April endorses the text of the international petition against forced bundling of software with computers [4], which was proposed by the Aful group working on “racketware” [5] (Aful is another French NGO devoted to the promotion of free software).
Forced bundling [6] [fr] is one of the threats to free software against which April regularly speaks out.
This is the commercial practice of tying the sale of a product to the purchase of another product without giving any real choice to the customer. Its effects are detrimental, not only to the consumer —higher bill, limited choice, compulsory restrictive license— but also to the French economy, since it increases the power of some US monopolies at the expense of free solutions, it encourages unfair competition, and it ignores innovative solutions.
Favourable statements made throughtout the years have never been followed through. It is now proven that user's freedoms and interests are considered negligible. Even very weak and completely unsatisfactory proposals, such as that of consumer information on the price of force-bundled software, have been rejected by the executive. Thus the petition addresses the need to show our strength against what has to be referred to as privileges.
However, April does not wish to encourage the use of the Avaaz petition website, because of its Terms of Use [7], for the following reasons in particular:
- The Avaaz organisation is under US law, and all the private data provided by the signataries are hosted in that country, with its much weaker protection of privacy than is found in France.
- Avaaz reserves the discretionary right to modify a petition which has been launched by a third party.
- By default, signing a petition on their website entails regularly receiving signature requests for other petitions. One has to opt out voluntarily.