Interesting stuff. I think its a good idea, but with one caveat: it neglects to take into account challenges of network effects, and in fact discourages networks and services in general. I find that somewhat counter intuitive to our goals of encouraging collaboration online and utilizing social software to achieve our goals. In other words, if Students for Free Culture had to abandon Facebook as an organizational tool, I fear that our ability to organize would be significantly more limited.
Perhaps that is a sad remark about the independence of our peers (and their ability to hold principled views on software and user freedom) but it is a necessary reality we have to accept understand as organizers. If a user is using Microsoft Word and switches to OpenOffice, so long as the functionality is the same, and the end result is the same, the means don't really matter. Perhaps gcc is a better example -- so long as the application takes C code as input and outputs an executable, it is arguably 'better' that I use the free version of a C compiler rather than the proprietary version. But this point doesn't scale well with services dependent on network effects like Facebook or Twitter. This is because these services depend on other people using them. This makes the 'friction' to convert people much higher and is why the fax machine is not valuable until everyone you know is using one. Software libraries and components are perhaps the same way -- the same argument could be levied against the creation of Linux -- that its not worth until every part of the stack is "free" ... Well that battle is still being fought. Anyway, while I sympathize with the ideology here to a great extent, I worry about the statement's discouraging of use of social software in general. Hopefully identi.ca will prove me long, but I have to admit that i've been neglecting it because of the strong network effects of Twitter. F On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Nelson Pavlosky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Perhaps this is a statement that SFC should endorse? With the > appearance of identi.ca perhaps the time for free, open network services > has come and the sun is setting on walled gardens ;-) > > http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/ > > ~Nelson~ > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
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