🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bsyns3.93L@news.udel.edu>, johnston@me.udel.edu (Bill Johnston) writes:

<many excellent points deleted>
 
> To overturn Lotus v. Borland, and more importantly to achieve
> an unequivocal change in user interface law, the focus in future
> needs to be on principles rather than personalities.  In my opinion,
> boycotts are good at demonizing, but lousy at focusing debate on 
> the real issues.


And my point is this:

Why continue with a policy that so clearly results in a "them-and-us"
division when one could gain allies (and allies WITHIN APPLE) by a
simple change.  I am not suggesting LPF anounce an alliance with Apple
and endorse their products, only that they adopt a method of protest
that:
	1) Does not alienate those who agree with LPF but, for whatever
		reason, use Apple (or other boycotted products).

	2) Is more likely to result in a CHANGE in Apple's policy (though
		any change would likely be de-facto rather than a statement
		of future policy).

Is this solution too simple? Does it cause an unacceptable loss of face
for LPF?  I don't think either is the case.  What it does do is allow LPF
to marshal new troops.  As I said earlier, there are many programmers
that disagree with Apple Inc. as much as LPF.  It is somewhat silly to
assume that the everyone who owns/uses/programs anything made by Apple
agrees with policies created by a few individuals in ivory towers.

As has been observed before, the lack of gcc on Apple platforms is only an
inconvience to those that both use Apple AND have enough respect for
LPF/GNUs position to abide by their wishes.  Apple hardly cares wether
or not gcc exists -- yet they DO care about PR (notice how quick they
procured a patch to fix 32-bit incompatability in older machines -- I really
doubt that there were very many of us using >16 MB in the machines, yet
our internet petition had well in excess of 500 signatures in the first week).

Perhaps, as as Bill may have eluded to in his earlier post, the boycott is 
more about choosing an easy scapegoat than changing attitudes....

-- 
/* Dale Southard Jr.                                 Sr. Rigger      */
/* University of Toledo                             AFF/I   SL/I     */
/* dsouth@uoft02.utoledo.edu                           D-11216       */
/* Department of Chemistry -- "Just another skydiving grad student." */