Just to be clear, I don't think we should stop vilifying Apple.  I
agree completely that what they're doing is bad, and I want to make
them stop.  I just don't personally feel that I have the power to do
so.  And because they have a more winning paradigm for their users
than the children of the IBM PC, people who care will continue to
flock to them.   And because these people don't come from the hacker
community, there's no way to get them to participate in any boycott -
they've never heard of it and we have no way of telling them about it.

Basically, if every computer programmer in the world stopped buying
Apple computers, it would make a dent of about a half a percent in
their sales.   Maybe.   We simply don't have any clout.   If we could
reach their customer base, perhaps we could get them to boycott in
small numbers, but since their only credible alternative is
MS-Windows, it's unlikely that we'll succeed in this way.   These
people could be a valuable asset to the LPF in achieving its
legislative goals, but I don't believe they will ever stop buying
Apples.

So it seems to me that the solution is to infiltrate the ranks of
Apple people.   Get them to like us and enjoy cooperating with us, and
only then lower the boom and tell them why they should be trying to
change Apple.

A lot of the Apple employees that you mention are completely closed to
any argument that the LPF or the FSF may send their way.   Why?
Because all they ever hear from the LPF is ``your company is bad'',
and all they ever hear from the FSF is ``we won't accept your hacks.''
If instead the FSF were saying ``sure, we'll take your hacks, but
think about this'', I think we would be doing a better job of getting
our message across.

We could also modify the GPL so that it requires that interactive
products like Emacs must, when distributed on the Mac, be distributed
in such a way that the user has to read our propoganda or build from
source in order to get a version of the software which doesn't pop up
a message asking them to read the propoganda.   This is a bit
obnoxious, but it does seem to work with shareware.

I don't know.  I'm not sure what the right solution is, but I'm quite
certain that the boycott and the antagonism that results is materially
impeding our cause, which is why I keep arguing that we should stop
it.

			       _MelloN_

------------------------------------------------------------------------------