Sam,
Firstly, thank you for your answer.
On 27/10/2010 16:38, Sam Tuke wrote:
Bernard,
Thank you for sharing your concerns with us about our PDF readers campaign.
On Tuesday 12 October 2010 15:35:15 Bernard Chomel wrote:
in the page which explain and suggest some free pdf readers, we can read a sentence which is not neutral and I find it especially libellous because any source/proof is mentionned
Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data. web page : http://www.pdfreaders.org/index.en.html
One of those pages[2] describes the four Freedoms that Software must grant in order for it to be Free Software:
OK, I know the 4 freedoms defined by the FSF and R. Stalman and also what are the proprietary software limits for us ; I'm agree with it, no problem.
The only way for us to guarantee that an application is respecting our privacy is to examine its code. Since we can't do that for proprietary applications, we cannot control how our data is used.
OK, proprietary software do not allow to know how the data are used by the software.
This is the nature of non-Free Software. You can verify it by trying to understand what a proprietary PDF reader does with information that you submit to it. You will not succeed. This is what we mean when we say "their internal working is a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data."
But I did not agree with your conclusion; you can't tell about proprietary software do not respect your privacy/data because you don't know how the data are deal with the application. If you find that the software transmit some of our data to the editor or another organization, OK I can tell : This software don't respect my privacy. To check that, you can inspect the traffic between you and the internet thanks to a sniffer, a firewall.... For me, your sentence is libellous and not objective. I think it is not correct to tell that because you badly extrapolate. It is not like Google who use your privacy data to advertise you, to keep lots of data about your life or Facebook... I repeat, I'm OK to inform people and denounce the risks/limits of proprietary software but you don't have to lie to others because you become incredible. I think there are already many arguments to prove the benefits of the free software compared to proprietary software to extrapolate with false information. Due to I'm not agree, I can't and won't promote your campaign.
I sincerely hope you understand my arguments and discuss about them with other people from the FSF and I hope you modify the arguments to denounce the true problems. Besides on the campaign against the european administration which promote the Acrobat Reader, I don't need of the false argument : Administration must be neutral !
Regards, B. Chomel