So what happened to the Apple Challenge?

It’s been roughly a year since I lost my faith in the Free Software Foundation. I’d long since been annoyed by juvenile derogatory names like the “Swindle” being used to refer to Amazon’s Kindle and place it on the same level as calling a certain Redmond company “Micro$oft.” While that was enough to annoy me, in July 2008 the group did something to infuriate me.

You probably don’t remember the Apple challenge. It came out shortly after the iPhone 3G, and the release of the iPhone 3GS was enough to remind me. Taken from the call to action, the event was to (emphasis theirs)…

… use Apple’s helpful online booking system (no registration required) to reserve time slots at the Genius Bar. There are currently 217 Apple stores in seven countries, giving us plenty of slots to book. We want as many people as possible to book slots this Friday, July 25, and Saturday, July 26. Why not book more than one?

Using the booked slots the participants are supposed to ask their Genius five questions about software freedom. Essentially the group called for a distributed denial of service on Apple. Slashdot covered this already and on second of two days that the action was supposed to happen. I can’t call it a protest when it’s more similar to petty vandalism, directed at the wrong people, doomed to be ineffective and maligns the customers they seek to convert. As someone who’s donated to the FSF and CLUE in the past I could not believe a group that claimed to represent my interests would stoop to such a level. I have since shifted my donations to EFF, Book Aid International and Doctors Without Borders.

I’m having trouble finding any results, or anything other than the initial call to action, the Digg post and the slashdot post. I think it’s safe to say that the action did not result in any sort of victory or significant disturbance.

My questions are thus:

What was the goal of this exercise?
Why was the denial of service to customers considered acceptable?
Who was involved with organizing this action?
Why has there not been a repudiation from the FSF or the DBD groups?

I’ve sent the folks at defectivebydesign a short e-mail that’s much less angry asking them if there’s any similar actions planned, what were the results, and why there was no repudiation. A friend of mine sent a much better letter to the FSF asking them to retract and apologise for the Apple challenge.

I’m eagerly awaiting any response from either group.

Why #O2Fail is really ‘iPhone customer Fail’ (thenextweb.com)

4 Comments to “So what happened to the Apple Challenge?”

Warren 18 June 2009 at 5:27 am #

I think there’s an unfortunate point at which being “for” or “against” a cause devolves into fanatacism and utter lunacy. I realize this is the internet and anonymity is synonymous with lack of accountability, but I get tired of people who can’t tell the difference between a valid argument and a petty attention grab (or just don’t care.)
Blaise Alleyne 19 June 2009 at 4:46 am #

I don’t share the same outrage over this, but I agree that these campaigns are often petty. There was some discussion in the FSF forums recently about a Windows 7 Sins campaign. Some of the members were complaining that it was too petty and negative, and that it won’t do much good to convince anyone of anything. That much, I agree with.

I still support the FSF though because of all the other work they do beside the campaigns, like the recent work with Wikimedia and the Creative Commons to switch Wikipedia from the GFDL to CC BY-SA, or the support they give to groups like autonomous.
lance_ 20 June 2009 at 7:42 pm #

@Blaise, making customers collatoral damage was not acceptable. They do some good work but I won’t resume donations until they repudiate the challenge.
SEO被リンク 5 February 2010 at 10:00 pm #

Hope the same problem will not happen this year.