Hi Anivar
On the question you raise
'how much role public has in deciding the publicness of water?'
There have been successful mass movements to reclaim the pulbicness of
water, notably in Bolivia and some other Latin American countries.
On, whether democracy is not already sold off ?
I am not sure what you mean by it, and how should I respond to this
proposition. Because, we as an organization mean to keep working on
democracy as the key political, even the key overall organizing,
principle of our societies. (That is what, incidentally, right now Anna
Hazare is doing!)
At the base of our argument with you here, I understand, is whether we
give up the institutions of a democratic society including a democratic
state, or we do not. And that difference of position I do not think we
will be able to resolve here. Health, education, basic livelihood, basic
software - all these things for us admit of similar overall political
analysis. We are unable either
(1) to accept that we forgo all hopes and expectations from the
institutions of a democratic society/ state
or
(2) that the realm of software is politically that *fundamentally*
different from other realms of social life that we have mentioned above
for it to admit of a *completely* different socio-political analysis and
institutional systems (while we do admit that there are some significant
differences, which our model does take account of)
These beliefs are the basis of our work in this area.
Thanks for the continuing engagement on the issue. It does help us even
clarify things to ourselves better.
parminder
On Thursday 07 April 2011 05:07 PM, Anivar Aravind wrote:
On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 12:38 PM, parminder<[email protected]> wrote:
On Thursday 07 April 2011 12:16 PM, V. Sasi Kumar wrote:
On Wed, 2011-04-06 at 07:57 +0530, Anivar Aravind wrote:
Who decides Publicness of Software? ie defining the Term Public
Software
Public or people do, through various means of political expression open to
them, of which representational politics and elections are just one
How much role the public have in deciding Publicness of Public water ?
State is the authority to decide even now.
With the help of much celebrated World Bank/NGO language you can say
that it can be decided to Stakeholder consultations . But even in that
deciding authority is the state
It just means the responsibility of pushing /correcting the ambiguous
term is again in the hands of Public who are using well accepted
definitions such as Free Software/ FOSS
We also need to keep in mind that our governments are showing a tendency
to move away from providing such services.For instance, governments are
increasingly depending on private agencies to provide services like
health and education and moving out of these sectors. Even public taps
are becoming rare.
These perverse directions are good reasons on insist on publicness of all
these things, basic health, education, water, as well as, basic software.
More privatisation insist more we need to fight for values of publicness
rather than ourselves abandon it.
Insisting Publicness of Free Software is important . But Naming it as
public software is giving control on interpreting that term to state
again, which is harmful
I like to know how ITfor Change is going to address this problem ,
before pushing such terms to policies
How do we prevent the government from making all
public software private one day?
It is not for the governments to do such a thing. It is not in their hands.
In the same way that they cannot sell-off or privatize democracy. These
concepts belong to the people.
Democracy is already getting privatized!
If you need more proof visit any Tamilnadu Villeges/ Read Hungama
offer manifestos of Both Front's in TN . Election commission
captures more than 1 crore each and everyday
Anivar
thanks, parminder
Best
Sasi
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