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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

There are three things I want to do with PC technology: store stuff, run programs (which may mean consuming the things I've stored), and stay connected with friends.

None of these should be dependent on location, hardware, or my personal affiliations. Geesh, it's almost 2013 folks. I should be able to walk up to a panel at a store, have it recognize me, and have all of my stuff available. Do whatever I would do at home using my PC if I like. Walk away from the panel and it resets. There's no clue or trail that I was even there.

We keep trying to use these metaphors about how the internet should work. It's a walled garden. It's a bazzar. It's a type of newspaper subscription. It's a club for friends. Each metaphor works okay -- for a while. But then the people making money off the metaphor start trying to make sure that we never grow past their little idea of happiness.

The tech community is smarter than this. Location-free, hardware-free, non-walled technology is the goal. Let's start going there.

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The tech community is cleverer than this yes, but the consumers aren't and businesses still will use any tactic possible to milk their accumulated crop of consumers dry and protect them from other wolves.

Better start listening to stallman if you want all that (I certainly do).

Better start listening to stallman if you want all that

Why? Stallman has written some software and posited some interesting ideas, but his philosophical bent lacks any kind of holistic approach to problem solving in the real world.

When Stallman tries to extend his ideas to larger contexts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd), he fails because he's not a big picture guy. He's a laser-focused ideologue.

If you want that Star Trekky future, you're better off listening to the words of those who built business models (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Walt Disney, etc.), not operating system libraries and software licenses.

I think you missed his point, and mine.

His solution is simply that the real world is broken and needs fixing, which it sorely does.

If you want that Star Trekky future, throw the corporations out who want to partition everyone into markets like cattle. Then build stuff for the good of humanity, not for cash. Oh wait - there's GNU already in that space.

Jobs, Bezos, Disney just worked out how to sell shit, not respect our freedoms or improve the world.

That is a tricky issue and comes down to financing riskier innovation. It is worth remembering that GNU originally existed as a way to clone a non free system in a way that made it free.

A lot of open source development is also done or funded by corporations to help build commoditize the parts they need in order to create platforms for software and media that are in many cases fairly walled garden.

Stallman and the like may have produced fine C compilers and text editors but it would seem unlikely for them to come up with something like the iPhone.

I think you overestimate the importance of the smartphone. A free smartphone is still tied to a non free network and to be honest, isn't required for humanity to function. It's an accessory, not a necessity.

If they disappeared overnight, the world would still turn.

The same is not true for the text editor and compiler.

The same could be said about most pieces of technology. If emacs disappeared tomorrow the HN server would probably be crushed under the weight of angsty developers but stuff would still keep happening. It's not like GNU developed the first C compiler or text editor either, Stallman seems to believe the priority should be on developing free alternatives to things that have already been made (i.e the risk taken) by a proprietary company.

This is reflected in the FSF "high priority" list:

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

If you want a Star Trek future you need to develop all the little pieces of technology that are required incrementally.

>A free smartphone is still tied to a non free network

You know what else is a non-free network? The entire internet.

Clearly humanity would still turn if computers didn't exist at all, but I would argue that the internet has been directly responsible for more social change than the text editor and the compiler. If you want to trivially argue that the text editor and compiler are prerequisites for the internet, then I would point out that James Maxwell should deserve far more credit than either Steve Jobs or Richard Stallman.

>The same is not true for the text editor and compiler.

Now I know you're joking.

Given that the internet is dependent on the text editor and the compiler, you can't separate them like that.

Sure you can. In fact, I preemptively responded to that argument in my post.

>>If you want to trivially argue that the text editor and compiler are prerequisites for the internet, then I would point out that James Maxwell should deserve far more credit than either Steve Jobs or Richard Stallman.

More importantly, I don't think that's what meaty was saying, since that statement is so trivial that it's meaningless. C'mon, give him a little credit!

I don't think it's that trivial an argument - firmware is being constantly modified to help the internet expand and secure itself, and software is in the same boat; the same cannot be said of Maxwell's work. While Maxwell was foundational, it's hardly in the state of flux that code is in.

