I have a feeling that the FLOSS movement in spirit was constructed in the previous centralised computing paradigm with timesharing systems, and in some sense is left there. I wonder what its corresponding movement of our time would be, now that the pendulum has swung back from the desktop computing paradigm and into dumb terminals over a document format?
@albin As I see it: decentralization.
@lupine For me the code is a means, not an end. The most interesting parts of the free software movement to me were always the slightly utopian visions (and I think they are very clearly widely different) about the societies around and through the code. I can imagine both communal centralised computing and individualised libertarian computing springing from the same roots, just to name two.
Do you have a good source on copy far left?
What about turning all people to #hackers?
Many call this an #utopia, while to me its the inevitable effect and necessary cause of progress in #IT. Also it's the obvious consequence of the core #freedom of #FreeSoftware, the freedom to modify the software: why such freedom should be reserved to a caste of privileged programmers?
#Hacking today is what writing was in Ancient Egypt. We need to go beyond JavaScript^WMainframes^Whieroglyphs!
Some ideological communities will pick self-hosting as long as it's possible, of course. For email, it's still marginally possible, but I wouldn't bet on it long-term. Usenet, IRC, XMPP demonstrate its fate
One could imagine a crop variety that is insanely delicious, but if you put it in the existing commons, you'll find it in the supermarket the very next day. What other options are available?
@Shamar @lupine I'd much prefer no hosting at all. Of course, I agree with your sentiment, and I used to agree with your literal statement about all users becoming hackers as well. I also used to host my own email, domains, web servers, and IRC servers. That was many years ago. Now I use Gmail, Facebook et al for mostly everything, and have almost completely dropped out of the GNU/Linux ecosystem in favour of Apple's software, because it suits my needs better, even if I don't like it.
@lupine @Shamar However, if it's specifically control and accountability you are after, couldn't that be solved through less heavy means than turning everyone into hackers? Also, I think it's worth thinking about how this translates to other fields. According to the same logic, do I also need to be able to produce my own food, or do biotech or medicine? Or is there something specific to software, and if so why?
No, I'm after #knowledge and #freedom.
Try to think what would happen to our cyber #democracy, in a world of hackers.
Or to #economy?
No corporation, not even #Google #Microsoft #Facebook and #Amazon together, could compete with billions of hackers coding their own #FreeSoftware.
The point is just how to go there.
Yes, I wrote the Hacking License to protect my new networking protocol, #FP (for file protocol).
Imagine a single protocol that subsumes what you can do with #NFS, #SMB, #HTTP, SFTP, #RDP, X and #SSH but simpler than #9P2000.
I know I look like a megalomaniac when I say so, but infact that's my goal: to prove that #Informatics is very #simple, it's just that by stacking patch on patch we turned it to a mess.
And we can fix it. Even if I will fail.
The more I succeed, the less people will need me or any other technical authority.
As for being nice: I'm not used to insult people and in general I'm a quite kind person so it's unlikely to see me in berserk mode.
Yet I'm able to ridiculing bad arguments in a way that drive people crazy... see https://dev.to/shamar/i-have-been-banned-from-lobsters-ask-me-anything-5041 or http://www.tesio.it/cache/2018/TildesNET_Undetectable-Remote-Arbitrary-Code-Execution-Attacks-through-JavaScript-and-HTTP-headers-trickery.html
However I also think we need more and more weirdos.
#RMS, #TerryADavis and (till recently) #LinusTorvalds are a sort of barrier to mainstream pression to conform.
Hackers are weird, we are far from the average on many different axes, so we are very tollerant to divese people however different they are, and this is what drive mainstreamers crazy: https://mobile.twitter.com/giacomotesio/status/1073624852525957120
A world of hackers is a world of tolerant weirdos.
I'm not saying that they were or are tollerant.
I'm saying that I would be much more interested into listening (some of) their ideas than I care about their flaws.
To me each human is unique, like a vector drawn on a dimension that is orthogonal to every other one: you can't really compare people.
However our behaviours can be (improperly) described according to several dimensions, some of which provide an ordering relation.
1/
#Hackers' #Curiosity inevitably move them far and far from the average, so that mainstreamers (whose beliefs and behaviour lay within 2 STD from the average in most dimensions), see us as weird, dangerous, evil or worse.
Yet hackers are intuitively aware of this: we are all similar in our being ouliners, in our absolute distance from the average. So while my deviation occur in less visible dimensions, I'm not much different from them.
2/
But don't get me wrong, I'm not simply defending them to retain my #freedom to be weird: I'm really curious about what they have to say, because I know that it's my "weirdness" that let me see things differently.
I can't see things like them, so I'm curious to listen how they see things from their own perspective.
That's why I'm very annoyed by mainstreamers pushing workspace-like behaviours though #CoC everywhere: #conformism reduce perspectives.
@lupine @Shamar I'd say what's stopping them is either the produced useful things (systems, experiences, communities, etc) not being possible to squeeze into the commodity form (i.e. not being possible to sell or otherwise make profits from), or them being legally restricted from doing so. If we view code / society / law as three sides of the same coin, this makes sense; code and law both program society, and vice versa.
> code and law both program society, and vice versa.
Exactly.
#Technology is a prosecution of #Politics by other means.
History shows that the most powerful political force has always been technology. War is second (and since the #WW2 and the #MarshallPlan, it's tightly coupled with technology too, as #DARPA shows).
So we have to choose how we want to fight the next #revolution.
I bet on my #curiosity.
It's not a weapon, but it's viral.
