We've gone as far as licenses can take us. The next thing is about community and stewardship, not intellectual property and legalese.
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@jenniferplusplus what did I miss?
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mhoye but spookyreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus I think this is extremely true. "What parts if this project you can copy or paste into those other projects and what you have to do after that", I mean, great but who cares? Where is the human elevated or sheltered in this, where is the continuity of care, where is any sort of social obligation?
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@jenniferplusplus ohh. That guy. Yeah, fuck that guy.
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Nelson Chu Pavloskyreplied to mhoye but spooky last edited by
@mhoye @jenniferplusplus Yes exactly. Access to code is nice, but what about e.g. access to computing?
There was a time when projects like One Laptop Per Child and FreeGeek seemed like harbingers of a future where FOSS would encourage and enable social justice, but OLPC crashed and burned, and FreeGeek seems like a one-off concept that didn't keep growing, kind of like how Wikipedia is one shining example of the wiki way that didn't continue as an ongoing wider movement.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Nelson Chu Pavlosky last edited by
@skyfaller @mhoye OLPC had a lot of flaws, but it was at least thinking beyond the four freedoms.
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> Just leave Stallman behind. Stop letting them hold us back.
@jenniferplusplus apologies if this comes off as dismissive or aggressive.
But as a random person on the internet doing open source since the early noughts, Stallman has never been required in the equation. I am baffled that people give him so much attention instead of moving on to better things with their time and their sanity.
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mhoye but spookyreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus @skyfaller I think the OLPC’s cardinal flaw, beyond that trash keyboard, was that it was built without meaningful input from the people it was intended for. Nobody wanted to talk about this much but a lot of the “hacking” that got done to those things was “installing Windows so people could learn market-relevant skills”.
In that respect it played out as a kind of rich-nerd colonialism, and ultimately was the opposite of what we should be aspiring to.
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mhoye but spookyreplied to mhoye but spooky last edited by
@jenniferplusplus @skyfaller IIRC the OLPC project eventually caved and started shipping them preinstalled with XP, which fundamentally undermined the entire point of the project, and it all fell apart not long after that.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to mhoye but spooky last edited by [email protected]
@mhoye @skyfaller yeah, it was very white savior-y. But it was also a recognition that people are the important part of computing, and that software freedoms don't amount to much if people can't even use the software. And in that sense, it was progress.
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@mariusor I don't really get it either.
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mhoye but spookyreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus @skyfaller I think we’re going to disagree here. I believe your point is sound, that without access to hardware, software freedoms are a thin shade of what they might be, but I also can’t think of a good thing I can point to in this world and confidently say that if not for the OLPC project we would not have this good thing.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to mhoye but spooky last edited by
@mhoye @skyfaller the actual impact was small, yes. I'm not a particular fan of the project. I wanted it to be better than it was. I just think it was an attempt to move in a good direction, relative to the prevailing line of thought about computing at the time.