"Stallman and the like may have produced fine C compilers and text editors but it would seem unlikely for them to come up with something like the iPhone."

Actually they did, it was called 'Openmoko' and it was released before the iPhone (albeit there wasn't much between the two). It wasn't just an open source smart phone OS, but also open hardware as well.

Sadly it never took off: partly because iOS (and later, Android) were busy reshaping the mobile landscape; and partly because corporations started adopting Linux for mobile OSs which dragged many of the hacker crowd away from independent set ups.

As to whether Openmoko would have succeeded if it was conceived a couple of years earlier; or whether it such a project was too ambitious without corporate backing, i don't know. But for a while there was an a community driven smart phone available to buy.

I googled that and one of the first results was "OpenMoko Train Wreck", a video showing how clunky the phone was and how poor the UI is (teeny tiny software keyboard etc).

Looked more like a replacement to early versions of Windows mobile.

I suppose the question is why is this, is it just that the folks who are driven to open source development don't have a sense for aesthetics and convenient UIs?

Yes this is true, but to be 100% honest, it wasn't finished. If you remember very early Android prototypes, they were in about the same place.

It's a matter of resources. It was a very ambitious project, and they didn't have the funding behind it that Apple and Google do.

> I suppose the question is why is this, is it just that the folks who are driven to open source development don't have a sense for aesthetics and convenient UIs?

No. They do have a sense of aesthetics and convenient UIs. Ubuntu is an example. Open Source follows the trial-and-error iterative approach. If the project has enough momentum, the end is bound to be near-perfect, having gone through so many iterations and decisions by the users itself.

However, the problem with Open Source + Hardware is that hardware is too slow and unnatural for iterative development.

While that's true, you have to bare in mind that the project barely made it past alpha stage and was anything but stable. So it's not really fair to compare OpenMoko to the matured interfaces we enjoy today.

Plus if you look at how long the iPhone was in development and compare that against the development time of OpenMoko, then I think you'll agree that what they achieved was impressive project given the lack of resources they had compared to businesses such as Apple and Google.

"Looked more like a replacement to early versions of Windows mobile."

Given that we're talking pre-iOS and Android, it's not really all that surprising. Back then, most smart phone OSs were pretty crap. Regardless of whether you believe that Apple innovated the mobile industry, there was a huge leap forward in OS design around then; and Openmoko pre-dates that leap.

That's sort of my point in that the "disruptive" products that really move the needle in terms of expectations seem to be produced as proprietary products first.

This means they get hype and first mover advantage which in turn means they get a chance to tie up the best deals for content etc and get lock-in.

Things often work out that way, but there are exceptions. For example Firefox raised expectations of what a good browser can be like. But then I guess you could argue that Firefox has enjoyed large contributions from Google and thus isn't a true community project either. So I'm not really sure where to draw the line.

However I don't want to sound argumentative as you do make a valid point there. It just wasn't clear from your earlier iPhone comparison that you were talking about disruptive products specifically (or perhaps I misread your post to mean that community-lead smart phones could never exist?). Either way, I think we essentially agree here :)

>given the lack of resources they had compared to businesses such as Apple and Google.

I think this is exactly the kind of issue that crusso was speaking to. Richard Stallman et. al. don't have a realistic solution to this problem. "Just work for free" isn't realistic. "Just get paid by IBM" sounds good until you realize that you're essentially on IBM's IT staff and they happen to open source their tools. They're not producing the products that get ordinary people off the couch and opening their wallet. The closest they'll get is producing a single technical ingredient that someone else will use to make such a product.

Currently , there's some open source research into neglected diseases. This is certainly a high risk project. I hope it succeeds.

I could imagine open source would work well for non-profits, some of them doing high risk projects(like the green revolution, or gates's work). It's also possible it would work well for university research(maybe with some change of universities operation models).

Open source is relatively new. Maybe it will take time to see what kind of high risk projects it's good for.

Well, one could argue that they improved the world in certain focused ways. For example, Amazon and Apple have raised the bar in online sales, delivery logistics, smartphones, tablets, and personal computers.

This doesn't absolve them from the fact that some of their revolution has taken place behind a paywall. But to say that they haven't improved the world because it didn't happen perfectly, is not quite correct.

