Re: New maintainer

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2015 09:36:30 +0200
> 
> >> Ah, but turning those settings off does not really suffice.
> >> 
> >> <URL:http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/>
> >
> > Which includes further advice on how to turn the other stuff off.
> 
> Have we been reading the same article?

Yes.  It's a long article, not just the 2 sentences you've cited.

> "We've asked Microsoft if there is any way to disable this
> additional communication or information about what its purpose is."
> ... "if Web searching and Cortana are disabled, we suspect that the
> inference that most people would make is that searching the Start
> menu wouldn't hit the Internet at all. But it does. The traffic
> could be innocuous, but the inclusion of a machine ID gives it a
> suspicious appearance."

"We suspect", "could be innocuous", "suspicious appearance", etc. here
mean that the authors don't really know themselves whether there is a
problem.

In any case, wait a bit, and more information will surely surface
about disabling that, if there is indeed a problem.

> Do you or don't you agree that there is a point for an operating system
> respecting the user's choices, privacy and control?

I do, but the GPL in my reading is not about privacy and choices.
There could be a GPL'ed program that doesn't care about privacy and
gives the users little control on its operation.  (It would be a bad
program, IMO.)

Protecting privacy and giving users more control are all good
principles for building user-friendly software, and I very much hope
Emacs and the rest of the GNU project will do that.  But they have
nothing to do with software freedom of the GPL itself, IMO.  Lumping
them together just muddies the waters.

> Because we are
> talking here about the need of a prospective Emacs manager to heed the
> policies designed to ensuring that such a system remains available in
> future and cannot be watered down easily.  Even while the availability
> of such systems depressingly appears to have very little impact on
> users' choices, it's the GNU mission to make sure that for those few who
> actually care, the choice remains.
> 
> With Emacs being a core component of GNU, the maintainer needs to accept
> that he is not independently responsible for Emacs but also for GNU.

All true and agreed.  All I'm saying is that the specific point you
were trying to make regarding malware-type misfeatures of Windows 10
is not relevant to this.

> > But trying to make it easier by representing the issues as
> > black-and-white is not TRT, IME, and it will always fail given an
> > intelligent enough opponent who knows her ground.  You (not you
> > personally, David) can even be accused in trying to con your audience
> > by false statements, which then might have far-reaching effect on our
> > argumentation in general.
> 
> I wish.  Unfortunately, the world is moving away from shades of grey and
> rather thoroughly into contrasts increasingly indistinguishable from
> black-and-white.

I strongly disagree, but I don't want to argue about that, certainly
not here.

> if you care about recommending and working with Windows and MacOSX

I don't.