-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 On 12/05/2014 11:46 AM, Aurélien DESBRIÈRES wrote: > > Works for money have a cost, this cost is true freedom. > *** Work without money has a cost, this cost is true freedom.
We live in a world where approval economy is not working so well. People have to pay for their rent, their food, their taxes, transportation, and all kinds of trade economy stuff that really makes a huge hole in the realization of software freedom and a fair society. The GNU project is starting a donations campaign with the objective of gathering half-a-million dollars. Do you know why? Because money is needed to do a lot of things in our society. So yes, working *for* money is shit, but we're not talking about that here. Instead, the proposal is to enable core people to spend 100% of their time on Parabola, which they're already doing, and which they've been doing by personal election. The alternative is that they have to work on other things because that is not sustainable. Sustainability of free software has always been a hard issue, and the only successful methods found so far have been to abandon independence and get funding from corporate or government sources. Look at successful free software projects and find one that does not accept money from such sources. Sometimes it does not even involve abandoning anything. The GNU project receives support from Google via the Summer of Code, but still is able to criticize the corporation's vigilance. There's no conflict of interest there: Google knows the value of free software, it's built on it. Getting money from Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft would be another issue, but not because the money is "dirty": such sources would necessarily require visibility, and their ethics are opposite to the GNU project's. Consider the Tor project: they get military funding. Many criticize Tor for being funding by the same people who create havoc around the world. I say: the money that goes into Tor does not go into bombs. Accepting money is not bad per se. Failing to allocate money fairly and transparently, and treating money as the objective rather than the mean, are. Leaving a solidarity perspective behind and entering a trading mindset is. For example, considering the issue of fairness: "Why A is being paid more than me?" won't happen if you consider a complex of factors. If I have a paid job, my need for (extra) money is much less than if I don't have a job. On the other hand, my available time is much reduced as well. Living in Europe in more costly than living in South America, but relative income in South America is much lower, etc. There are many factors that can be considered. Note that one of the important factors about fairness and free software relates to the role: it is intuitively normal to consider the highest valued contributor to be a developer. Then, an UX designer, a marketer, or an user are not considered valuable, and that leads to a technical elite of so-called meritocracy that leaves projects without blood because they fail to see free software as more than open source: who cares how brilliant is your code if it doesn't help build community and solidarity across society? I understand a lot all those issues, for having spent countless years believing in the evil of money with regard to software freedom and the resistance. But I was wrong. Software freedom needs money, not loads of it, but enough to not have to think about it. Maybe there's a way to invent here. For example, gather $200,000 and buy a big house in a cheap country and move a group of people there to take care of each other and build a fortress of freedom. That's the way Calafou was born. And that's the price Rafael Bonifaz is willing to sell his house in Ecuador, constrained by his work promoting software freedom in the Ecuadorean Parliament to leave it behind. Shall it fall back into the trade economy, or remain with software freedom advocates? Solidarity networks can be created to boost projects up scale and out of the trade economy. $200K is a lot, and may be completely out of proportion: it's simply an example of what could be done. Lorea thrived on less than $1000/person/year for three years, and died of not being able to expand the message to its users, because of the artificial division of labor between developers and users, and the inability of our generations educated in the trade economy to understand the power of cheap solidarity. What we got out from Lorea is burned out people and the conviction we can't make it on the long term without solid and sustainable foundations. == hk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQJ8BAEBCgBmBQJUghcTXxSAAAAAAC4AKGlzc3Vlci1mcHJAbm90YXRpb25zLm9w ZW5wZ3AuZmlmdGhob3JzZW1hbi5uZXQwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAw MDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwAAoJEEgGw2P8GJg9xmsP/Aot3DrQLT3C4oHWP15Q8uH+ LTGLGWrglTFawy499ScqqBQCAb5UxcMnkUj/MSvr9M25f9xxuAwg/vX75gw1z70u DQhMVg7TI3OREpIfQW15MAZfrRLL2iH6lFyFoV1uVlRjTumHSMfohdDzaVGzAWdf OARnGxMwn/1Naf1qC0fWPDCyC31p6+Q29LSzcQ+kdYUQRGgKg9Q3snMdzDhqNaAk JM570mHDl6QGTHhjm8n2tctJewfMp0TBTea/EegFtD5+8zljuaT87GsuhiAVGoUB H9CMtMh858mtIOo3WD64aBcfJjW0TJ75wQEO487Kkq6YLrSB9o4yUsKM2WX0ZccA sR8+afBZagZtUz0iMav6lKTqIwOQGx8waiAVi0dIcBOYpVkPxHrAqN/en07ySd/l k688kms6xRu+z5E1xApDS4CVVYjI9R9rHDaQD7g6l8Zksm6D1yAif7zRZsxdlETT L9ZCInsrcGp6FryrGp7jv1RhBD22SCoxTvbl2dGfRThiICH385m2nqllQCzzc8Aw BB9UpObMmOKlx4ND8PSP4T1kEjHHLmeaieEpZRhhn523L9ltdtNd2j8auViEDGm6 jDdY299LvEgq/w3ZdnxzghAOpU0xvZ8O1pSDrydFh02D33vIsFsWY3GE06fB0Dsv WAnDu2/sOdNS6CQJYrO5 =fic1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev
