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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they disappeared overnight, the world would still turn.
The same is not true for the text editor and compiler.
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.
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.
>>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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
That's not a solution, that's a problem.