If you want change you got to direct your comments to the HDMI forum. Here we can talk about it forever and if they never see anything they won’t change. I sent the following email to: [email protected]

Dear HDMI Forum,

I was recently saw the news that the HDMI forum was blocking open source implementations of the HDMI 2.1 specifications and I want to express that I really believe this is a bad idea. I hope the HDMI Forum will consider allowing it. I can’t say I understand what the concern is or the reason for blocking it but I really doubt that whatever issue is envisioned will actually come to fruition, instead I believe that allowing open source implementations will be beneficial for adoption of the standard and since if I understand correctly the licensing fees are based on hardware sold so having open source code will of course not exempt anyone from HDMI licensing rules.

Thank you so much for your consideration,

(Name)

Maybe it’s not perfect (I already wished I worded one sentence better) but I think what matters most is just trying your best and using your voice whenever you can. Be sure to send your email too, the more they receive hopefully the higher the chances that this works but of course be sure to use your own wording, I just put that here for an example.

Thank you so much for clarifying! Yes, now I understand it’s a powerful thought like they can’t stop me because I live in Sweden, I will keep protesting.

It reminds me of how many countries boycotted South Africa which helped end apartheid.

You got to vote and be active in politics and encourage as many people to do likewise. If more people did that the sum of our power would be far greater than the power of billionaires. We can then have reforms like regulating campaign contributions and lobbying and passing more regulations that protect the people.

For some countries there are things working against us. For example in the US billionaires have a lot of power and contribute heavily to politics in part due to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC which opened the floodgates for unlimited political spending and has really harmed our country. My solution to this is to encourage people to boycott companies that donate heavily to Republicans and most importantly encourage people to vote for people who will help stop all the corruption.

Bill Gates was ruthless during the 90s. Just as a random example he tried to make ACPI only work with Windows saying “It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work” just as a random example.

Maybe he’s making up for it now but still it’s more complex than him just always being a good person.

I posted it there! Before I was worried to post there because I didn’t see any recent posts.

I was just thinking, one way to start adding Oracle might be to create a Database section and mention Oracle’s database and perhaps other closed source/bad solutions like Access and suggest open source alternatives like PostgreSQL and MariaDB.

I don’t know where this would fit in on the website but one company that is really important to boycott is Oracle. Larry Ellison is a mega right-wing donor and his son is buying up media companies for the purposes of turning them into right-wing propaganda machines.

One way everyone can make a difference is by uninstalling any Oracle software on your computer. You might have the Oracle JRE installed or if you’re into virtualization you may be using Virtualbox. It’s especially important to avoid Oracle software in a corporate setting because their lawyers may come after you. If you work for a company and you’re either involved in purchasing software or a software developer I would strongly recommend avoiding Oracle not just because of ethical reasons but also because typically they have their products are not as good from a technical standpoint as well.

For the Oracle JRE or JDK you can replace it with Adoptium. Adoptium is run by the Eclipse Foundation which is based in the EU.

For Virtualbox you can replace it with QEMU or Xen. For QEMU there are a lot of good GUI or CLI front-ends that make using it easy. See this article: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/QEMU/Front-ends note that some of the front-ends listing in that article also support Xen.

For Oracle’s database some say that PostgreSQL is a good competitor. For this one I acknowledge the topic is more complex. I’m just going to leave it at for new designs please consider avoiding Oracle’s database if you can. Oracle has a bad reputation among programmers for a reason.

Safari isn’t open source. They could in theory add a backdoor anytime and it would be more difficult to audit.

Right, I better not tell him about chat control.

We’re all in this together in a way, what becomes normalized in one country risks coming for you one day. Do you notice how other countries have Trump copycats? In fact Trump has learned a lot from Hungary. So when something bad happens in one country we must stand against it no matter where we are because sooner or later if we don’t it will come for us.