Man, that guy is a curmudgeon. But I love that he exists even though I don't really worry about any of that stuff (who has the time or energy?).
Reasons not to buy from Amazon
31–40 of 152 posts
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#32> "Amazon cut off service to Wikileaks, claiming that whistleblowing violates its terms of service. It had no need to go to court to prove this, because if you rent a server from Amazon, you have no rights." I find it highly amusing that RMS doesn't seem to agree with Amazon's restrictive ToS agreement but his GNU software license is one of the most restrictive licenses out there. If I include a GNU licensed library…
You'd have to go to court to actually enforce that though. If the law didn't give you the right to license your software that way, there's nothing you could do about it. Amazon gets to make up their own rules and enforce them on their own hardware, even if there's no law against what you're doing.
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#33This is not exactly nuanced. It reads like he disliked Amazon for some reason and then went out and googled around for a while to come up with more reasons to support that belief. Personally, I like Amazon... so of course I'm just looking for reasons to dismiss his arguments without considering their merit. Ha!
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
Not quite sure what your point is. I was referring to one of Stallman's points which was basically that they are "dodging taxes" in the US. They're not and are increasingly collecting sales taxes as they are opening facilities in more and more states as they expand their offerings, just as the law dictates.
Without a robust definition of "dodging taxes," I'm not going to buy the argument. A lot of people use phrases like that to refer to completely legal practices designed to minimize taxes.
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite sure what your point is. I was referring to one of Stallman's points which was basically that they are "dodging taxes" in the US. They're not and are increasingly collecting sales taxes as they are opening facilities in more and more states as they expand their offerings, just as the law dictates.
Walmart's political action committee is vigorously campaigning for laws to enforce sales taxes on all online sales, seemingly as a direct result of Amazon. I would imagine if Amazon were doing anything overtly dodgy in that regard, Walmart would likely be fairly vocal about it.
Amazon is on board for online sales taxes, and have been since 2012 [0]. They rightly see it now as a obstacle to future competition, as collecting sales taxes for the thousands of jurisdictions in the US is very difficult.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/carney-amazon-joins-walmar...
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#36> "Amazon cut off service to Wikileaks, claiming that whistleblowing violates its terms of service. It had no need to go to court to prove this, because if you rent a server from Amazon, you have no rights." I find it highly amusing that RMS doesn't seem to agree with Amazon's restrictive ToS agreement but his GNU software license is one of the most restrictive licenses out there. If I include a GNU licensed library…
> "his GNU software license is one of the most restrictive licenses out there." Of "open source" licenses perhaps. In the grand scheme of software licenses, it is pretty fucking permissive. Most software licenses don't let you anywhere near the source, don't let you modify the code, and don't let you redistribute or share the software.
> Most software licenses don't let you anywhere near the source, don't let you modify the code,
Are there any software licenses where the source code is provided but you are prohibited to view or modify it?
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#37how did this get up here
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#38That whole thing about the tor keyboard intercept by nsa was never proven afaik. The common conclusion is that they wouldn't be so stupid as to let the customer tracking show the keyboard passing through them so they can bug it. And as for Amazon reducing the price of books from publishers, this quantitatively has shown they will sell more and make more money despite the lower price tag.
> That whole thing about the tor keyboard intercept by nsa was never proven afaik.
Yeah RMS is already considerably crazy for most readers, adding clearly false claims as references doesn't help.
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#39Regarding the keyboard and "NSA" --- recall, NSA's entire involvement in this story is a shipment tracker that showed a package traversing Alexandria, VA --- here's the previous thread:
Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
#40[deleted]