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Comment by loomio | Hacker News Reader

Something is going on in Spain. You can track the Indignados movement through Occupy and now Podemos. We're seeing a parallel movement in technology there to what's going on in politics with the Podemos movement [0] - decentralised, grassroots, bottom-up. It's deeply exciting to track these digital and cultural trends together and imagine a new paradigm emerging in society.

We make an open source tool for distributed collaboration, and our userbase is now overwhelmingly in Spain. This emerged organically. It seems to be very fertile ground right now for distributed communication and democracy. I would advise anyone making software in this space to get a Spanish version out there and join the wave. I wonder about how it will spread to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world and join up with related tools and movements coming out of South America, like DemocracyOS.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/spain-politics-via-re...

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The push for open source in Spain is often labelled as being about freedom.

Personally, I think it tends to be about money, especially in SMEs.

My friend uses an open source collaboration tool in his office of 20+ people, because even though everyone uses evernote personally, the plan with collaboration features is "too expensive". Might just be an anecdote, but I keep hearing lots of those.

Spain might be great for free software, but I would stay away from it in terms of starting an actual business.

Podemos' offer might be great for some people, but I don't think they will do much to change some of the deeper issues of the Spanish economy. I don't think I will be voting for them.

That's most probably a part of it, but it wouldn't explain why people migrate to GNU Social, because users don't need to pay for twitter.

>That's most probably a part of it, but it wouldn't explain why people migrate to GNU Social

Do they? I don't think the article is accurate to what's happening in any large degree. As another commenter puts it below:

>I call shenanigans. Spaniard here, the story is completely wrong. Most of the 6k registered users on Quitter Spain are inactive and it has nothing to do with Podemos and the indignados movement (they use Twitter actively along with Facebook). Even the user that started this "false migration" (@barbijaputa) is using Twitter and is inactive on Quitter

Cost is also associated with freedom, I don't see how you can think of it in any other way. The cost of software for startups is so significant that it can lead to bankruptcy.

This is my main gripe when people compare Gimp vs Photoshop, or Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, or desktop Linux vs Windows - as that cost is not associated and placed in balance to what people actually need.

I also don't buy that "everyone uses evernote personally". If they do, then those people haven't evaluated their options.

Without the premium account, you have some pretty harsh limits, like a maximum of 60MB/month, or search that sucks, or no mobile app. And the premium version is what? Last time I checked it was $5 / month. Do you know what I also pay $5 per month? Google Apps, but that's only for the privilege of using GMail with my own domain, because otherwise Google Docs and 15 GB of Google Drive are free. And Office 365 is also in that range.

> The cost of software for startups is so significant that it can lead to bankruptcy.

What? Here's the software you listed:

Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Windows, Google Apps, Evernote. All of these added together comes to less than $3000 a year per employee (and I've generously padded pricing and then rounded up).

That's $250 a month per employee. I'd argue that if your startup cannot afford $250 a month per employee in software costs, then the startup is hiring too fast and cannot sustain the number of employees it has.

Maybe in the US, but in poorer countries things are a bit different. And let's not forget that money are scarce in startups unless you have some investors.

$3000/year is a lot of ramen.

I don't think it's an anecdote. If you are funded $ 30M then you can buy "pro" plans to virtually everything. If not, you buy a VPS for $ 15/month and setup everything you need there.

My experience is that its open source or cracked in PYMEs here in Spain (small and medium businesses).

There is no money here compared to N.A. and parts of northern Europe.

Its complicated, different and has way less capital.

This is much more a european-centric movement akin to Siriza in Greece than it is a spanish speaking thing. Southern Europe got hit hard by the recession and southern states were semi-forced into adopting austerity policies by the european union. The success or failure of the new greek governement will probably have a large influence in the fate of Podemos in the next election. In the end, it's about reconfiguring the coalition that governs europe more than it is about anything else. Europe is a quasi federal state where the Senate (i.e. the European Council, representing state governements) has the bulk of the power.

Last I checked, there was an even newer political movement gaining ground in Spain - Ciudadanos:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/podemos...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/13/ciudadanos-pode...

Ciudadanos (aka Ciutadans) it's not «new», it's 10 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_(Spanish_political_pa...

Ciudadanos is just an offspring of the current ruling party (PP) that will probably die like the last offspring did (UPyD).

They want to retain power by creating new parties which (supposedly) repulse corruption.

The «Podemos» movement is losing steam. Other political parties are still worried about them, but the breach they created in the bipartisan politics in Spain has been occupied quickly by other new (yet, more standard) political parties. In the last regional ("autonomic") elections «Podemos» got a good number of votes, but far less than expected, while other more traditional new political parties took a good bite in each election.

Things are changing, but not as dramatically as people expected. Let's see what happens in the general elections.

I happened to work on some of the decentralised computing and networking projects in Barcelona. Guifi.net is the largest community network at the moment that among others lets users share and publish their content including internet access [1]. Last year I worked in Clommunity [2], an effort to build the first large scale community cloud. Guifi.net users can just install the Clommunity distro [3] on top of and use its service discovery and decentralised cloud management tools to contribute and benefit from marginal resources. I think it's a cool idea that we will keep revisiting in the long future...

[1] http://guifi.net/ [2] http://clommunity-project.eu/ [3] http://cloudy.community/

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