My life - and that of many of my peers - is substantially better due to the actions of Amazon and Apple.

"is substantially better"

That's ... not the normal definition of "substantial".

Your life is materially more convenient, probably much much more so. The argument here is that the small and widely distributed negatives inherent in that model affect social things that are literally "substantial" and the gain in individual convenience is a poor tradeoff.

All I mean that I can point to several specific ways in which my life is improved ("materially more convenient", if you prefer) because of the actions of these companies.

I'm not sure what specifically you mean by "small and widely distributed negatives", but the balance of convenience against cost is something that each customer decides. If being a customer of Apple, Amazon (or whoever) is perceived as a net benefit, people become a customer. If not, then they don't.

But the argument was that they "improved the world", not that they were a good cost/benefit tradeoff for each individual consumer.

One of those has to take negative externalities (aka social/legal consequences or the "small and widely distributed negatives" I was referring to) and the other does not.

You don't get a "star trek future" by trading freedom for micro-improvements in convenience.

my life, and that of many of my peers, is substantially better due to the actions of stallman and torvalds.

Agreed - me too!

You're apparently not keeping up with the times, Stallman is imminently practical and realistic:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/richard-stallman-softwa...

There's also the whole GPL, one of, if not the, most widely used software licenses in the world.

> His solution is simply that the real world is broken and needs fixing, which it sorely does.

That's not a solution, that's a problem.

Long after Steve Jobs is relegated to the dustbin of Past Industrialists and Apple has regressed to the mean, Stallmans work will still be moving both technology and our society forward in ways that are meaningful and positive.

Sorry, but that is utter bullshit. Somehow Stallman's importance is somewhere in foggy future with a lot of handwaving and FUD. The real relevance of his ideas is already in the past. I won't be surprised a bit if at the time you are talking about most OSS will be under MIT/BSD type licenses not GPL.

Strong disagree. GPL licensed software is powering an ever increasing fraction of all devices. Far more than I would have ever believed in only a decade ago.

There are some interesting network effects at work here. Th e more GPL'd software there is out there the bigger the chunk you have to write yourself (or pay someone to write) would have to be if you want to forego it.

Hence Linksys and Android.

Those would have never gotten as far as they did without the GPL's software underneath their externally visible features as a foundation to build on.

Linux on the desktop may never happen, but linux in your pocket is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point.

Internet killed GPL. AGPL tried to win the Inernet, and the corporations dodged it.

The internet killed the GPL? Tell that to my home servers.

Most of the internet runs on a kernel that is GPL'd.

Android could have based itself on a BSD, or even xnu, and done just fine.

Android is an interesting example. Google did use a linux kernel but threw out everything GPL they possibly could above that, to the point of writing their own libc. So I wouldn't really call it an example of GPL winning. It's equally an example of how it was necessary to throw away piles of code because it was GPL's and couldn't be used in commercially compatible way.

The GPL was never intended to eliminate NIH Syndrome.

Digital rights/freedoms is becoming more of an issue not less. That makes Stallman more relevant every day.

"The dustbin of Past Industrialists" includes Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, R.J. Reynolds, Eli Whitney, and a fair number of others who are in our history books, whose names have entered the common vernacular, or both. I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, but it's still a serious question: is the reason we don't hear about the Stallmans of their eras in similar fashions because there simply weren't any, or because as it turns out, it's not the successful industrialists who end up in the dustbin, historically speaking?

I don't mean to downplay Stallman's contributions, and as maddening as I frequently find him I think he makes some very important points. The software world needs people like him. But I honestly think anyone who imagines that Stallman is going to be a household name in 70 years while Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will be forgotten is engaging in a hell of a lot of wishful thinking. I do hope Stallman is remembered then (and ideally favorably), but Jobs and Gates undoubtedly will be.

(As an aside, I think it's somewhat interesting that Jobs is the current decade's boogeyman, while Gates was the last decade's. Maybe this is because they're both deserving of it, but I suspect it has a whole lot more to do with "tall poppy syndrome" than we care to admit.)

I think Diesel might be a bit more along the lines of Stallman, than Ford.

