I disagree; knowing that bad evidence was presented (particularly in life imprisonment and death penalty cases where there is no chance to make amends with those falsely convicted) shows more evidence of why the death penalty was never a good idea. Therefore we don't need more death penalty conclusions such as "Willfully hide exculpatory evidence in a capital murder trial? Death penalty.".

You could host the multimedia files on your own website, which would let you move your domain and/or provider to an amenable ISP whenever needed while retaining the same URLs for your visitors. There are ISPs such as Dreamhost.com that will host email and websites and their accompanying data files at reasonable costs with lots of bandwidth should your show become popular. I don't work for them but I've worked with their hosting and found it to be reasonable.

You could host files on archive.org (the Internet Archive) for no fee which will deliver files to all comers also gratis. I'm not aware of IA discriminating against people doing what you're doing.

You could consider delivering pointers to your shows delivered cooperatively via BitTorrent with magnet URLs posted to popular BitTorrent-based sharing sites so the public can keep your shows downloadable even if you find hosting hard to come by.

You could combine these ideas, they're not mutually exclusive. And I hope you'll consider distributing your multimedia in formats that favor free software such as WebM. Finally, be wary of any provider's changing terms of service should you start talking about something they someday consider important. Commercial organizations and nations don't have permanent friends, they have interests which change.

EndSoftPatents.org makes multiple relevant points very clear in their warning against relying on Microsoft's "promise" for .NET core listing the limits and foreseeable risks in Microsoft's offer. It seems to me there's enough there to make anyone wary of relying on .NET and instead heed what the Free Software Foundation said in 2009 warning against developing in C#.

You asked:

Burz, I wonder if you'd say the same about all OSS software that's licensed under MIT or BSD but which lacks a patent promise? Because such software would be in an even weaker state from your perspective than Microsoft's OSS .NET.

I don't speak for Burz and I don't argue for anything "OSS", in fact this issue is one reason why looking at this from the perspective of the open source movement is so dangerous. But it seems to me that the FSF has explained this well as they point out in their aforementioned article, Microsoft is "the only major software company that has declared itself the enemy of GNU/Linux and stated its intention to attack our community with patents" which makes Microsoft more of a threat. Also, there's more than one BSD license and it's better to be clear about what you're referring to.

EndSoftPatents.org and the FSF both manage to make their points referring to specifics, linking to their sources, and without using the word "Chinese" to denote confusion or incomprehensibility. So it seems to me that EndSoftPatents.org's conclusion, "This patent licence looks fine for users of the code published by Microsoft, but its protections disappear very quickly for those who wish to modify or re-use the code." is entirely sensible and hardly worthy of your offensive dismissal.

Actually, on 2015-03-16 he said he's been using a web browser and Tor. I don't know if the two are related and I don't know when he started using a common browser in a typical fashion.

Looking at the kerfuffle around LLVM/Clang you can find more of the same attitude from RMS—he doesn't have the ego invested in the work as his detractors claim he does (often without examples cited at all, sometimes as with the grandparent poster with wrong examples cited):

For GCC to be replaced by another technically superior compiler that defended freedom equally well would cause me some personal regret, but I would rejoice for the community's advance. The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers -- so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us.

Those aren't the words of someone who places ego above the good of the project or the public. For software freedom seekers, software freedom and defense of software freedom is the goal and good for the public.

Firmware is software and computer users still need software freedom for all published software. This hasn't changed since Richard Stallman reached conclusions about the ethics of software over 30 years ago. Changing what device the software is loaded into or the form it takes when loaded doesn't change any of the underlying issues that all have to do with how people treat each other. This is also not an issue to be properly understood by "open source" focus on convenience, caving into business desires, or developmental methodology.

If you want to say that RMS's position is pedantic, that's fine. Just understand that RMS has slightly different values than open source advocates and he works to keep those values. RMS views open source as dangerous to the freedom to have all changes made available because open source does not make any guarantee about it. Others, like ESR, aren't quite as concerned about that as long as some version of the source is available. Thus, you get open source. Free and open source software are not exactly the same thing though.

