4 ms·

It's not "free as in lying around on the ground", it's free as in "freedom". You have to agree to Canonical's "Terms of Service" to use Ubuntu, so you are a lic

It's not "free as in lying around on the ground", it's free as in "freedom". You have to agree to Canonical's "Terms of Service" to use Ubuntu, so you are a licensed customer of Canonical's. In this case, the license is the GPL, none of which has anything to say about privacy. Maybe this is a failure of the Free Software Foundation's to not include privacy protection in the GPL. Though even if they were to create a GPLv4, the Linux Kernel is still only licensed under v2, so distro implementors have no obligation to use a more restrictive license. AKA, "the cat is already out of the bag". In the OP's case, they additionally are are customer of Microsoft's, who explicitly stated they share this kind of information with their vendors.

j16sdiz 6y ago
I am not sure we should add privacy protection to software license. Debian Free software guideline does not allow discriminate against using debian for evil.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Oh, I definitely agree, I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people here are making assumptions about what "Free Software" means that literally nobody in the FOSS or Open Source movements have ever said were goals.
  - goodpoint 6y ago
    > nobody in the FOSS or Open Source movements have ever said were goals Citation needed. RMS, the FSF and many other orgs made public statements around privacy many times.
    - moron4hire 6y ago
      I think you're the one who needs to provide a citation, because I've read a lot of the literature on the FSF's website and not once does privacy come up. Now, I can't exhaustively prove a negative, but I think I can easily demonstrate that the FSF has never meaningfully expressed an opinion on privacy. Go to https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html, open every single page it links to in the body of the text, and search for the word "privacy". It does not show up in the body text of any of those documents. It shows up once in a footnote that mentions a change that Samsung made had that "caused privacy concerns". The closest they get to even mentioning the concept of privacy is when they talk about the right to modify software and use those modifications "privately", which clearly does not mean anything about user privacy. If privacy were so big of a concern for the FSF, you'd think they'd talk about it in their official documentation on their philosophy, or put something about it in the ONE tool they have to have power over anyone: the GPL.
- goodpoint 6y ago
  This is plain false. Debian routinely disables trackers and homecalling functions in the packaged software and even in the documentation.
  - elihu 6y ago
    I think you misunderstand. Debian doesn't have restrictions on how end users use their software. They do however make an effort to ensure the software they distribute is high-quality and doesn't do bad things to the user.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    Indeed, if you want to help fix privacy issues in Debian, please check out our wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
goodpoint 6y ago
> the license is the GPL, none of which has anything to say about privacy The anti-patent-trolling, anti-tivoization and copyleft provisions are there to protect developers and users. Additional clauses around privacy and security would be very nice. Unfortunately, corporate-sponsored FUD made a lot of people wary of the GPL - which is ironic, given its protective features.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  People are coming into this thread, talking about "this should not happen cuz free software." And Free Software protections are just completely orthogonal to privacy protections. There is a certain level of reasoning where one might say that, if the software were truly libre, you could "just" fork it and rip out the parts you don't like. But because you clearly can't "just" do that, then the software must not be free. Yes. The software is not Libre. But it's not clear to me that this is the case because the system is hosted on Azure or the distro is Ubuntu. Your rights within a marketplace go only so far as you can throw your alternatives. Software, especially operating systems, are just too complex to expect the concept of Free Software to be sufficient to protect user privacy.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    The idea is that, if free software principles were widely followed, this kind of spying could never be built in the first place. It'd be like a rice cooker that refuses to cook a full portion if you're putting on weight, or a washing machine that won't turn on during peak energy hours; a bizarre, unprecedented imposition on the principle that you should be able to do what you want with your stuff.
    - moron4hire 6y ago
      Will, it's a neat idea, but so is communism, on paper.

j16sdiz 6y ago

I am not sure we should add privacy protection to software license. Debian Free software guideline does not allow discriminate against using debian for evil.

moron4hire 6y ago
Oh, I definitely agree, I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people here are making assumptions about what "Free Software" means that literally nobody in the FOSS or Open Source movements have ever said were goals.
- goodpoint 6y ago
  > nobody in the FOSS or Open Source movements have ever said were goals Citation needed. RMS, the FSF and many other orgs made public statements around privacy many times.
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    I think you're the one who needs to provide a citation, because I've read a lot of the literature on the FSF's website and not once does privacy come up. Now, I can't exhaustively prove a negative, but I think I can easily demonstrate that the FSF has never meaningfully expressed an opinion on privacy. Go to https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html, open every single page it links to in the body of the text, and search for the word "privacy". It does not show up in the body text of any of those documents. It shows up once in a footnote that mentions a change that Samsung made had that "caused privacy concerns". The closest they get to even mentioning the concept of privacy is when they talk about the right to modify software and use those modifications "privately", which clearly does not mean anything about user privacy. If privacy were so big of a concern for the FSF, you'd think they'd talk about it in their official documentation on their philosophy, or put something about it in the ONE tool they have to have power over anyone: the GPL.
goodpoint 6y ago
This is plain false. Debian routinely disables trackers and homecalling functions in the packaged software and even in the documentation.
- elihu 6y ago
  I think you misunderstand. Debian doesn't have restrictions on how end users use their software. They do however make an effort to ensure the software they distribute is high-quality and doesn't do bad things to the user.
- pabs3 6y ago
  Indeed, if you want to help fix privacy issues in Debian, please check out our wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues

goodpoint 6y ago

> the license is the GPL, none of which has anything to say about privacy The anti-patent-trolling, anti-tivoization and copyleft provisions are there to protect developers and users. Additional clauses around privacy and security would be very nice. Unfortunately, corporate-sponsored FUD made a lot of people wary of the GPL - which is ironic, given its protective features.

moron4hire 6y ago
People are coming into this thread, talking about "this should not happen cuz free software." And Free Software protections are just completely orthogonal to privacy protections. There is a certain level of reasoning where one might say that, if the software were truly libre, you could "just" fork it and rip out the parts you don't like. But because you clearly can't "just" do that, then the software must not be free. Yes. The software is not Libre. But it's not clear to me that this is the case because the system is hosted on Azure or the distro is Ubuntu. Your rights within a marketplace go only so far as you can throw your alternatives. Software, especially operating systems, are just too complex to expect the concept of Free Software to be sufficient to protect user privacy.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The idea is that, if free software principles were widely followed, this kind of spying could never be built in the first place. It'd be like a rice cooker that refuses to cook a full portion if you're putting on weight, or a washing machine that won't turn on during peak energy hours; a bizarre, unprecedented imposition on the principle that you should be able to do what you want with your stuff.
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    Will, it's a neat idea, but so is communism, on paper.