IIRC he wanted to make sure the Diesel engine remained an open design -- a design that was made to use biofuel -- for the betterment of mankind, basically.

Then someone threw him in the English channel (or so it would seem), and we got gasoline engines.

If you want a Star Trek future, the last people you should be listening to are Jobs or Disney: http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of...

>as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society.

Wow, that's frustrating. It's not communist, it's post scarcity! Why on earth would we still have capitalism (i.e. a system for allocating finite resources) when resources are unlimited? Once you can have anything you can imagine by walking up to a machine and telling it what you want, what would you be buying with money?

Communism, in contrast, is a different approach to dealing with finite resources. That is, if all resources were infinite we wouldn't need communism either.

Otherwise the article looks good, but I suspect if we really arrived at post scarcity and all that was forcing us to slog into the office was IP, there would be a revolution in short order.

what would you be buying with money?

Services. Goods aren't the only resource one pays for. Peoples time and energy will still be scares.

Services can be exchanged without money and interchangeably between goods as well.

I do this regularly. I rebuilt someone's Windows machine the other day in exchange for the fruit trees in my garden being pruned.

That's not post-scarcity. That is inefficiency. And it is still capitalism. Money is a bookkeeping system for IOUs, not an economic operating structure.

It's a barter/trade system, not capitalism.

Capitalism is primarily about generating profit, and there's no profit without money.

It all went downhill after the Enclosure Acts.

Even under barter and trade, there is profit. To go with the GP's example, one persona valued having his trees pruned more than he valued the time he spent upgrading the computer, and vice versa. Both parties profited and ended up better off or else they wouldn't have made the trade.

The lack of money involved just makes it potentially less efficient if the trade isn't well balanced, or potentially more efficient if they can avoid the friction of the taxman by avoiding money.

This works only if the two nodes in the network have exact matching needs/abilities. This is rare even in small groups.

If you will, money is a message is a message passing protocol. I don't care what's on the other side and how the message (money) was generated - all I care is that I received a message (money) and then I sent other messages (money) to other actors in the network (obviously I sent back something in exchange and so do the other nodes). Then they generated their messages and so on. This way all I need to know are the nodes immediate to me to work it out. I don't care how complex the message graph becomes, it's all irrelevant to me and to others as well. If you don't have that then you have to broadcast all that you offer and all that you need and somehow create the graph to work it out all out. Money is a cheap way of abstracting all that.

What services? Services are generally things people want done but don't want to or can't do themselves. In a star trek world I would expect these things that are still relevant (e.g. tax support services and the like obviously wouldn't exist anymore) would be handled by robots, which themselves are made by the replicators.

There would still be things to do of course. But they would be things that people want to do and wouldn't need to charge for since they no longer have rent or food/utility bills to pay.

People who want to join and can qualify for Starfleet Academy (and less whimsical occupations) will be in relatively short supply.

What about entertainment?

Right now, if we look at just music, there are some people in music because they love it and it's their life. There are many more people who are there because if they make it they'll have insane amounts of money. But pretty much no one can do it for free because everyone has to buy food.

If there were no more money and no more bartering, only the first group would stay in music and they wouldn't need to be paid for it because they wouldn't need money.

I expect things like real TV would go away because that kind of stuff is mostly to push advertisement and without money what would you be advertising?

Why on earth would we still have capitalism (i.e. a system for allocating finite resources) when resources are unlimited?

The same damn reason we still have capitalism now, when industrial productivity keeps rising to all-time highs each year! Because some people view human life as a competition for hierarchical rank, and believe so strongly in that vision that they impose it on the rest of us.

marshall brain's "manna: two visions of humanity's future" does a good job of exploring this problem.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Wow that was really interesting!

Except for being one of the worst-written pieces of science fiction I've ever read in my life, yes. And by "worst-written", I mean that even its so-called "utopia" is in fact a totalitarian state.

oh it has no real literary qualities - it might as well have been written as a counter-factual world history piece. But the idea it contains is interesting. Unrealistic (given current tech), but interesting.

