Fitting the battle of life

I’m currently involved in (i.e. pretty much doing it myself at this stage, though I will bring in others once the groundwork is done) writing a guide to competitive debating for my debating society. We send out teams to various inter-varsity competitions most weekends, and while we had three semi-final reaching teams last term, that’s not good enough, so we’re getting a guide together to try and boost everyone’s skill level. It’s all in the knowledge-sharing vein, which is good. Anyway, I usually use OpenOffice.org for my word-processing jobs, but for this I thought it might be fun to try something new - .

I can’t remember exactly why I wanted to try it, but it had come to my attention during the summer and I figured it sounded pretty neat, and this was the perfect opportunity to try something. If all else failed, my document(s) would be in plain-text format so I could easily import them in OO.o and finish the job there. Turns out I’m pretty enamoured by . It’s incredibly simple to use once you’ve set up the document, and even that’s pretty easy if you follow templates. Making a .dvi of your document is quick and easy so you can see how any formatting changes look before the (tbh, only slightly) longer .pdf process, and that’s how I preview my document.

The thing I love is, it’s a lot easier to separate out all the chapters/sections of the guide from each other so I can concentrate on one bit at a time, and not worry about manually inserting page breaks between each one, and ensuring I’ve followed the same formatting throughout however many pages - takes care of all that for me, pulling all the separate files together when I run it on the main document.

I can easily add notes to myself about what to include that don’t get included in the final file simply by using comments, which in gedit are automatically highlighted blue, to differentiate them. (To write a comment in , just use the percentage symbol, %, at the start of the comment. The rest of the line will be commented.) This is a lot easier than using lots of bits of paper around my desk, and far quicker than any corresponding feature in a word-processor.

It’s not for everyone, this way of working on documents. One friend had a massive go at me - and I mean massive - for using a non-standard, geeky, out-dated bit of kit when she could do better on MS Word. But, I don’t really care. It helps me work on it, and it’s a choice I have - to use whatever software I wish. It’s not as if no one can open the resulting .pdf file, is it now?

Useful site: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/

Before I start, let me just clarify: here I’m going to be talking about open source software, rather than any definition of ‘free’, i.e. simply software where the source code is available to look it (regardless of the cost of that software, and regardless of any limitations on the user to amend that code). This isn’t because of any disdain for the FSF or any other group, but simply because I don’t want to get drawn into a debate over whether you have a ‘right’ to do what you want with software you own/license/use (another time, perhaps).

Ok, so in this post I want to argue that we should be using open source software (i.e. OS, drivers, and any other applications we might think about using) in order better to protect our own rights, primarily the right to privacy, which comes under Article 8 of the ECHR.  My argument basically concerns ‘hidden’ functions of software - i.e. things software does that you don’t know it is doing/have no way of knowing (without incessantly watching your outgoing internet traffic, for instance) it is doing.

Let’s get rid of the ‘users should read the EULA’ argument as well, because it’s just rubbish to be frank. While yes, everyone who clicks the ‘Yes, I agree’ button declares that they have read the EULA and agree to be bound by its terms, the pragmatic view is that actually very few people do. Let’s take the worst case scenario: you’re setting up a new computer, installing all the software you want to use. How long would it take to read all those EULAs properly?

Secondly, software features shouldn’t be hidden in an EULA. If EULAs should exist at all, they should be there to say what you as a user may or may not do with the software, not to tell you in tiny writing what the software will be doing behind your back. Any gathering of statistical information about end-users should also be a transparent option for those end-users, not built into (and hidden in) a license agreement.  Software companies do not have a right to invade our privacy unless we make a clear and transparent (a tautology if ever I saw one) choice to give up some of your personal information.

So far I’ve been arguing against EULAs and ‘hidden’ features of software. Where does open source come into this, even if we installed laws to prevent the former?

I’m not one who has great belief in the kindness of humanity. There will always be people with malicious intent (whether intended maliciously or not, if that makes sense). We cannot rid ourselves of privacy-invading software so long as that software remains closed. Given that there have been some very worrying cases of closed software invading privacy (and doing so quite deceptively), we cannot trust closed software. Only open software guarantees our right to privacy, simply because we can see what it’s doing. Even if an end-user doesn’t have the requisite knowledge to read millions of lines of code that tell him what’s going on in his computer, someone somewhere does, and will be reading it.

We wouldn’t have faith in a closed judiciary, because we need to know that fundamental rights are being protected, and you can’t do that when trials happen behind closed doors. So why admit the possibility of rights infringements by using closed software?