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hi James,

first of all, i admit your arguments are geared toward pragmatism, yet
progressive in the direction of free (libre) software principles,
already well valuable to the cause. yet the point of view you are
explaining is that of an artist, a creative role in first person,
rather than that of an educator, someone whose mission is that of
sharing know-how rather than concepts. i'd like to make a distinction.

please consider me far from the role of judging wether one or the
other roles are "ideologically" or "ethically" more fit for populating
the free software community, often we switch ourselves between those
two roles and i believe that this benefits the quality of all our
activities.

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 09:07:19AM +0800, James Harkins wrote:
> But when free software advocates insist that the documentation --
> documentation, not code -- must not help users install non-free
> components, then I have to get off the train. Where's the boundary?

i believe our main concern is about educational institutions, which in
the past decades have progressively shifted into the role of preparing
people to serve industry and be dependent from its commodities. at the
risk of sounding pedantic, the scholarly formulated statement below
serves well to explain what i'm saying.

  The  semantic nucleus  (Sinn)  of the  word  "Economy" has  remained
  almost invariant  and that has permitted  to extend the  word to new
  denotations.   This  phenomenon  is  somehow  similar  to  what  has
  happened  in our  days  to  the term  /Enterprise/  which, with  the
  consensus of the majority  of interested subjects, has been extended
  to contexts indicated by the term /University/, which originally had
  nothing to do with it (Agamben, 2007)

this can be just an incipit for a critical analysis of publicly
subsidized initiatives in Europe that go along the name of "creative
industries" or "creative enterprises".

now to come back closer to our topic: in this discussion my concerns
about having an 100% free (as in libre) operating system deal with the
context of its distribution in schools and adoption in educational
initiatives and, more precisely, with the transfer of *knowledge*
constituted by *commons*, as opposed to privately owned. 

in case of an initiative as that of an artwork, i'd be much less
concerned with such pedagogical issues, since it is up to the artists
to decide on how artworks are circulating and redistributed, being
such attributes often integral part of their concepts. nevertheless my
aesthetic sense suggests me that interactive art is nowadays closer
than ever to entertainment, after having developed a strong dependence
from the industry, art became somehow "limited", even in its capacity
to produce values: paradoxically, the commodification of its
materiality has left very little space to the economy art used to
constitute.

at last you can argue that, as an artist, my own productions are kept
somehow "primitive" and themselves limited by such ideological
assumptions, but i can assure you that my use of black and white and
text based mediums so far is a pure and intentional aesthetic choice
:)

ciao


- --
jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org

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