On 09.05.2008 13:13, Richard M Stallman wrote:
Come on Richard, enough is enough. No one is talking about racism here.No? It definitely looks that way. Here is what Reinauer wrote:
>> that very graphics chip vendor, in a half-reflected way, similar to those >> my ancestor countrymen suggested not to buy from certain groups of >> people.As far as I can tell, that is a thinly veiled reference to racism, and it asserts that boycotting a company is equivalent to racism.
You're missing a point here because you don't know German history well enough (Stefan and I are from Germany). Germany saw campaigns where people suggested not to buy from groupsof peopley with whom they disagreed politically. NO racism involved AT ALL. Granted, that's one of the lesser known aspects of German history.
If I misunderstood, that's not my fault. The statement was written to be unclear. If Reinauer intended some other meaning, he should state it clearly, and then we can set aside any misinterpretations.
It's really much less ambiguous once you know the background. Besides that, there were people besides you who ran around and suggested not to buy grapics cards/chipsets from ATI/Nvidia/Intel/etc. Most companies had less than stellar behaviour in their past, but I know of no example where trying to shame a company into doing something beneficial to free software worked. It's either polite requests and workign behind the scenes, together with praising their competitors, or (if there are any GPL violations) suing them into compliance, a thing that worked remarkably well in the past here in Germany (see the injunction granted and upheld against Skype).
Regards, Carl-Daniel