Chalk one up for the good guys, a rather smug Mac using orange sunglasses type friend of mine who has in the past made fun of me for my activism in regard to Free Software and fighting DRM called me the other day with a tale I'd heard before, he'd bought a new CD but it refused to play on his Mac. I asked him to read me all the labels on the CD and sure enough it had a "Plays for sure" label. I explained that this meant it would for sure not play on his Mac and advised him to return to HMV where he bought it. He was of course enraged by this, I pointed out that he had in the past told me I was being unreasonable for fighting DRM and that he thought that the Digital Restrictions Management on his iTunes music store music was reasonable even though such music can only be played in iTunes or on his iPod. Since then he has converted all his iTunes music to CD and signed up for Defectivebydesign. This Friday my friend will get is chance to let the bad guys know how e felt about being sold a purposely broken CD, the defectivebydesign guys are organizing a phone in campaign to RIAA execs to protest the selling such defective merchandise. Sign up today to join this heroic effort.
Of course the RIAA are not the only place you can get music, Lugradio's world famous Jono Bacon (see Jono at least someone spells it right) makes all his music freely available under permissive Creative Commons licences through his music site http://www.recreantview.org/, some pretty good stuff, the Banger Beat is particularly funny.
Speaking of Lugradio brings me to my next topic, the Lugradio crews recent discussion of the proprietary nature of most web apps and this article from OSweekly got me thinking about whether I should follow the very reverend Ted of Novell fame over to wordpress, they use open source software and they're terms of servce are quite reasonable, I'm currently running a trial of their service and if all goes well I may migrate in the near future. Now if only I could find a decent floss gmail substitute, oh well, baby steps.