71–80 of 124 posts
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Software-Foundation/11227...
That's not official according to the article.
Also, an FSF fan club without the most doctrinaire FSFers (who refuse to use Facebook) is an interesting syncretic phenomenon in itself, for reasons that both overlap and diverge from the reasons the FSF itself is interesting.
Hasn't this been discussed before? The Person of the Year award is supposed to be given to the most influential person of the year, not the nicest or the most ethical one. Zuckerberg did become a widely recognizable person and you can't say he has not become influential too. Joseph Stalin got the award twice, 'nuff said. Disclaimer: I'm not comparing, just pointing out that the FSF's reaction is kind of attacking the…
I'm making a guess that FSF (and EFF) would probably have preferred the most influential person to win, namely Julian Assange.
Facebook is seriously changing people's lives on a large scale. Wikileaks has mostly provided diplomatic gossip, with a few things tossed in that will harm people, and a smaller number of things tossed in that will help people.
Facebook appears to have had a tremendous effect on countries like Tunisia and Egypt. The alternatives that FSF lists may not have been as effective because of the technical difficulty for a large number of people to set up such a service.
Revolutions've happened before Facebook. There was some anecdotal evidence that more people went on the streets of Egypt when Internet got shut down and they couldn't anymore just sit in front of the computer and read updates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser…
The Facebook crowd is 500m people. The number who even know what BitTorrent is compared to that is a rounding error.
FSF doesn't like a service that doesn't operate exactly how the FSF thinks they should. Shocking. I don't take anything they or their pseudo-communist leader say seriously anymore. Back when Stallman started attacking OpenBSD because of their ports tree I knew he had finally lost it.
Stallman supports the free market, he's just anti intellectual property.
Without property rights, I'm not sure what if anything -- except services, a.k.a. labor -- can be consistently monetized in a free market.
In other words, in a world without property rights, the only thing of (monetary) value is labor.
And if memory serves, the labor theory of value is the foundation of Marxian economics; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value.
Consequently, it's not clear to me how it's possible even to have a free market in intellectual work product, as opposed to a free market in labor, without some kind of legally-enforceable rights in intellectual property.
Bias disclosure: I'm an IP lawyer by background.
EDIT: The GPL couldn't exist without IP rights, that is, the right (under copyright law) to haul others into court to force them to comply with the GPL terms or to fine them for failing to do so.
The public at large doesn't care and more to the point and the public at large usually aren't affected by loss of privacy - it doesn't inconvenience them enough to bother them. Diaspora and other such projects are a complete joke. People aren't going to run their own server. Make it easy, make it fast and get their friends to use it, that's it. Nothing else matters.
People aren't going to run their own server. Why do people keep repeating this fallacy? People won't have to. None of these projects are focused on single-user P2P approach. For all of 30 seconds, Diaspora insinuated that, but that was before they had actually written any code. If you feel these projects (including mine) is a joke, I'd love to hear feedback why, but please don't repeat falsehoods about how the softwa…
If individuals don't run their own server and hold control of their own data, then who does? Whoever is running the node.
I know as nerds, we like to get our geek boners over cool projects that aren't mainstream, and fight the man and all, but people on the street could give a crap less. It means that these are stillborn ideas. Does this mean you should stop fighting the good fight? No, but I wouldn't hold my breath for critical mass.
This article is a joke, it's something I would expect to find on some tech/news gossip website. Is this what FSF has become? > so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and fore…
> Is this what FSF has become? You mean there was a time when FSF didn't launch ideological arguments to demand that people use software from the GNU Project? I'm not picking a side, just pointing out that this is par for the course. If it isn't GPL, it's evil.
They maintain a very comprehensive and useful listing[1] of 3rd party licenses which goes over their histories, tradeoffs, and whether they're compatible with the GPL.
And that compatibility is treated independently of whether they consider those licenses to be 'Free'.
Of course they'd prefer use of their own licenses, but this self-interest takes a back seat to helping the overall ecosystem.
Don't look now but Adsense and every other ad network can track your movements online too! In keeping with their Facebook stance, FSF should block the GoogleBot and get off of Google too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser…
The Facebook crowd is 500m people. The number who even know what BitTorrent is compared to that is a rounding error.
That's from 2008 announcing Pirate Bay had hit 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker. That's not total users, that's total online. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to 10 to estimate total users, double it to account for the rest of the global trackers (low?) and increase it by some percentage to account for 3 years of growth and you're in the hundreds of millions of users range, possibly as high as 300M or more.
I'm not a crazy bittorrent fanboy, in fact I'm quite the opposite, but I think it's clear that the number of users of a decentralized system can far exceed any "rounding errors" of facebook's numbers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People aren't going to run their own server. Why do people keep repeating this fallacy? People won't have to. None of these projects are focused on single-user P2P approach. For all of 30 seconds, Diaspora insinuated that, but that was before they had actually written any code. If you feel these projects (including mine) is a joke, I'd love to hear feedback why, but please don't repeat falsehoods about how the softwa…
Simplicity mostly. People want to be abstracted away from the nitty gritty details. Open ID failed because you couldn't explain it to your grandmother. But you can explain, "oh yeah, you can just click this button and login with your facebook account" Maybe this is just marketing. If individuals don't run their own server and hold control of their own data, then who does? Whoever is running the node. I know as nerds,…
People don't need to know what an apache, django or drupal is in order to use a website based on it. It's a fallacy to think that the user has to be aware of what the underlying software is in order for that software to catch on.