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The Mozilla Corporation is known for among other things the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird e-mail client, and its current CEO has written an open letter to the European Commission on the upcoming Digital Services Act (DSA) (warning for PDF). In it she vaguely addresses transparency, accountability, online advertising, and digital markets for a European internet, without addressing The Internet itself. The DSA appears to include proposals to split off a European internet from The Internet at large and model it after the great firewall of China in regards to control and isolation.
In the document, New Developments in Digital Services: Short-(2021), medium-(2025) and long-term (2030) perspectives and the implications for theDigital Services Act, the great firewall of China gets praised repeatedly as something to emulate should the EU split of an internet from The Internet:
To make sure these predictions become reality and to prevent the misuse of digital tools, we advise the European Parliament to take a le ading stance in the global digitalisation. Three main recommendations are given in the study: A European cloud / European internet could secure a reliable, trustworthy digital ecosystem in Europe. Funding programmes for eGovernment would use the innovative capabilities of start-ups throughout Europe to create the most digital and advanced government in the world. And all this should be communicated in a visionary and exciting way, making sure the right regulations are in place, but also encouraging boldness and showing a willingness to change (see Figure 2).
[...] Action Plan 1: European Cloud / European Internet
A European firewall/cloud/ internet would foster a digital ecosystem in Europe based on data and innovation. It would drive competition and set standards, similar to what has happened in China in the past 20 years. The foundations of such a European cloud are democratic values, transparency, competition and data protection.
[...] Technologically, it would require a top-level infrastructure, high-speed 5G or a 6G data network and a firewall. Setting up such a network would promote many European companies and therefore boost business and drive innovation.
Like the Chinese firewall, this European internet would block off services that condone or support unlawful conduct from third party countries.
[...] As e-commerce and remote working solutions became widely used and even smartphone tracking to prevent infections met very little scepticism. Now in the aftermath of this pandemic it's the perfect time to act and to push for ambitious goal in digitalising Europe.
[...] Update 2 of the Visionary Communication Programme: i.e. crypto, quantum computing. Here it is important to include visionaries, think tanks and influences to communicate the update to the public.
Phase 2 of the eGovernment Venture Programme: Testing and evaluating first technologies and ideas developed in the programme.
Initialising the European internet: setting up think tanks to creating the cornerstones and possible pitfalls of such a project.
Long term 2025 – 2030
Update 3 of the Visionary Communication Programme: i.e. 6G, European internet, DNA products. Further communication within the Europe of the new digital goals.
The EFF has also responded to the EU Commission on the Digital Services Act, with a request in the opposite direction, that of putting the citizens back in control and avoiding a situation where there are gatekeepers consisting of only a handful of large corporations.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday September 09 2020, @03:27PM (5 children)
Just because RMS isn't in the public spotlight doesn't mean he isn't right. Dude was prophetic about a lot of things that have come to pass.
Maybe he isn't the most pleasant or photogenic guy, but that often has little to do with the accuracy of what you profess.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Disagree) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 09 2020, @04:16PM (4 children)
He was proven wrong. Open source doesn't have a proper financial model to assure continuous and consistent development and support. And let's face it -- nobody is getting any younger. The people who did the initial development surge are mostly dead or retired. There's no institution to provide institutional knowledge to those who might have been tempted to contribute because there's no corporate body to ensure that thing that need to get done (like bug fixes) get priority. Everyone wants to scratch their own itch - like adding another feature - than in maintaining the plumbing.
Look what happened to Perl6. Or The Shitshiw Formerly Known As Firefox. Or systemd. Or all the package managers that aren't even compatible in the same distro. Or the lack of proper screen readers - they once "sort of worked" but not any more. The population that can benefit from a screen reader on the desktop is bigger than all the users of Linux on the desktop worldwide. So the choices are Microsoft or Apple.
And the fault lies with the GPL. FreeBSD is the #2 desktop OS (Apple) because it is possible to make enough money to sustain developers.
In 2000 there were 1,000 Linux distros, all offering pretty much the same software. In 2020 there are twice as many distr, all offering the same basic selection of increasingly dated software. In 2040? There probably won't be any Linux distros because the world will have changed and Linux will be a corporate-sponsored monolith with no use by individuals.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday September 09 2020, @06:17PM (3 children)
Did he claim it did? He wasn't pushing open source because it was profitable, but because in his estimation, it was the ethical way to do software development.
Not really familiar with this one
I think that had more to do with them running off the end of the road after reaching feature completeness, than an inherent failure of open source philosophy. Although I guess the ability of OSS projects to get taken over by SJWs is a problem.
Systemd, the blatant ignoring of The Unix Way? The thing that Red Hat twisted everybody's arm into using? It may be from an open source company, but it doesn't play by open source rules.
BSD is the "#2 desktop OS" because it's easier to appropriate people's work and then lock it behind your own license, so of course for-profit companies are going to like it better. Am I supposed to be surprised? BSD License is for the benefit of the developer; the GPL is for the benefit of the end user (the assumption is that most of the time they're a programmer as well, but still).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2020, @07:02PM
i don't think the tranny is really that dumb to not understand it's disingenuous analysis of FOSS. There's no point arguing with a liar.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 09 2020, @11:14PM (1 child)
How is dead software in any way to the benefit of the end user? And RMS proposed several financial models, all of which were laughable. In theory there should not be a browser monopoly if RMS was right. He obviously was wrong.
Also, RMS was and is hugely ethically challenged. He called one of his buddy Epstein's victims a liar, a knee jerk response to anything that threatened Epsteins financial contributions to certain media projects at MIT.
He also is totally wrong with his refusal to accept people's self identity [stallman.org]
Check out his idea of "respecting a persons gender identity by NOT using their preferred pronouns
Using the non-gender madeup "pers" instead of using a trans persons preferred pronouns is totally disrespectful.
His misogyny is well documented.
I will say the same thing about him when he dies that he said about Steve Jobs
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 15 2020, @03:53PM
Plenty of people are idiots outside of their field of expertise. I don't go to RMS if I want to talk about identity issues, the same as any other "hard" scientist.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"