Dont think we need/want/could have an individualized solution where everyone does it all by themselves
I'm inspired by Community Supported Agriculture, which has quite a variety of models, what I find really exciting are those where the people getting the food are involved, at the level *they choose*, in the resourcing, governance, admin &/or growing
The Solidarity Agriculure movement in Germany is interesting
https://discourse.solawi.allmende.io/t/clarifications-about-the-solawi-model/345
See linked github issue there
@dazinism That would be roughly the shape of my preferred counter-argument to the "hacking for the masses" as well, but thanks for the link, I have never heard of that before!
I think the difference between agriculture/artisanship and #hacking (beyond the obvious difference in physical constraints) is that the firsts are mostly technical skills, something you can do, while programming is mostly a method of expression, exactly like writing.
And just like #writing is a precondition of citizenship that support any skill in a physical world, so is #programming in our #cyber world.
That's why I designed the #HackingLicense.
This is one of the tricks of the Hacking License: there's nothing that members of an organisation cannot do to benefit their organisation. But the organisation cannot use the Hack or modify it. This put hackers in power, inside the organisation.
So good organisations benefit from the Hack plenty, while evil ones could have some issues, so to say.
Ultimately this license is a piece of my puzzle. Another piece is the file protocol I designed it for.
Yet another is the #vademecum http://www.tesio.it/documents/vademecum.txt (still at an early stage).
Finally education: to me, as a dad and as a hacker, kids are our sole hope. All the rest, the license, the os... everything, serve the purpose of giving them the tool to do better than their parents. Because we are doing very bad on so many levels that... well... we deserve what we have.
I planned to build a FAQ page for it in these days but
1. wife and daughters forbidden me computers while they are awake (we are on vacation)
2. the Russian Government interjected to steal my remaining free time: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487081#c16
A gist of my motivations are outlined at
I'm not really certain this is relevant, but your analogy breaks down because they have no way, no way at all, to get produce to the supermarket in a comparable quality to what a *competent* grower can put on his own table.
Partly because we will not always agree on what is a desireable quality, but also because produce in the supermarket has to stand up to the process of getting there.
So, for instance, all else being equal, fruits must have thicker skins and longer shelf-life to be suitable for the supermarket.
The first is an obvious determinant sometimes. The second is a complicated tradeoff between height of the peak and speed of deterioration.
It is said, around here, that potatoes lose 90% of their quality within the first hour after leaving the ground.
re: visions of society, rms vs esr (or FSF vs OSI) was always an interesting tension. Corporate centralised computing squashes both flat at present, though.
@lupine Ah, Kleiner; I should have suspected. I'm slightly familiar with his work, if not this one. Thank you for the link!
@lupine OK; I have done my homework now. What Kleiner seems to be after is roughly the same thing as the Commons Clause people are trying to fix in some sense, that is the appropriation of labour from FLOSS by companies. It's an interesting side-effect that both of these proposals are violating some of the software freedoms specifically because they are formulated without any distinction of power, etc. (1/2)
@lupine I think this is to be expected? Anything reasonably different from the GLP (in terms of scope or intention) can be assumed to end up with incompatible rules in some sense. A more important question, I think, is if copyright law is even the best place to fight this battle. There ARE other options; blockades (DDoS?), campains, strikes, etc. It seems a bit...cargo-cultish to me to try a license just because it "worked before". (2/2)
I don't really see that denying the four software freedoms to our enemies must be a bad thing, but it does seem hella controversial from the experiments I've done.
@lupine I kind of like the form vs content argument inside of that, but I think the answer is "yes, but it wouldn't work the same if it was user-developed, depending on which user's needs developed it"
@lupine It would be interesting to investigate the source of that controversy. Is it: a) actual differing interests and/or perspectives and/or lived experiences, or is it a matter of semantics or cargo-culting FLOSS licenses?
Not impossible to fix at all.
#Decentralization is not something that can happen alone, you need #hackers to write the code and #users able (and #free) to self-host.
In practice we need #education and a stronger #copyleft but designed to prevent abuse. #Copyfarleft misses the point: it's not a matter of maximizing money but knowledge and innovation.
That's why I wrote the #HackingLicense http://www.tesio.it/documents/HACK.txt
@alcinnz Without having read anything about it, it sounds reasonable to me!
@albin I'll look up some articals for you, but the idea is that if you can do your core job without uploading a piece of data to some central servers you are forbidden from doing so. And you can't say "but we can offer more conveniences by collecting this data".
@albin It's mentioned in this talk, I think https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
But definitely these links:
https://ar.al/2018/11/29/gdmr-this-one-simple-regulation-could-end-surveillance-capitalism-in-the-eu/
@albin From Stallman's artical:
"There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data."
@Hamishcampbell @alcinnz Could you please expand a bit on that for me? I think I agree to some extent but I'm not sure if I see a (necessary) conflict between that and eg Stallman et al.
@albin @alcinnz Not being human (geek disfuctional fantasey) is the idea of not collecting data as a good path.
Libertarians have a limited view https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism :)
@Hamishcampbell I...partially agree. I mean, of course the society in which the data collection happens matters, as that affects who collects data on whom and what they can use it for, and I would certainly be sceptical of purely libertarian perspectives, but I still think some variant of Stallman's policies might make sense, if nothing else then as harm reduction for our particular society at this point in time. Would you agree to that?
@albin yep, fair point, but good to point this as disfuctional mediation and clearly not as a desirable outcome. Its inhuman.
@Hamishcampbell Do you mean that *all* sorts of data collections are a necessary part of the human condition? I am not sure I follow your argument here, but it sounds interesting.
Also, when you talk about "not being human", how do you relate this to eg the concept of the modern human as cyborg. which I have heard some people use in these discussions as well?
It's all very code-focused on the GNU side. What people seem to get interested in with cloud services is the fact that commercial exploitation of the code gets monopolised by those cloud services. So we get copyfarleft and weird stuff like the "commons clause" showing up.
Might actually be impossible to fix though.