Open source advocates think that proprietary software is acceptable and free software advocates don't think proprietary software is ever acceptable, as RMS points out in his essays and talks dating back many years (1, 2). I'd hardly call that difference pedantic—being overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning like a pedant. And the preservation of software freedom copyleft makes real can sometimes be okay to forgo but only after careful consideration. But the open source movement doesn't distinguish among licenses based on copyleft because that would draw attention to the very thing that movement was designed to silence and distract discussion away from talk of—software freedom.

Glenn Greenwald asks a more interesting and important question than /. encourages its readers to consider when Greenwald asks "What's Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in its Name?" and then he answers it, "More damage has been inflicted historically by censorship than by the "terrorism" used to justify it.". Considering how little of a threat terrorism is in the US relative to other known dangers ('Terrorism Still Less Deadly in US Than Lack of Health Insurance, Salmonella', 'Gun Murders vs. Terrorism by the Numbers') one has to wonder about other western countries such as France.

Don't worry, he won't. And this story (like so much of /.) is "hyping empty garbage" (what Glenn Greenwald called Politicoâ(TM)s digital editorial director Blake Hounshell, but applies quite well here). Greenwald explains it all excellently, as per usual.

I'm uninterested in DRM'd e-readers or any e-reader that reveals my location, refuses to let me copy, quote, print, and do other things I do with books. I'm unwilling to sacrifice my rights because some publisher wants a rent scheme on books or wants me to constantly feed them information on my whereabouts, what I'm reading, logging my name with what I read (which even my local library only does as long as the loan), and other privacy violations that simply aren't possible with books. Calling DRM "digital restrictions management" is right and proper because that frames the debate where it belongs—around user's rights.

I'm not so sure that's true because the relevant laws are set such that the penalties are so light for the wealthy violators and virtually non-existant for the most powerful participants in the system. First, the organization with the most patents is not in a position to "feel pain" as you say; IBM's power is (as they've said long ago) in cross-licensing. They said they get an order of magnitude more benefit by leveraging the power the patent scheme was built to exert (which is also part of the problem of calling organizations "patent trolls" as if leveraging that power is somehow not to be expected, or an abuse of an otherwise upright system, when in fact that power is just part of the system operating as designed). As a result, losing patent infringement lawsuits is not common for IBM. Richard Stallman laid out how this works in his patent talks many years ago:

IBM got two kinds of benefit from its 9000 US patents. I believe the number is larger today. These were first, collecting royalties and second, getting access to the patents of others. They said that the latter benefit is an order of magnitude greater. So the benefit that IBM got from being allowed to use the ideas that were patented by others was 10 times the direct benefit IBM could get from licensing patents. What does this really mean?

What is the benefit that IBM gets from this access to the patents of others? It is basically the benefit of being excused from the trouble that the patent system can cause you. The patent system is like a lottery. What happens with any given patent could be nothing, could be a windfall for some patent holder or a disaster for everyone else. But IBM being so big, for them, it averages out. They get to measure the average harm and good of the patent system. For them, the trouble of the patent system would have been 10 times the good. I say would have been because IBM through cross-licensing avoids experiencing that trouble. That trouble is only potential. It doesn't really happen to them. But when they measure the benefits of avoiding that trouble, they estimate it as 10 times the value of the money they collect from their patents.

With regard to Apple specifically, it's not that difficult to see that they get by in part by violating government-granted monopoly and they're wealthy enough to be able to afford to do it repeatedly. The people who run Apple now ran NeXT years ago. NeXT infringed the FSF's license (GPLv2) in NeXT's initially unauthorized GCC derivative in which NeXT added Objective-C support. NeXT and the FSF settled out of court when the FSF got them to comply with the terms of the GPL (lesson learned here: stand up for your strong copylefted free software licenses and the bullies will meet your terms). Apple would again violate the GPLv2 later by distributing an infringing copy of VideoLAN Client. VLC co-author Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote critically of Apple's choice to let the program through it's app store saying "Those terms are contradicted by the products usage rules of the AppStore through which Apple delivers applications to users of its mobile devices." Apple infringed upon 3 Chinese writer's copyrights and were ordered to pay 730,000 yuan ($118,000), hardly a sum that would stop Apple from doing this again. But the pattern seems clear: Apple violates laws it doesn't like and never really meets a punishment that will make the leaders of the organization question whether to do it again. Apple isn't unique in this but that is a detail; we need punishments for the wealthy and powerful that make them take the law more seriously. But most importantly for endeavors practiced by the general public, such as computer programming, we need to fight in an organized and political way to end software idea patents. Mere patent reform is a delaying tactic that benefits the powerful.

