A brief essay by free software pioneer Richard Stallman on the problems with e-books made the front page of Slashdot today. It’s everything I’ve come to expect from Stallman. I found myself vigorously agreeing with parts of it, and vigorously disagreeing with other parts of it.
But mainly I found myself disappointed that he didn’t really elaborate much. Maybe it’s because he covered similar ground once before in his 1997 dystopian 1984-ish short story, The Right to Read.
And, to me, that’s the problem. We’re on a slippery slope. Today it sounds ridiculous that it could be illegal to loan your laptop or your e-reader or your tablet to someone else. But prior to 2009, the idea that you could buy a book and then at some point the party that sold it to you could take it back from you without permission sounded ridiculous.
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David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
