Re: [autonomo.us] Welcome back to autonomo.us

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 15:42, Bradley M. Kuhn <address@hidden> wrote:
> Mike Linksvayer wrote at 19:20 (EDT) on Thursday:
>>> The action is in building and deploying software. This list just has
>>> a limited role, and that's fine.
>
> Luis Villa wrote at 19:30 (EDT) on Thursday:
>
>> building is needed - but you still need some people thinking thoughts,
>> and this group seems well suited to that role; realistically, we're
>> not in a good position to actually whack out code.
>
> Christopher Allan Webber wrote at 19:24 (EDT) on Thursday:
>>> Indeed!  Less armchair philosophizing, more addressing direct issues,
>>> and way more importantly, building shit!  (And helping people getting
>>> involved and directing them to build shit.)  Or if not building shit,
>>> helping people actually deploy shit.
>
> I think Mike & cwebber are 100% right.

But I agree with Luis. More building shit yes, but not something for
this list, and "less armchair philosophizing" is as much throwaway
vacuity as most armchair philosophizing; that is if it doesn't qualify
as such.

> The software development
> problems to do truly distributed network services are hard; the idea
> that these can be solved by anyone but talented distributed system
> developers now seems pretty ludicrous to me at this point.

Most of the required software development effort doesn't involve
solving truly hard problems.

Exhibit A: http://status.net/open-source/issues/

Yes there are hard and interesting problems that ought be solved;
fortunately they're pretty attractive to work on. We'd have made
further progress if not for evil chill over P2P research the past
decade (or so I'm inclined to conjecture).

> At best,
> Autonomo.us role should be to recruit people with such talent to work on
> the problem.

Per above, I think the pool of people who can usefully contribute to
increasing the use of services and substitutes for that offer software
freedom relative to the use of proprietary services, is large.
Furthermore, users, as well as entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers,
and others can make a difference.

> Autonomo.us had an important role to bring the issue to the forefront.
> That role is complete,

Ridiculous! The forefront of *what*? A slightly larger circle of FLOSS
advocates strongly inclined to care once made aware? I doubt we
reached even a tiny fraction of that population.

I suspect Stallman and Moglen's speeches on related topics recently
have reached many more people, even in the FLOSS community. One data
point, see 2nd last question in
http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=299

But their high level political rallying only goes so far, unless the
only purpose of communicating about the problem is indeed to recruit
people to work on the issue.

Now lots and lots of people are talking about some version of or some
things related to the issue. The above interview (of the Unhosted guy)
is pretty unique in that he's thinking about the issue in terms of
software freedom. I don't think many people are still -- and I suspect
we're still in early days of even understanding "the issue" relative
to software freedom and vice versa -- and that's a gigantic gaping
hole, and IMO where autonomo.us (or something; maybe this group isn't
the right thing to fill the hole) is needed.

> which is why it didn't really bother me that it
> was defunct.

I was both bothered and pleased -- the failure to keep the group's
services up in any reasonable way is some kind of a lesson.

> If it can serve now as a meeting place of people actual
> working to solve the problem in a community way, then that's a great
> use.

That I agree with.

Mike