Interesting quote, illustrating what is wrong with Gmail, Flickr, and friends:
One day soon, tomorrow’s Richard Stallman will wake up and realize that all the software distributed in the world is free and open source, but that he still has no control to improve or change the computer tools that he relies on every day. They are services backed by collective databases too large (and controlled by their service providers) to be easily modified. Even data portability initiatives such as those starting today merely scratch the surface, because taking your own data out of the pool may let you move it somewhere else, but much of its value depends on its original context, now lost. – Tim O’Reilly ¹
I admit I’m using Gmail for leisure (familty & friends).
#FreeSoftware
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Tim’s an interesting character to be advocating this “total open source” given his past. Well, beyond being an “open source” organizer and groupie, and publisher of dominantly non-free manuals for free (and proprietary software) he has very little credentials in my opinion.
Otherwise, there’s little for the free software movement to disagree with here. Lessig started the free culture movement. O’Reilly wants a “free data” movement. But Tim won’t start it.
I think the reason Tim is unable to pinpoint why “open source” companies don’t “open source” everything else is because he knows intimately why. The evidence is how O’Reilly Media has “open sourced” little to nothing of their core business.
By the way, the next RichardStallman for “free data” society may be a woman...
– AaronHawley 2006-07-26 02:41 UTC