Startrek has huge resources, but not infinite. We (in western Europe and north America) reached a point of sufficient resources around 1970. Yet we still have homeless starving on our streets while the 1% who own 90% of the resources cruise around in their super yachts. If we continue this broken system then by the 24th century a typical 1%er might own 30 planets, a fleet of starships and a dilithium crystal mine, but I don't see why he would be anymore willing to share this hoarded wealth with the rest of humanity than the 1%ers of today are.

Indeed, the political resistance to welfare systems in the USA has always saddened me. It seems to me that at a certain point, a post-industrial first-world country has exactly two ways to continue its ascendance and raise the quality of life for its citizens: You can expand in an imperialist fashion (see: Britain in the 19th century, USA in the early 20th century, Germany in the late 1930's in dramatic fashion). Or you can become a welfare state (see: Germany post-WWII, Sweden, France).

The USA has a cultural heritage of expansionism. In the 1850's, losing everything was no biggie, you just moved to California and started digging. In the 1940's, losing everything was no biggie, you just joined the army and shipped out for the Philippines. But by the 1960's when imperialism more or less became untenable (see: the entirety of Africa), there were no more safety nets. America continued in its headstrong belief that no man needs charity, that hard work will provide opportunities for anyone who looks.

The rich always want to be richer. There's two things to do when a first-world country exhausts its own easily-exploitable resources: acquire more resources by force, or redistribute wealth. Otherwise the rich will exploit the only remaining source of wealth which is a country's middle-class.

30 planets and only one dilithium mine? I'd be having a stern talk with the procurement agent over that!

This seems way off topic but too fun not to discuss

Even in a world with replicators someone gets the penthouse, someone else gets the first floor. Someone gets the 1br apartment in Detroit. Someone else gets the beachfront mansion.

That's just one example of the things a replicator will not make less scarce.

Another is people's time. Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces.

> Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces.

Why would you like to make a next CoD? Because you think it's fun and many people would enjoy it. You know they want it. There are likely to be more than 200 talented people wanting to take part in making this game. For fun, because they like the idea, they want the game to be made.

In post-scarcity society you and others won't have much extrinsic motivators; the intrinsic ones would run the society.

> I suspect if we really arrived at post scarcity and all that was forcing us to slog into the office was IP, there would be a revolution in short order

Post-scarcity doesn't happen all at once, it happens to different resources at different times.

There are a huge number of us slogging into the office for IP as well as the challenge of erecting artificial barriers in front of newly non-scarce resources in order to extract profit by imposing artificial scarcity on them.

So I have my doubts that the revolution would arrive in "short order" although I'm optimistic enough to believe it would arrive sooner or later.

>Once you can have anything you can imagine by walking up to a machine and telling it what you want, what would you be buying with money?

Anything? I can have anything I want? My own personal Tal Mahal? One for all my friends? How about a full-size replica of Jupiter? Oh, and I's really love a Dyson sphere for Christmas.

Our current capabilities are immensely greater than anything dreamed up during neolithic times, but we're still unsatisfied. There is no reason to believe that further technological progress will change that condition.

These are some pretty silly examples. What would you do with another Jupiter? Do you really think that 100 years from now the 1% will be devoting all their resources to buying their own Jupiter?

There are still lots of reasons we need capitalism. As long as humanity has to clean toilets and take out the trash there will be people who will be willing to pay to not have to do that. But at some point we will have illuminated every single one of those tasks. At that point the gain we get from the rat race vs what it costs us will flip and people will be ready to trash the system. We're not there by a long shot even if people from centuries ago would have thought we are. I'm not saying this will happen in my lifetime or the lifetime of my great grand kids. But I'm confident it will happen eventually.

open source is a co-operation model. Historically new and sucsessfull cooperation models(democracy, capitalism , scientific method) had a larger effect than new products and services.

One interesting example is the industrial revolution: some claim that the technical innovations at that time are the result of England becoming a capitalist state based on competition(starting with land owners encouraging competition between farmers on productivity).

Will stallman succeed ? I don't know. But i wonder if the option he opened of extremely open source software has made companies more receptive to various kinds of open source licenses and business models that led to the large open source ecosystem we have today.

