Blogging Ottinger (tim)

We are unapologetically a Linux-only household. That is generally a very good thing. I don’t have a lot of the troubles that Windows households have, and I get a lot of powerful software for no cost whatsoever. I would happily accept a new Mac into the fold, but have intentionally stayed away from Windows for about seven years. My kids have grown up with free software. This only causes problems when people don’t realize that there are non-windows households. Sometimes people expect us to have the latest version of Word and Excel (we never will, we use OpenOffice.org . Someone might try to give us windows software, or winPrinters, or winScanners, or winModems or similar nonsense. We can at least give them away and make other people happy though.

The latest reminder of this difference is that my music-loving son was given an iTunes gift card. It’s pretty thoughtful, because he’s always carrying around his CDs, and an MP3-capable CD player. We typically will rip a CD and burn an MP3-CD with the music so that he doesn’t have to carry around dozens of CDs to have dozens of hours of music. He has an iPod, but likes his CD player better (going against the cultural flow is apparently a family value). He loves a lot of styles of music, and would keep the soundtrack going 24/7 if he could.

However, the card is not useful to us because we don’t have a Mac, nor a Windows PC. We can try to get the windows iTunes working under Wine, but he’s not going to be able to burn the music to a CD in wine or transcode it to mp3 or ogg. Nor will we spend a few hundred dollars to buy Windows so he can use a free gift card . If we installed itunes with wine, the music would have to live on the shared family desktop machine, where it can be played when there’s nothing else going on. It’s not portable, and it’s not convenient.

Also, my son and I both signed a petition saying that we would not intentionally buy DRM “enriched” music. We’ve stayed true to that, so he isn’t interested in breaking his word even with the gift of iTunes music.

My thought is that he should probably thank the giver, then sell the gift card to a buddy and spend the money it brings on whatever he wants. Even if he sells it under face value, it is still a gift and he has money he did not have before. Ah, if only it were eMusic or Magnatune, maybe an online vender like CdConnection or Borders or Amazon, it would be fine. Likewise, it would be fine if it were to a brick-n-mortar store like Target (where we do a lot of business) or Starbucks or a even a more cash-like gift card rom MasterCard, Visa, etc. The problem is that iTunes is iTunes, and you need windows and mac.

It was kind to give a gift of music to a music lover, and a good idea to let the very eclectic gift-receiver make his own choices. The real issue is that the iTunes store is dealing in DRM-polluted music, and only certain platforms and devices can play it. If it were free of DRM (like emusic and magnatune) we would have the freedom to download, play, and even convert audio formats. The gift-giver just didn’t realize that the whole world is not populated by Windows and Mac users. It was simply a matter of not understanding our computing setup, which reflects the philosophy we live in a practical way.

PS: He agreed that the correct thing to do is to sell the card to someone who feels differently about DRM and has Windows or Mac at home.