On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 05:55:17PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > > Sometimes I wonder if people think free software is so fragile that if > > anyone who works on it ever touches non-free software, everything we > > built will crumble. I think our community and ecosystem is a lot more > > robust than that. > > Conversely, I wonder why people are so eager to cede the power of peer > collaboration by setting up single-vendor services as mediators of our > peer relationships. Surely we have seen that fail far too many times to > be led down that path yet again.
The real conversation here is slightly more subtle, I think. You, me and the majority of people here on this list *are* willing to make tradeoffs for our freedom. Our tradeoffs often come at the expense of ultra-modern hardware, fancy new non-free software and the SaaS of the month. We're willing to hack on our stuff to make it work -- to create a free and open source world. That's why I'm here. That's why I spend hours on this stuff. Other people, they made other tradeoffs on their freedom. They're willing to give up some of that freedom to a company, subject themselves to a power dynamic wherein they're denied freedom, in a pragmatic decision to just "not worry about it". People use GitHub simply because they don't have to host it, they don't have to maintain it, they don't have to tell contributors how to contribute. They're using Slack because NTEUs can use it better than IRC. They're using gmail because mail servers suck to maintain. Everyone's willing to make tradeoffs on our freedom. It's what tradeoffs we make, that's the question. -- .''`. Paul Tagliamonte <paul...@debian.org> | Proud Debian Developer : :' : 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352 D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87 `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~paultag `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt
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