Man Tries to Live an Open Source Life for a Year
shareable.net
shareable.net
Users are already free to modify their shoes. And even if you had a video showing how the shoes were made, that isn't enough to replicate the shoes unless you have the machinery and dexterity to make shoes.
He also claims he wants to be open source in "how I get around." What would it mean for walking to be open source or closed source? Is it "open source" to ride a bus?
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/johanna_blakley_lessons_fro...
Tangentially related, but despite the article's definition of open source: "It's definitely not just software", it's a peeve of mine nonetheless to hear the term "open source" applied in non-software/programming contexts. Especially with some of the examples you've pointed out:
> He also claims he wants to be open source in "how I get around." What would it mean for walking to be open source or closed source? Is it "open source" to ride a bus?
Not sure if I'm alone on this.
If an architect released a set of standard building plans under an open license, would that not be legitimately "open source"?
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Macbook.
More like "I used linux for a year"
I'm pretty baffled by his mention of copyright here. The linux kernel is 'open source' by most people's standards yet the copyrights are held by thousands of people. Living a modern life with only open source products is very doable, living with only products which have no copyright would be almost impossible
Unless we want to go really old school, before copyrights were filed. But "traditional" may not take that long to apply, I guess?
Or whatever else.
Thinking about hosting a discussion about this. Seems like there's a lot of knowledge out there. Any interest?
Or maybe there is already a forum for this. Pointers welcome.
How about patents? Trademarks?
The build requirements and procedures are openly documented on the Internet. GL;HF!
Even as a Linux user, I doubt I could ever go completely FOSS. (Or that I would ever want to.)
I'm extremely happy with Parabola GNU/Linux (one of the FSF endorsed distros), both as an OS, and as a community.
[1] It was for the iwl3495, and it was actually the only blob on my system--I was manually patching a Linux-libre kernel to re-add that one blob.
Intels integrated gpu driver is also really good, to the point where you can play ~5 year old games on it just fine with a high end chip.
I wonder how you would pull off OSS hard drive / ram / mobo / psu / etc. It would require that the design schematics and documentation are public. I assume many of them are, but some might not be, and it would be a pain to investigate open hardware.
More specificly, the Lemote Yeelong, which is not only made in China (like most hardware I guess), but also designed there.
It's neat enough if you can find one, with actually a pretty decent keyboard (for a netbook; rms uses a seperate keyboard with his).
While there are abuses in the worlds of business and government today that might (might) have been prevented if we had insisted on open code and/or open data all along, I am reasonably confident that the various power imbalances as we learn to cope with things like the Internet will have been corrected long before 2032. I don't know what the technological, social and political landscapes will look like by then, but if I were a betting man I'd go with something much more open in most respects than we have today but with a renewed emphasis on personal privacy when it matters.
If you want fully open browsing you can always use IceWeazel:
As for regressing 20 years, how often are you able to pick up an incoming call right away? Your phone is 90% of the time a mini Internet tablet, not a portable version of a land-line phone.
The privacy issue isn't just theoretical. There is a blacklist of more than 3000 activist construction workers maintained by police and UK companies. Could the people on that blacklist have kept themselves under the radar by paying closer attention to communications privacy?
Your phone might be. Mine isn't.
The privacy issue isn't just theoretical.
No, I agree, it's not. In fact, I'm an active campaigner for privacy in various ways, and I don't share my life with on-line social networks for privacy reasons.
However, it's easy to get into a black-and-white mindset that values only complete privacy and assumes no value at all otherwise, which I don't think is helpful. Of all the ways someone could technically spy on me if they had the resources to do it, monitoring the location of my mobile phones is unlikely to be what causes me problems.
We are in an interesting and potentially dangerous time at the moment, because it's been too long since a mass of people all suffered due to a major invasion of their privacy. It is easy to dismiss the creeping invasions we see with things like CCTV, monitoring of the Internet and telecomms services, and social networking sites asking for ever more personal information, when these aren't yet causing serious consequences to most people. And of course, people often give up that information voluntarily because it benefits them in some way that they value more than any perceived intrusion. Privacy isn't about withholding data entirely, it's about controlling who know what and how they can use that information.
I think the pendulum will swing back in a few years, though things will get worse before they start to get better. As people start to find that they really can't get jobs because of some minor indiscretion, or that their credit rating is damaged, or that they simply can't get complete health insurance because they know too many people at a high risk of some lifestyle-related condition, social norms recognising the importance of privacy and the political climate that follows will rein in the likes of Facebook and Google. All that convenience won't look quite so cost-free any more. I also don't see the kind of abuses we see by governments, for example the excessively personal searches at places like airports, continuing indefinitely. These measures are unpleasant, and no matter how much the airlines/governments stick their heads in the sand publicly, the fact is that it puts some people off flying and that costs those airlines/governments some of their profits/taxes.
At the rate things are going -- even 10 years ago, Google were the new kid on the block and Facebook didn't even exist yet -- I don't think it will take 20 years for this to happen. The abuses (and resulting concerns) are already starting, and we're already starting to see savvy politicians try to get ahead of the curve on things like blocking employers from demanding to see their employees'/applicants' private social network content. The security theatre and government intrusion is getting tiresome, and ever more expensive at a time when the global economy isn't exactly doing well.
In short, I think far more powerful social pressures than open source software are going to be what preserves useful privacy and establishes new social norms for what is and isn't acceptable behaviour in the era of the Internet and big data mining. Open source may provide a valuable tool for audit purposes and watching the watchers to keep them honest, but it's only one tool in the box.