So, some guy has decided that by going to conventions with a group of his mates and asking random women if he can grope their breasts, he’s somehow being feminist and sexually liberating.

I cannot even begin to express how completely and disgustingly moronic and sexist that is. Fortunately, other people have expressed it much more eloquently than I can; I don’t really have much to add to the discussion.

Seriously, what kind of stupid fuck is he? I found this sentence, right at the beginning, particularly moronic:

"…I wish this was the kind of world where say, ‘Wow, I’d like to touch your breasts,’ and people would understand that it’s not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful."

The problem there is simple: you might say that the mind is at least as important as the body, but the fact that you could even make (or agree with) the above statement says exactly the opposite — that the body is more important, so much so that you’re more interested in copping a feel of a woman than you are in getting to know her first. It’s not so much disturbing that this guy could think like this as mind-numbingly, frustratingly stupid.

Another one that was just disturbing was:

By the end of the evening, women were coming up to us. "My breasts," they asked shyly, having heard about the project. "Are they… are they good enough to be touched?" And lo, we showed them how beautiful their bodies were without turning it into something tawdry.

As some of the commenters on the original article have pointed out, there’s a whole load of judgemental bullshit about body image and so on tied up in that, like these guys are being generous enough to show women how beautiful their breasts are (because obviously that’s the only part of a woman that matters), and the women are lucky enough to have participated. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for anything that’ll encourage women — and men — to stop worrying about their appearance, but this is really not the way.

There’s another cringingly moronic discussion on Matthew Garrett’s blog, where some other guy actually attempts to argue that by criticising this "project", people are disadvantaging the (vanishingly small minority of) women who don’t mind being groped by strangers; the obvious argument being that if a woman wants to be groped by strangers, she has many opportunities, whereas the women who don’t tend not to get the option — especially, apparently, at conventions.

Another thing that puzzles me — that again, several people have already pointed out — is, why would you want to grope some random stranger? It kind of devalues the whole thing; there’s no intimacy or whatever there, which I’d always assumed was the whole point of sexual interaction. It comes back to the whole mind-versus-body thing: if the person you’re groping is a stranger, you don’t know their mind, so they’re just a body to you — why would you even want to? Being sexually liberated doesn’t mean that you have to grope strangers, or allow yourself to be groped by strangers; again, other people make this point better than I can. I don’t think I’m expressing this very well, really.

Finally, a comparatively minor point, but what the bloody hell does it have to do with open-source? For a start, I’d rather not be associated with your moronic schemes to get your hands on a pair of breasts, ta very much, and I doubt many other people in the free software community would either. Geeks have a bad enough reputation as it is for being a bunch of guys (I use the word "guys" intentionally, because that’s certainly how geeks are seen by a lot of people) with no social skills and an overwhelming desire to get laid, without people going around and demonstrating that the stereotype is occasionally accurate. Quite aside from that, the term just makes no sense when applied to something that’s not software.

Update: via isako, two entries from his blog that suggest he’s not so much naïve, as I’d assumed, as typically sexist: arguing that if women dress provocatively, they’re "asking for" male attention. Hurray patriarchy!

As you may have noticed if you’ve used Debian (or Ubuntu), Firefox in those distributions doesn’t use the “standard” fox icon. This is because the fox icon is trademarked and can only be used with the permission of the Mozilla Foundation. Now, although they’re willing to give permission to Debian, they’re not willing to grant permission to everyone; Debian for its part won’t accept special exceptions granted to it like this - if Debian is allowed but nobody else is, it’s not free.

This wasn’t a problem. The icon was replaced, all was well.

However, now the Mozilla Foundation are saying the same thing about the Firefox name (the Mozilla part of the name went away at the same time as the icon). Debian will have to rename its version of the browser or face legal unpleasantness.

Is this really free software? Yes, it’s undeniably open-source, but that’s not the same thing - you can release the source code for something without it being free. I understand why the Mozilla Foundation is doing these things, but that’s not the point. Free software is more that just access to the source code - I couldn’t care less if I can modify most of the free software I use, though it’s certainly nice to be able to do so. It’s about freedom:

From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

In the case of Firefox, you’re limited in terms of what changes you make - if you make any major changes, you have to change the name, the icons, etc., or get permission from the Mozilla Foundation. That’s not freedom.

Update: After rereading the very long, rather dull and repetitive thread regarding the issue, I just want to clarify the situation to myself:

• The Firefox name can’t be used without the official logos.
• The logos can’t be used, since they’re not free (as mentioned above, each change needs Mozilla Foundation approval before the logos can be used).
• The logos are only non-free because the copyright licence includes those restrictions.
• The restrictions do exactly the same as the trademark on the logos does: if the copyright licence was free, the logos would still be protected by trademark law. Debian have no problem distributing trademarked material assuming they have permission.
• Mozilla don’t want to remove the restrictions in the copyright licence because they want to “protect their brand”, despite their brand being protected by trademark law anyway.

Crazy…

My karma on [launchpad.net[] (Canonical/Ubuntu’s development platform thing) is currently 11, thanks to some Spanish translations I did for Jokosher. My Spanish has gone downhill since I finished my A levels, but it’s a start. And it’s nice to contribute, even if it’s fairly minor.

“Ubuntu” is an ancient african word meaning “I can’t configure ?Debian”

Personally, I never found Ubuntu any easier to install or run than Debian; in fact, last time I tried to install Ubuntu (when I first got my laptop), it wouldn’t run - apparently, 256MB of RAM just isn’t enough for their LiveCD installer, and I was unable to find the command-line installer (okay, so I didn’t look too hard, but neither would the average Windows user). I then installed Debian, which worked perfectly (at least, for my needs - haven’t really tried suspend-to-RAM/disc yet) on a fairly recent laptop.

I wish people would stop whinging about it.