On 2012-06-25 21:10, Markus Sabadello wrote: > On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Michiel de Jong <[email protected]>wrote: > On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 6:41 AM, Stephen Michael Kellat >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> In a [hostile] regime, this is not a plug and pray platform >>> that requires no training. >> >> that's probably the appropriate conclusion. and i think we should not >> underestimate the importance of freedombox in the US and also in >> Europe. This is something we need. On all levels, and for the general >> public. So i think it should be a tool aimed both at relatively-free >> and not-so-free countries, at the same time, keeping in mind the >> differences between the use cases, and providing documentation with it >> to educate users. >> > > Yes definitely.. The FreedomBox was born out of Eben Moglen's vision to > liberate > us from the centralized Facebooks, Googles, etc. It is about having data > under > our control, and about decentralized communication. My understanding is > that the > use case of political activism is of course important, but just a subset of > the > FreedomBox idea.
I think this pretty much sums up to views upon the project that have often been been brought up on this mailing list: There are some people who want it to be a free, censorship-resistant, distributed, meshed, secure etc. (insert your favourite property here) device, which is in itself a noble and ambitious idea but perhaps a bit to too difficult given the readily available technology in the near future, and others who simply want it a small server that provides an alternative/a substitute to the above mentioned types of services. There has been a lot of discussion, but little progress compared to the interest the project initially had and to some extent still has. Perhaps one should focus the efforts on features that can be delivered in a year or two and accept that these ambitious ideas are part of the next big step and that having working software is more important in the current situation. If that means that the FreedomBox is not the perfect computer for dissidents, we will have to accept this for now (remember that most people volunteer in their free time). Maybe applying a more structured software development process (e.g. assigning people to tasks and keeping track of their progress and maintaining a development plan/schedule) could help to make better progress, so that the FreedomBox becomes something tangible and usable instead of an idea, though it could be difficult without full-time developers (just a thought). I don't know if this has been said before on this mailing list as I have not always the time to pay close attention, but following the discussion of the last weeks I think this had to be said. Regards, Matthias-Christian _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
