The Perils of ‘Free’

May 14, 2010 in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

But first – welcome to my new blog – I hope you like the new look! Its also all new underneath (now running on WordPress).

Switching to a new blog software wasn’t entirely voluntary: Blogger (i..e. Google) decided to discontinue the support for blogs that are published via FTP (this was my old setup). This left me (and probably in excess of a hundred thousand people that are also using FTP publishing) with 2 months to either move our blogs from our own servers to Blogger’s servers or to switch to a different blogging software.

The problem is – moving to Blogger really is not a realistic option – after-all I switched to FTP publishing after Google decided my Blog is SPAM (without any reason) and barred me from doing any changes for weeks (yea – I don’t write that often, but its still creepy to have an important part of your online identity suddenly slip out of your control). Even worse, Google recently decided to delete (not: “make invisible” – delete!) a large number of Music Blogs that got a few takedown notices but that probably did nothing wrong.

So – there you have it (again) – sometimes its neither “free as in beer” nor “free as in speech” but as in “free of rights and without recourse”.