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Re: [ox-en] Re: Oekonux and politics




[snip]

Possible futures are always also about politics because they are disputed 
and shaped by fights and decisions. And in the domain of politics, looking 
for allies is useful for small projects like Oekonux.

Hmm... One of the good things in Oekonux is that even such discussions
bring new insights - at least for me. Actually I think I had some
roots for this in my head for quite some time now, but Graham's third
possibility put it to the point: Coalitions of organizations might be
simply outdated. Coalitions of organizations are a typical construct
of mass societies. Free Software in many respects transcends mass
societies.

Why not favour this network approach where simply each individual
decides who to coalize with and who to avoid? To me this does sound
much more like Free Software than "Newsflash: Today Apache and Debian
announced a coalition".

Random thought this triggers:

I was at a meeting at a government department to debate issues of
software licenses. About half the meeting were from Free and Open
software -backing organisations. There's a discussion about particular
licenses for software. One chap gets up and bangs on about the wondrous
merits of the GPL (I agree with him, but wait) and how he's completely
committed to it. The man in front of me [Chatham House rules - I can't
name names] says "What web server does your [major project] run on?"
"Apache" "BSD license".

The funny thing - in the Free Software world, this "betrayal" of ideals
isn't really an issue. Someone else was doing text translation for a
couple of languages for *both KDE and GNOME* at the same time - which I
can only describe as "like designing logos for Galliano and Karan".

The network we operate in, as Free Software users, is *better than you
can imagine* unless you work with it all the time. Not only do we gain
all the benefits of rivalrous competition, but also we have complete
interchangeability and cross-competition standardisation! Vi and Emacs
key-bindings on everything. Drop-in-replacement mail servers! Quality
*and feature* competition between windowing environments! Hell, even the
"boot linux off a single floppy" guys compete and swap technology.

What we end up with are "statistical coalitions" rather than "lock-in
coalitions".


cheers, Rich.

-- 
rich walker | technical person | Shadow Robot Company | rw shadow.org.uk
front-of-tshirt space to let     251 Liverpool Road   |
                                 London  N1 1LX       | +UK 20 7700 2487
_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/



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