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A comment on Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before. Parent comment

Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by dinkumthinkum on Saturday September 28, 2013 @10:35PM (#6463881)
Isn't it weird to refer to Github or any other company providing a service as "not open source" or "not free" in a libre software sense?

What is the alternative for you all? Charity? I'm being serious.

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Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by andrewaylett on Sunday September 29, 2013 @08:48AM (#6465024)
Take a look at Newsblur: There's a free tier, or you can pay for hosting, but at the end of the day the sources[0] for the software you're using are freely available so if the service fails, or the author makes changes you don't like, or you find yourself needing customisations that aren't appropriate for the author to provide, you can keep using the software by hosting it yourself or finding someone else to host it for you.

[0]: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

You might also find the Franklin Street Statement[1] to be an interesting read -- it tries to set out a useful collection of ideas for services that respect the users' freedoms.

[1]: http://autonomo.us/2008/07/14/franklin-street-statement/

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Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by jjsz on Saturday September 28, 2013 @11:22PM (#6463983)
The alternative is for the whole US to strive for actually being the alternative; the self sufficient decentralized yet United States. If Germany, Singapore, China and Japan provided alternatives, while we continue to hold on to old ways, like: not investing as much into energy efficiency, or thinking outside the box like Germany -> we will lose to white labeled and foreign hosted OSS. To solve this we would need a social market economy [0] or at least a mandate to tax for fractionally financed civic OSS, open hardware (self sufficient micro servers), data, and R&D.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy

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Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by dinkumthinkum on Sunday September 29, 2013 @12:55AM (#6464173)
I'm really struggling to understand what this means ... It doesn't makes sense. Can you help?

This thing you are talking about United States and this and that ... It is some kind of alternative to Github or hosted services?

I don't know if it makes sense ... Oh wait how would these governments get money to support all charity?

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Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by jjsz on Sunday September 29, 2013 @01:14AM (#6464205)
I knew I went too off topic...What I mean by Singapore is the mandated efficient renewable buildings, Germany: it's social market economy and how they are paying people for energy, China: it's investment in renewable energy, Japan: the same. The alternative of a centralized structure is a decentralized or hybrid one. The equipment for what I suggested in other terms would have to be treated as a public good, taxed by the services it provides or as a government subsidized one. Which as an efficient microserver: communication, entertainment, and the option to subscribe to private services. The ideology here is getting the most people to use a box by paying for them to maintain it. The box just happens to be energy efficient to the point where one can exchange selling their excess electricity or storage for private services / nodes / other microservers. Another form of continuing this route is to be able to use energy, storage, or cpu / gpu as a currency or collateral. Also if one decides to give up control of their servers for hosting, or scientific research one can. It's this idea we're trying to evangelize at r/Nucleus.

I believe freeing software will eventually free the regulation on transactions, energy, and communications. Something like a government subsidized team that controls a vagrant-mesos-docker for connecting CJDNS nodes (the SaaSS). Time Warner cable and all of these other companies who don't run OSS are stopping the digital divide and prohibiting peer communications. WebRTC and websockets are enough!

The topic should be on why BSD software is more important right now than GPL. Since we're talking about freedom.

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Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by roel_v on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:40AM (#6464667)
Don't bother making sense of extremist blabbering. I used to try to reason with religious fanatics, people who believed in homeopathics or quackery like ear candles, socialists, etc., on the basis of 'everybody has their right to an opinion' and 'it might be true'. And those two are still true, but the right answer to those two assumptions is 'yes but not all of them are equal', and 'the onus of proof is on those with prima facie extraordinary claims'.

Don't get sucked into arguing on a rational basis with people whose sole method of conviction is appeal to emotion and looking profound through obscurity.

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Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by jjsz on Sunday September 29, 2013 @08:47AM (#6465022)
I'm here to disprove my convictions and find the correct answers if something is not possible. Not to boost my ego. You could have easily said don't waste your time: he doesn't know 100% what he's talking about.
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Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by cscurmudgeon on Sunday September 29, 2013 @09:51AM (#6465172)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AGPL_web_applications

I am not saying Github should distribute their source, but Github and their fans should stop the "holier than thou" attitude.

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