Russian Censorship Through Proprietary Software Licensing

Opposition political newspapers are being shut down in Russia for using unlicensed proprietary software.

This highlights the need for free quality print production typography design software, and makes me think twice about focusing too heavily on on-screen reading when combined with the great night at the OSP briefing an nm-x that I went to tonight - I’ll post the liveblogging notes shortly! :-)

Creative Commons License
The Russian Censorship Through Proprietary Software Licensing by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
November 16, 2007 |

Comments

3 Responses to “Russian Censorship Through Proprietary Software Licensing”

  1. Dan on November 16th, 2007 08:46

    Blaming the software for this is a bit silly. The point is that “Opposition political newspapers are being shut down in Russia.” They are being shut down because the government wants them shut down, not because of the software they use to create their media. If they couldn’t be shut down because of their software, another reason would be found to pull the plug.

  2. Alexandre on November 16th, 2007 17:25

    Warez is just an excuse for ransacking here.

    BTW, you do remember about the tagged guides idea, do you? :)

  3. David Crossland on November 17th, 2007 00:39

    I think theres an important shared set of values in free speech, free press, and free software, and this news item is a point of trivia about that; while its true Putin probably would find some other way to silence criticism, while he is using unlicensed proprietary software, he is partially in the right. If he had to use some more underhanded way of silencing criticism, he would be more fully in the wrong.

Leave a Reply