jjg
Reading Lanier’s book (“10 Arguments...”) had the less-obvious effect of making me think hard about the free-as-in-beer aspect of (most) #FOSS.
The claim he makes that this was a mistake, or more specifically that the way they “solved for free” (advertising) paved the way for exploitation of users, warrants considerable thought.
Until we smash capitalism, people who make free-as-in-speech things need money to survive,;using ads for this was a mistake.
What to do next...🤔
kelbot ◖⎚∠⎚◗
@jjg While far from perfect crowd-funding/patreon etc.. has been a moderately successful alternative to that issue of funding people that create things.
Sajith
@jjg I found it hard to agree with that part of the book. Lanier is assigning blame on FOSS for problems created by an entirely different group of people with entirely different set of values.
jjg
@sajith I hear you there.
There’s a few things in the book that seem weird to me at first (solutions focused on capitalism/commerce type stuff) but when you consider the culture he comes from his take makes more sense (even if I don’t always agree). Also, I think this makes the book more accessible to “squares” (perhaps that’s the intent?)
That said the treatment of the primary subject outweighs the parts that didn’t click with me.
Jonkman Microblog is a social network, courtesy of SOBAC Microcomputer Services. It runs on GNU social, version 1.2.0-beta5, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.