Freedom

[Jim Herrmann]

I had an experience tonight that I just had to share with my Linux brethren, 
and I have BCCed my immediate family.

The story starts with the fact that my daughter is a huge Beatles/Paul 
McCartney fan.  I am too, for that matter.  Paul has released two songs that 
can be paid for and downloaded, with the proceeds going to benefit the police 
and fire fighters of NY.  The songs are "Freedom" and "From a Lover to a 
Friend", which he performed at the benefit concert in Madison Square Garden.  
Would I download these songs and burn them to a CD so that she can listen to 
them?  Sure, great, I can do that, no problem.  

So, the choices of places listed in the paper was bestbuy.com, music.msn.com, 
and windowsmedia.com.  I should have had a clue of what was to come right 
here, when two of the three sites were under the M$ umbrella, but I proceeded 
with guarded hope.  A search of the bestbuy.com site turned up nothing, so I 
tried the msn sites.  This wouldn't allow me in if I wasn't using Internet 
Exploder.  Well, the Konqueror browser allows one to fake out the server 
telling it you're any browser you want to be, and I got in, but things looked 
bad, so I searched in Goggle for options.  I found that cdnow.com was also a 
possible download site, so I setup an account and purchased the two songs.  
Everything's cool, right?  Wrong.

In order to download the songs, I *had* to use Liquid Audio, which only runs 
on Windows and Mac.  The easiest way to get around this was to just bite the 
bullet and boot over to Windoze, which I keep around for just such 
emergencies.  I then downloaded the 12 Meg install for Liquid Audio, ran the 
install, rebooted (of course), and signed on to cdnow.com and downloaded the 
songs.  Well, actually, I downloaded a little file that told Liquid Audio 
where to download the file.  When I started to download the songs, get this, 
I was REQUIRED to register with Passport, that MS-Big Brother tool, to be 
able to get the songs that I had already bought and paid for!  Of course, if 
you actually read the Passport license, everything that passes through the MS 
servers, belongs to them from then on, but I'll save that for another rant.  
Luckily, I have my own domain, so I gave it a bogus address at itdepends.com, 
and the download proceeded just fine.  Liquid Audio includes the ability to 
burn CDs from the files I downloaded (no doubt that feature required several 
meg of the 12 meg download) and that went smoothly.  I got the CD burned and 
labeled, and I was shutting down to boot back to Linux, when guess what I 
got?  That's right a BSOD!  In fact, I was stuck in a BSOD loop, and I had to 
do a hard reset of my computer to get out of it.  Now I'm back in Linux 
writing this letter.  Whew!

The totally ironic thing here is that I had *no choice* but to use Windows 
(actually I could have used Mac, but that's not an option if you don't own 
one), I was *required* to register not only with the vendor actually handling 
the money transaction, but also with Microsoft's Passport so that I could do 
what?  Download "Freedom"!!!  That is irony incarnate.

The lyrics of the song go like this:
"Freedom!  
Talking 'bout Freedom!  
We gotta fight for the right to live in Freedom!"

Tonight I got a vivid reminder of exactly why I am enduring the transition to 
a new operating system and all that goes with that experience.  Linux and 
open source is all about freedom.  I'm going to fight for the right to live 
in freedom from tyranny with Linux!

Peace, love, and Linux,
Jim Herrmann

P.S.  See you at the meeting!