Hi Marc, marc garrett said : > Perhaps East Germany is an easy target for declaring that social > change is occuring, but there is something in the air. So, considering > the current state of things and the impact of economies collapsing > around us, do you think that this climate adds extra weight for more > people to use (FLOSS) Free/Libre/Open Source Software and pure:dyne, > if so why?
Well it's obvious that the current situation is an occasion for all the grow-your-own, do-it-yourself, open and free cultures to be under the spotlight. Although during this process there will be a lot of reinvinting the wheel and re-discoveries, it's still of course a very good thing and might present alternative future for our societies, by breaking down hierarchic glass structures into more "meshy" robust heterarchic systems. Unfortunately, maybe I am bit too pessimistic, but I suspect that just like usual, only the most educated groups will benefit from this. The masses will be served the usual soup. "we will do everything we can, to fix the issue, and it's together that we will get out of this crisis" will be copy/pasted all over the place, which usually means introducing more contol and less freedom to ensure the well-being of a few. Panem et circenses, over and over again. >From the cultural and artistic institutions point of view, things might be much better though. The obvious economy crisis and the current lack of funding/support for media arts (in its broadest definition), make platform like pure:dyne very attractive to run a multimedia lab using shiny imacs or just a bunch of recycled PC. Even if FLOSS get introduced only for cost reasons, it is still a good thing as it will show it has more to offer in the long term. From a social point of view a FLOSS lab is more ethical as well: your budget, even if grandly reduced, will go to a part-time admin, a freelance developer, a GNU/Linux hacker, who will in turn contribute back to the development of the software you use. In such a case you are supporting directly a human being with direct feedback in the community, instead of injecting more money for company shareholders. The position of the artist, on the other hand is probably the most ambiguous. The way I see it, is that artists would use FLOSS for 3 different reasons (non-exclusive). - money saving - technological advantage - politics, activism Now the problems is that in fact money saving is not a problem. Let's be honest most artists are attached to their digital tools ... but not as much to their licenses. The majority of artists always find a way to not have to pay for a license, and nowadays you don't need to belong to a private torrent tracker community or to scene top site to get your daily dose of binaries, anyone who knows how to formulate a search expression in Google can get virtually anything in a click. So the advantage of FLOSS here is very little. Another problem is that, it is very likely that if an artist is at the same time already an activist and fond of technology, we can safely assume he knows about FLOSS and already uses it. I don't remember seeing any Microsoft hacktivist ... ever ... :) So in the end what could bring an artist to change his toolset/environment is to access a new field of possibilities. This doesn't mean the two other situations are completely leading to a logic dead-end, but we can assume they are not the most important cause. In such a situation the economic context would have very little influence. To embrace FLOSS, artists must be able to see what is has to offer that is not available elsewhere (from practical issues, to social aspects and knowledge sharing) and this only needs curiosity and a good dose of self motivation. a. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
