Comments on: Free Software is obsolete

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:03:11 +0000

Jake, nice to hear from you! And you make a good point. You clarified what I was trying to get at with the ‘annihilate’ button example, it really is the communal data that is generating the value in these social applications, and it is the integrity of that data that needs to be protected. Perhaps the access to data could be governed freely and democratically - I suppose it doesn’t even need to be centralized - but it would still need some sort of control. This is to say I couldn’t do whatever I pleased ‘freely’. But you put it well, maybe it must change from anarchy to democracy, though it does sound a bit more like communism (in the best sense )

By: jake

jake — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:02:56 +0000

playing devil´s advocate, i would say that calling free software an “obsolete philosophy” might be going a bit too far.

you contend that the communal nature of software like facebook precludes you from making private modifications, but that need not be the case. one could imagine providing an infrastructure for the implementation and deployment of private facebook plugins, or even a per-session instantiation of private facebook binaries based on user login preferences. inter-version compatibility would of course be an issue, but the onus there would mostly fall upon you convincing your friends to adopt your changes (note that they would not have to abandon the central facebook deployment to do this though).

of course it´s not clear that such a plugin/private binary approach would allow you to implement any and all changes you could imagine (e.g., a nifty “annihilate” button to permanently destroy other users´ accounts), and your changes may require the consent of the community before they are adopted, but your freedoms need not be entirely annulled. perhaps with communal applications the flavor of free software must change from one of anarchy to democracy.

but you´re probably planning to address all this in the next post anyhow…

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:38:02 +0000

Is this post not more valuable now that you’ve commented? I hope you think you’ve added something Blogs almost by definition derive their particular value from community interaction and sharing - otherwise they would just be personal journaling.
But maybe a better example would be a computer game with little online component, like World of Goo. Almost all it’s value is ‘instrict’ (and so it was pirated like mad).

But the point I was trying to make is that Stallman advocates a world where ALL software is ‘free’ (according to his freedoms) and that is impossible. It’s a quantifying question: I’m arguing that not *all* software can be ‘free’, not that ’some’ software can be free. There exists ‘free’ software. But it’s not social.

By: Joe Gaudet

Joe Gaudet — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:52:19 +0000

While I agree with you in principle, consider wordpress, its value is not derived from community, and we (both you and I) build our blogs on it.