What stands out to me about your post and the grandparent post is how both of you malign someone with no evidence. I'm certainly not taking you seriously about speaking for "many people [in Seattle]" either.

Ah, the flames from someone without much finesse: Premature declaration of failure to discourage further examination ("The masses have spoken..."), misidentification of fault ("If Apple could have continued using gcc...", "[The FSF] should have gone into the hardware business..."), citing trends with no backing and overvaluing business interests ("...then corporations wouldn't have run away from any GPLv3 software..."), and outright lying about intention and execution ("...weighing the costs of the walled garden (censorship etc) vs the benefits (no viruses)...", "...the attempt to take over the Linux kernel by renaming GNU/Linux..."), your post has so much flamebait to choose from it's almost as if you were taking instruction from an open source proponent who is eager to convince licensors to pick non-copylefted software licenses so they see their work become charitable contributions to software proprietors.

If there's so little interest in protecting oneself from international spying, malware, and other forms of user abuse Glenn Greenwald and other journalists would find it hard to get articles on the Snowden revelations published anywhere, world leaders wouldn't be holding meetings about the Snowden revelations, and people/organizations around the world wouldn't care about encryption. Don't confuse a non-technical user's inability to do better than running proprietary apps from a walled garden with not caring about these issues. They get both no software freedom and plenty of malware in their choice. Most computer users are weighing options where freedom is not available; they're suffering from the myth of choice where all of the readily-available options they know about deny them loyal computers.

Speaking of proprietors, Apple is no victim here. Apple wasn't forced to switch to LLVM and Clang, they chose to because they're proprietors eager to rob users of their software freedom in derivative works. If any organization with the means can be accurately accused of not writing their own stuff, it's Apple not writing their own compilers but instead relying on other compilers. This goes back to NeXT which was the first big GPL copyright infringement case (according to Brad Kuhn, former Executive Director of the FSF which holds the copyright on GCC in his discussion on his OggCast "Free as in Freedom"). NeXT got caught distributing a proprietary derivative of GCC which contained code to compile Objective-C. When Jobs spoke with the FSF about the matter, the FSF informed him that they would enforce their license (GPLv2). Jobs never liked that and never forgot. Apple doesn't mind the GPL they just don't like to be in a position of equality with their users unless they can pull out of that relationship when it suits them (see Apple's purchase of Easy SW which originally developed CUPS).

The FSF never tried to "take over the Linux kernel" and isn't doing so now by properly identifying Linux as a part of an operating system. They have said for years and continue to say they would like the GNU Project to get a share of the credit (1, 2). They also acknowledge that there are systems that don't include GNU and therefore should not be called "GNU slash" anything. No doubt, it would be equally unfair and erroneous to call GNU/kFreeBSD or GNU/HURD a "Linux" system when Linux isn't a part of that. This has nothing to do with capability of writing a kernel; a Linux kernel without the blobs is available so there's no pressing need for a fully-free system to have its own original kernel written by the FSF or the GNU Project. The core of the issue was and is a "greenwashing" (as Brad Kuhn aptly put it) open source movement not bringing to mind a user's software freedom (mirror) and the intended effect (older essay, newer essay) that has on people not understanding what software freedom is for its own sake.

See Brad Kuhn's talk about the future of copyleft (mirror) for the cure to non-copylefted free software—to keep software freedom in derivative works, license with strongly copylefted free software licenses (the AGPL version 3 or later being the best choice now) and then enforce the license.

Jailbreaking a device doesn't mean one has software freedom, a critical factor in making sure the device is loyal to its owner. It's good that you donate to the FSF and EFF despite your disagreeing with their goals to let people control their devices. I think people are rightly concerned about global spying and I encourage more learning about software freedom for freedom's sake. People were quick to dismiss the free software movement from the beginning, talking about how it wasn't (to use your words) "realistic or even a good idea" to have software freedom and that we'd never have a completely free OS. We have a lot of free software now (more than anyone can inspect on their own) and we're all better off for it. History shows the doubters were wrong to be dismissive of such concerns back then too. Holding every product to a standard that allows people to fully control their devices is a prerequisite for making software freedom the default in people's lives.