17
votes
DAS Keyboard banned a guy on forums for providing open source alternatives for their keyboards
@sebirdman:
So I got banned from the @daskeyboard forums for telling people there's an open source alternative to the windows only software they provide. I'll never buy one of these keyboards again.
I think we might need more information on this. I mean, this is what the guy says he got banned for, but if there's one thing I've learned over years of moderation on reddit it's that people usually don't understand why they got banned, and if they do, they'll paint it in a light that makes them look like a saint, and the banner look like satan.
Given that he's far from the only person to instantly catch a ban for mentioning it, and their employees using wikipedia edits to accuse people of breaking the law, I'm gonna take him at his word on this.
I'm not sure what I'm looking at in your link (I'm not really up on the ins and outs of Wikipedia - I rarely venture beyond just gathering information there).
I'm not a member of the Das Keyboard forums and I definitely don't know what's going on here, but I do know that there is a large number of people who are angry about this keyboard and have been consistently trying to smear Meta Dot everywhere they go because of their poor business practices. I'm not saying that Meta Dot / Das are above reproach (there's a lot of things wrong with their business internals), but I think we just need to take a step back and read the rules of the forums (can you even mention alternate drivers? Is it against the rules?
My tl;dr is that people are always really fast to just jump on the hatewagon. I think everyone should probably cool it. We don't really need more outrage... anywhere.
(→Das Keyboard products: I work at the company and the group of people that added this part just stole the code of the company and try to replicate the code. They give a bad influence of the company and what they are doing is against the law. They try to give a bad image of the company everywhere including wikipedia)... these people saying they were banned too.
While i do agree with you i do have to say that it's the forums and community is probably much more smaller compared to reddit. They could've given him a warning, delete the post and explain what was the wrong thing he did. Ban seems too extreme for such case. Anyhow, we should definitely know both sides of the coin before we judge.
They could've done a lot of things, but from the moderator side of things, people constantly breaking rules is tiring. We don't know if this was his first infraction, or the 30th. We don't know if he posted the link with 46 racial epithets attached to it. We don't know that he posted something respectable and DAS is just being awful.
Basically, all we know is he claims he got banned, and he claims it was because he posted about Open Source. And then he got a bunch of people really angry about it.
My gut reaction is "bad faith action" based on his response, but that could be because my second favourite keyboard is my Das Keyboard, so I have a soft spot for them , or because I just detest the "I got banned, look how awful this moderation is" style of post because in my experiences being on the other end of things, 95% of the time those people deserved their ban (just declaring my possible bias).
I want to believe that their keyboard has some kind of "malicious" code because it's cloud connected, and that they don't want people go around providing open source software with no spooky code (considering given situation), but what you're saying makes sense too... I guess time will tell if this situation develops into something a bit bigger.
This is one of the problems with random tweets from people who don't really provide any information. I'll admit that it's possible that they removed this because they don't want an open source alternative out there, but why would that indicate that they have spooky code? They've been so delayed on this keyboard, I'm almost surprised they have any code, but I don't think they've given any indication that they're going to be selling what you do on the keyboard (or that there's even any outgoing info at all).
Think of it this way: Why are they so determined to keep this under their control? You've already spent a ridiculous amount of money on their keyboard, so why does it matter if you use a FOSS alternative to the software they're giving away for free?
Obviously, they're getting something out of the data they're pulling from your keyboard, otherwise why would they bother?
Why are they so determined to keep a forum about their software about their software?
They likely can't support the FOSS alternative - they almost certainly don't have the throughput to do so. Keeping information about it on their own forums is a tacit approval of it, and sets them up for more people using it, and starting support requests that they can't really help with. On top of that, they've spent a lot of time and money on working out the bugs in their software, and they probably feel a pride of ownership about it. The most likely, though, is that I would guess the law department or the CTO said not to allow talk about alternative software, and given what is generally known about MetaDot
There are a ton of reasons that can be attributed to stupidity instead of malice, and as per Hanlon's razor, I think they're much more likely than, "We'll build a high quality keyboard, similar to all the ones we've built before, but in this one we're going to start harvesting information in a way that's going to be super easy to detect and prevent, from the people that have supported us for years through multiple purchases and despite our history of never doing actual illegal things."