An LCA 2010 overview

“Benjamin Mako Hill presented the Wednesday morning keynote. He
started off with a discussion of the open source/free software
divide, noting that he is very much in the free software camp. The
open source side, he said, emphasizes practical benefits, whereas
freedom has inherent benefits. The rest of his talk was dedicated
to one specific benefit (a rather practical one, in your editor’s
opinion) that comes with free software: freedom from
antifeatures.

“Antifeatures are behaviors added to proprietary software as a
way of exerting some sort of control over users. It can be a simple
matter of extracting money from users – requiring them to pay more
to have advertising or spyware features removed, for example. It
can be a matter of market segmentation; see, for example, the
several versions of Windows Vista offered by Microsoft or the
removal of raw image support from some Canon cameras. Vendors may
be trying to secure monopolies; software which detects third-party
batteries in devices and disables the power-saving features is an
example. “Protecting copyrights” is another; there are, he says, no
Facebook fan clubs for dongles or the unskippable tracks at the
beginning of DVDs.”

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