point assignment in a way that is clearly distinguishable from capricious censorship.
What's legal strikes me as besides the point; the Internet is global so what's legal in one regime might be illegal in another. But since Reddit (and Hacker News, for all I know) are hosted in the US, it's worth pointing out that freedom of speech is trampled on in the US ("Defending Pornography" does a very good job of discussing how American law has double standards with sexually-related speech, for example, by offering censorship in ways Americans would not tolerate for nonsexual speech). Private organizations (such as Reddit, Hacker News, etc.) have no obligation to honor freedom of speech, they're allowed to be remarkably censorious. So whether state-based or private but hosted in the US, free speech is always met with some reaction like "I believe in freedom of speech but there ought to be limits..." and then we're off to learn where the limits are with this person, that topic, or this minute.
Free Software Foundation got there earlier. From publishing https://www.fsf.org/facebook published on on Dec 20, 2010. FSF & GNU Project founder Richard Stallman has been rightly objecting to Facebook for years in his talks and on his personal website at https://stallman.org/facebook.html.
Long-time former FSF lawyer Eben Moglen rightly called Facebook "a monstrous surveillance engine" and pointed out the ugliness of Facebook's endless surveillance (at length in http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html but in other places in the same lecture series as well). See http://snowdenandthefuture.info/ for the entire series of talks.
I don't share that objection to forks; I don't find forks to be a problem. One can't do anything to change in the free software world, nor would I want it to change because changing that would mean losing the software freedom I value.
But there's an easier way to go about this: Want the more lenient termination policy of GPLv3? Relicense under 'GPLv3 or later' or 'AGPLv3 or later' and let your users know that they're getting this in writing in a meaningful and not capriciously-dropped way. Businesses (such as those ostensibly agreeing to the terms of this voluntary arrangement) wouldn't settle for less if this were a work you held the copyright which they wanted to license. Users deserve to be treated fairly and as partners in the endeavor and the GPLv3 does a good job of that by looking out for a user's interests.
Don't buy into the business-first viewpoint from which this article is written. That is to be expected of the narrow view corporate media gives us. The issue here affects anyone who distributes GPLv2 or LGPLv2.x-licensed works where any of these parties are a copyright holder.