Re: [ox-en] Software reinforcing socioeconomic class (was: Germ of a new form of society or germ of a new form of business?)
- From: "Niall Douglas" <s_fsfeurope2 nedprod.com>
- Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 23:40:31 -0000
On 4 Feb 2004 at 1:55, Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
This point of Niall's deserves further discussion. The source is
useless if you haven't got the skills to use it. The result is that
the free in FLOSS in this respect is free only to a technical elite.
I agree completely. It's clearly a major problem and one that's close
to my heart.
Unchecked, Free Software will recreate, and reinforce, old systems of
inequality and injustice. Along with access to source code must come
the ability to manipulate it. Advocacy of software with certain
freedoms without advocacy for a program to give users the ability to
take advantage of those freedom, or easily learn how to do this, is
useless.
You said I was being uncreative earlier in this thread because I said
that the exploitative model is a better one for making profit and as
a result, will tend to be the de facto software development model.
Here I think you're being uncreative. Yes, you've acknowledged that
free software like most things will tend to reinforce discriminatory
lines already present in society but can't you see that software is
not like a book which is a mostly static thing? Software is dynamic,
ever-changing and most importantly of all, a *tool* like a pump.
<bold>
Because of these attributes, software moulds us just as much as we
mould software (if I could put that statement in bold, I would).
</bold>
As "The Art of Motorcycle Maintainence" points out, there is a web of
relationships between the engineer, his/her tools and the machine.
All feed off one another. As someone earlier said "SOFTWARE IS NOT A
PERSON" well no it isn't, but as a tool it shares a personality with
its user because of how that user and all users perceive their
relationship with the tool and the tool with everything else. All
tools are effectively extensions of the human.
Therefore, software can be designed to lower entry barriers to new
programmers. In fact, I think it can lower them so much as to make
using a computer and programming the same indistinguishable. This is
what I'm attempting to do with my Tn project (among many other
things).
If I succeed, things will suddenly get very interesting in the world
of computing. But it's a while away yet.
Cheers,
Niall