Notices by Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)
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Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 19-Sep-2018 14:58:34 CEST 
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
"Open Source" served a particular purpose for a particular time. It helped to increase the adoption of Free Software by businesses, and thereby also more generally among the customers/users of those businesses.
But today that project is pretty much over, and we won. Nobody except for knuckle-dragging morons seriously doubt that source code should be publicly available. So really it's time to get back to talking about freedom rather than openness. How free are the users of this software according to the usual criteria? A lot of companies don't score well.
The problems of "open source" today are really ones of business culture and economics generally (surveillance crapitalism). The various isms (sexism, racism, etc) are not things which Free Software or Open Source ever set out to fix. The availability of Free Software is a tool, not a catch-all solution to social problems. The problem before Free Software was that only certain people had access to the tools, which were expensive. Now everyone who is willing to learn also does. It's a necessary but not sufficient step towards solving the bigger problems. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Tuesday, 18-Sep-2018 18:24:27 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@maiyannah I think the kernel story has jumped the shark now. In the worst case if the baddest scenario happens, just fork and continue. Ditching the Linux Foundation would be a great move. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Tuesday, 18-Sep-2018 10:28:43 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@lanodan @bram @Wolf480pl Just as the former NSA director asked "why don't we just collect all of the signals?" someone at Cloudflare might have said "why don't we just MiTM all of the internet?" -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 17-Sep-2018 21:25:49 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@Wolf480pl @strypey @Shamar
This might be a way for Microsoft or Google to have "their man" maintaining Linux.
If after some CoC drama Linus was replaced by a Microsoft guy I'd do a lot of laughing...and then maybe some crying. It would be the ultimate coup. But then of course it's just GPL. There would be a fork and maybe a split from the Linux Foundation. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 17-Sep-2018 15:08:23 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@aral And they'll now have more power than Linus in terms of enforcing standards of behavior via the CoC.
Expect more:
* Professionalism
* Corporatism
* Lack of criticism of certain politically contentious patches -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 17-Sep-2018 15:05:52 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@aral
You got it :thumbsup: -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 17-Sep-2018 00:49:07 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
That Free Software includes some non-copyleft licenses isn't that much of a problem in practice.
The war between "open source" and Free Software is mostly wasted energy.
It's easy to get riled up about licenses and "open source". It's a common pattern for developers to focus on that and believe that the licenses are all-powerful. But the biggest problems we have now aren't that there are not enough copyleft projects.
Some big hurdles I see in the near future are:
- Hardware lockdown. I expect more advanced versions of Intel ME are coming, building DRM into the hardware. We need more free/open hardware designs.
- Patents are still a problem. afaik software patents havn't been entirely invalidated.
- The web is heading for a cliff edge. The remaining silos may start locking the web down with EME and there may be not much we can do to stop that other than to work around it.
- We need to ensure that governments don't legislate the remaining independent web away. Things like article 13.
- We need to make sure that "strong" and e2e encryption remains legal. If we lose that then we are truly fucked.
- We need more education and agitation in the places that matter. Any public organization should be using Free Software by default and we also need to overcome the Microsoft monopoly in education establishments. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 17-Sep-2018 00:02:29 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
And there is enough for everyone. Austerity is a choice. We don't seriously have a problem with producing food or being able to build houses. Those shortages are all artificial. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Sunday, 16-Sep-2018 23:27:32 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@cwebber He's mentioned his failings before, but what's new here is that he's saying he's going to try to do something to improve his behavior, rather than just "this is who I am, so deal with it". -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Sunday, 16-Sep-2018 20:55:12 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Meanwhile back in 2010 they took some kind of stand, refusing to censor search results for Chinese users.
Somehow their earlier backbone vanished and no doubt money was involved.
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Saturday, 15-Sep-2018 23:33:45 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
One thing I learned from the Manchester Software Freedom day event is that Purism is a social purpose corporation.
https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose
Maybe having more social purpose corporations is something to encourage along with cooperatives. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Thursday, 13-Sep-2018 16:35:37 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Hurricane Florence From Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N02R_sqjOmI -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 12-Sep-2018 18:50:55 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@xj9 @seasharp So a possible near future development is someone developing a new type of browser and web framework which is dramatically simplified compared to what we see today, ditching a lot of what today we think of as vital and probably ignoring W3C entirely. Things are going to need to be designed for "offline first" and accommodate large latencies via satellites or multiple hops through mesh nodes. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 12-Sep-2018 18:26:07 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@xj9 @seasharp Half the planet is yet to get online, and they're the poorer half. When they do get online they're going to be using low power hardware comparable to an ARM7 board.
That's supposedly what the Simon & Speck fight was about.
So the growth area in the next decade is going to be in low performance and low energy systems. At this point Moore's Law is history, so we have what we have in terms of transistor density.
Many of today's browsers and sites are hopelessly bloated. I think there's going to be "disruption" in the web development and browser space as companies/organizations/projects focus on where the new growth is happening. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Tuesday, 11-Sep-2018 14:59:01 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
climatechange.jpg -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 10-Sep-2018 23:50:17 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@josemurilo
"If we’re going to achieve what we want to, it’s not just about building the best features. It’s about building the best community"
I agree with Zuckerberg about that, but I'd disagree that you can build the best community within a centralized architecture moderated by algorithms. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 10-Sep-2018 23:38:03 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@maiyannah @alcinnz @codesections @mooshoe
So yes, it really is a formula.
- start with things based on open standards
- grow the user base. People can use existing clients that they know and love
- extend and then extinguish the open formats, replacing them with a closed system
- when the user base is big enough so that there's network effect happening, deprecate the open standards support -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 10-Sep-2018 22:40:21 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Amusing that Twitter once had an XMPP gateway, as Slack did. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Monday, 10-Sep-2018 19:55:43 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@uranther I don't think that's an inherently evil goal. Taking the chaotic state of the web - which webrings and lists were not doing a good job or organizing - and turning that into useful information.
Where did Google go wrong? Between 2005-2010 the company was still on relatively good terms with the Free Software community although there was some grumbling about their use of GPL.
As with Microsoft and IBM before it, as the company grew it got more corporate and whatever values it might have held early on (supporting open standards, for example) took a back seat to profits, share prices and narrow self-serving interests.
When organizations get big they become more about self-preservation than doing the thing which they originally set out to do. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Sunday, 09-Sep-2018 23:21:24 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
2016 In The Mix - Demoscene Compotracks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quvxt4OhGYs
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