How is capitalism a cooperation model? How is Democracy, for that matter?

Capitalism is built on cooperation - its foundation is mutually beneficial trades.

Not to split hairs, but that would be "free markets".

Free markets are neither necessary nor sufficient condition for capitalism. Compare the US in its heyday vs. the present day "state capitalism" in Europe and China.

Democracy - The ability to vote peridically and demonstrate , the constitution are all various institutions that give power to citizens to influence the decisions of the ruler.

Capitalism - a combination of cooperation and competition by companies to achieve goals many consumers cooperate on getting(by paying). BTW when a few companies compete on the same goal , it's also a kind of cooperation.

Funny you should use those companies as examples of RMS's disconnection from "problem solving in the real world," since Apple's resurgence over the past 10 years is directly attributable to their adoption of BSD Unix as the basis for OSX, and Amazon's (and Pixar's) tech stack has been highly dependent (dependent) on Linux and Perl (Python in Pixar's case) over the years. All of these technologies owe all or most of their existence (existence) to the efforts of RMS, full-stop.

Apple and Disney are two of the most egregious campaigning against freedom via patent and copyright law. It's not going to be a Star Trek-like future when you are only allowed to sell ships without rounded rectangle displays and only allowed to use warp drive software from the single distributor.

Even Stallman wants you to live in an ecosystem, it's just his vision of an ecosystem.

Stallman's vision of an ecosystem is one in which you're not locked in by your data, since it's all in open formats and under your control. That makes his ideology very easy to get along with.

easy for us; not so easy for people aligned with the "lock your customers in as a revenue stream" model.

"tech community is cleverer than this yes, but the consumers aren't "

I think consumers "can" be smarter. Given a chance. Right now they (we) are inundated with marketing. It's everywhere. So much so, that's hard to make an informed decision (this is especially true in politics).

Corporations (and many politicians) aren't interested in "truth". They're interested in making the sale. And the best way to do that is emphasized the good of the product and ignore the bad.

Every "product" in the world does this. From Coke to a credit cards.

I should be able to walk up to a panel at a store, have it recognize me, and have all of my stuff available. Do whatever I would do at home using my PC if I like. Walk away from the panel and it resets. There's no clue or trail that I was even there.

How is it supposed to recognize you, but then have no clue or trail that you were even there?

The tech community is smarter than this. Location-free, hardware-free, non-walled technology is the goal. Let's start going there.

And who's going to pay for the platform to do all of that?

How do you keep the weeds out of your garden? Simple, build a wall. There is a reason walled gardens work.

Like a Linux LiveCD when you sign into Chrome. You authenticate, but when you close the session everything is gone and its back to default.

But that's google's garden. What is stopping them from getting bored of reading penis enhancement spam and shuttering gmail or reader?

I said "like this" not "exactly this". Just a demonstration of how it could work.

That's called wishful thinking.

Which is what the parent was engaging in. The next guy then asked how it would work. I gave an example of how it could work. I'm not sure what the disagreement is here.

Your example is what I called wishful thinking. You haven't explained how it could work without authenticating to somebody's walled garden.

The original idea of some magical screen you walk up to with all of these abilities and none of the limitations of walled gardens is also wishful thinking; however it doesn't go so far as to claim it's an example of how to accomplish this.

Your imagination can't extend my example to something more private? You can't envision an NFC-based OpenID authentication connecting to your private server containing the information you wish to bring up on the screen? You can't imagine a Diaspora-style open source kiosk? You can't imagine even bringing up Chrome in Incognito Mode and feeding it data from your personal KeePass?

I was using an example I figured everyone around here would be familiar enough with to extrapolate the possibilities. If it actually existed, we wouldn't be wishing for it to happen. The whole point is that it's *not" "magical", it's completely possible, yet it doesn't actually exist.

Sure, I can envision that. But that's not what the original idea was. It was a box which recognized you (presumably via some form of computer vision). How could such a device work without having a database to match against people's identities?

Your NFC idea is a lot more plausible than the original idea.

