This is a bit of rant here. >From a layman's point of view, I feel the talk and ideas of software and concept of sharing and openness has changed a lot. It seems internet is no more the internet which it was envisioned to be.
A long time ago, I used to think if something was open source, it was trustworthy, free in terms of money, and free in terms of freedom, that nobody controlled it. I used to think that a software which was open source was something which stood in defiance against companies whose main motive was money and dominance. In this spirit I was a fan of firefox for a long time. Then Google Chrome came along and I became its fan. Later on I heard there are new smarter phones with touch screen and they are based on Android which is open source. I readily adopted it, and my next phone after a Nokia symbian phone was Samsung s4. Well fast forward to current times, I now realize that open source or not, the products are tightly controlled by companies. Companies control what update is rolled out, when it is rolled, and even in which region it is rolled out. I had no idea that Google could choose whether or not to allow a company to use its version of Android. I had no idea that even if a software was open source, it was still a controllable creature. Fifteen years ago when ever I came across the word ecosystem I thought it was just another word used by experts to sound like experts. I have to agree that there may be times where blocking of communication may be warranted. But I have seen its instances of misuse. I know a few instances of this happening in India in past couple of years. There was a police crackdown in Haryana state not long ago and the government totally cut off social media apps for several days, because they wanted to shut down live or almost live news sharing. And nobody spoke out. Nothing happened. They did their thing and life went on. Later I got to know that it was happening elsewhere too. If a machine runs on electricity, no matter how smart that machine may be, all that needs to be done to defeat that machine is to cut off electricity. Governments control ISPs. A simple court order, brought about by the power that be, can make them fall in line. Understandably, if internet connection is shut down, and that too with legal tools, there is nothing common person can do. But there should be tools to communicate and share when there is at least some internet going on. That is something which deserves support. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/736f0322-3776-44dc-b591-b7b38f3b85eb%40googlegroups.com.
