There are several acknowledged rules on the Internet. Rule Zero, translated into more appropriate language,of course, is don’t commit violence against a cat. Rule One ought to be don’t mess with the EFF.
The EFF is one of those few organisations you can just always trust to have your best interests at heart. Their track record is impeccable, and their causes always just.
Don’t mess with the EFF.
For better or worse, most peope don’t know about the EFF, and if they do they perceive it as “nerd turf wars”.
There are many ways to insta-blow up your PR, such as having anti-gay views, but messing with the EFF is not one of them.
And most people don’t read tech blogs every day.
Edited 2016-01-09 16:16 UTC
When your core market share is composed of people with enough technical skills and knowledge to prefer T-Mobile over the histerical carriers, I bet you’d better not fool them against you. Especially if 95% of your PR communication happens on social media. Words spread fast these days.
Well, based on an instapoll (5 friends) of my tech friends that use tmobile.
1) They already hate tmobile
2) They still hate At&t, Sprint, Verizon more.
3) They really don’t care that much that the ceo is a dork that says stupid things. Because we all do.
4) If they leave tmobile it will be for more practical reasons.
Or you could out yourself as a racist bigot like the governor of Maine did yesterday.
So a dude doesn’t know what/who EFF is and that is (apparently) the end of the world? It’s not even for us who do know and care!
It’s just bullshit. As are the claims in the “article” that EFF somehow made it possible for mobile operators to exist. In short it’s a shit-stew of crap served by a crap site.
Do you know what FSF is ?
Well, that’s some hyperbole. The EFF is ideological and paranoid, which is good! That’s how I like my EFF. But sometimes their paranoia and/or ideology is based more on big guy vs. little guy than on substantial questions of ethics and strategy.
They more or less took Psystar’s side in the hackintosh case. I don’t know where the claim that Psystar “legitimately purchased” their copies of OS X actually came from – whether Psystar itself claimed it or if it was just an assumption turned rumor turned journalistic “fact” – but it was never substantiated in court. More importantly, the right of individuals to tinker has nothing to do with the claimed right of a business to redistribute unlicensed copies of modified copyrighted works. And if that far more extreme position were legally validated, it would abolish the GPL.
Their other position I’m not too keen on was how the Broken By Design campaign focused on the iPod and Fairplay in a time when all other digital music resellers were Windows-only and had more restrictive DRM. They don’t have to like iTunes, obviously, but since it’s a concern central to their mission, I would expect them to dig a little deeper and focus on the worst offenders rather than on the most popular guy, who also happened to be the least bad.
All that said, I like and support the EFF. Even their extreme positions add something positive to the conversation. But, come on: nobody’s perfect.
is John Legere?
i’m sorry, but the article sounds pretty much like “don’t mess with EFF, we are the bigger bully”
Who the hell is John Legere? WTF is EFF? How are any of them related to Operating Systems? Sometimes I get the feeling that this site is just someone’s personal virtual “notepad” to paste random quotes from random sites.
Yeah, the EFF should regulate the content of Osnews as well. Seriously, what’s the problem of a private site having a private editorial ?
Expectations that the names sets, maybe? When visiting the site named “OS news”, one expects to find news related to OS.