I had read the original post as being open to the authentication method of choice. What you describe is certainly one authentication method (inherence, aka what you are or do). Most common is knowledge, aka a password or unique URL. NFC would be ownership, or what you have. Two of these would allow you to keep your own database. I guess the confusion came from our different interpretations of what the original poster meant by "recognize". I linked recognition with authentication, of which there are three methods to be used, and picked the most likely in my mind. I'm knee deep in authentication principles most of the day.

Sorry if I came off as hostile, it was a miscommunication.

>Sorry if I came off as hostile, it was a miscommunication.

Story of the internet, really. I get down-voted a lot on Reddit because people confuse my directness for hostility. I've tried couching my arguments with a more passive voice but sometimes it becomes too much of a hassle.

While nothing is stopping them, Google provides ways to dump the contents of your feeds and mailbox locally so you can add them to some other email / rss client if you want. That is a lot better than what some of the higher up posts are getting at, which is platform lock-in

  > There is a reason walled gardens work.

Amazing, how often this is forgotten. And way to often the attitude on HN is similar to that in Orwell's farm: "four legs are good, two legs are bad". Walled garden? Bad. Open? Good. The truth however is that goodness or badness is not defined by this.

> How do you keep the weeds out of your garden?

In real life, you pull the weeds or specifically target them with pesticide. A wall is too granular of a filter to keep weeds out.

In software, the most successful filters -- such as e-mail spam filters --- specifically target malfeasors. A "wall" type of solution to e-mail would instead only trust e-mails from specific domains or recast the problem as "Facebook messages", eliminating interoperability.

Walls don't exist to keep out weeds, they exist to keep out neighbors or poachers -- aka, competitors.

That last sentence was hilarious. Weed seeds are in almost all soil. They arrive there on the wind. What constitutes a "weed" is that it's a plant that's not desired in a specific location. What is, and is not, a weed, is entirely contextual.

The reason for walling a garden is to create a microclimate that protects the garden from the wind. It's like a greenhouse. It's protection for species that would otherwise not survive in the area.

The way to get non-walled technology is government intervention. That's how the internet was invented. Then, as it was deployed and commercialized, it "won out" because it was open, while services like AOL, Delphi, GEnie, Prodigy, Apple's eWorld, CompuServe, and MSN were closed, walled garden online services.

You can't write out that coherent of an argument and expect any free market ideologues to answer you.

Cognitive dissonance is painful!

The only problem with your scenario is malware. That's not insurmountable, but people have spent so long concentrating on building the walls that the reasonable vision you present will probably never happen.

I agree that's a great shame.

I'm not sure I agree.

I definitely agree with the latter part about broken metaphors. I'm just not sure how well that agrees with the first part.

In my opinion, the broken metaphor that the blog is being chaffed by most is the metaphor of "owning content." We've never owned "content" before. Not as consumers. Labels & licensing companies owned "content" or "rights" or somesuch. Consumers owned records, books or video tapes.

When you own a video tape the rules are dictated (or at least suggested) by reality. You can watch it as often as you want. If you (and your equipment) take care of it, it will last a long time. You can loan it, you can sell it , you can give it away.

These days, "owning a song" is a metaphor. A broken one. These "ecosystems" are largely systems for maintaining this metaphor.

I have hope that most of the problems with roots in realities (eg controlling your Apple TV with an android phone) will be dulled over time. The ugly problems being caused by broken metaphors trying to simulate the past when we owned CDs will have ugly solutions.

The tech community is smart enough to know that removing your ability to do these things in order to improve user retention is a net win. Because most users might complain but will still use it anyway as long as your marketing is good.

You don't want a smarter tech community, you want a more altruistic or socially conscious tech community. I completely agree but ... HN is not a place where that message is well received in general.

Any sophisticated large-population demographic is going to require some form of governance, and a subset of that demographic will resent being governed.

Just being able to walk up to that panel will require rules regarding business zoning, construction codes, traffic organization and enforcement, etc.

Once you've arrived at the panel, there's all the standardization and regulation and coordination and infrastructure just to identify the face as you, securely transfer your data, standardized operating system to run on, etc. Much of what you do leaves traces - to your desirable benefit.

Anarchy is not conducive to sophisticated lifestyle.

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