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

[Christopher Allan Webber]

"Bradley M. Kuhn" <address@hidden> writes:

> We got from there to here by convincing hackers to write Free Software
> for GNU/Linux.  It seems to me this is a problem close enough that we
> need the same thing: convince hackers they don't want to code up
> something that doesn't respect the Franklin Street Statement.

So, we're in an interesting position where most of the people working on
the really cool non-autonomous webapps tend to think of themselves as
"open source people".  In the scope that they apply that, that's true,
because FOSS *libraries* on the web are where it's at (and it turns out
that copyleft just doesn't seem to be needed for these libraries, they
are doing just great using permissive licenses... I still think the AGPL
is greatly needed for web applications though).

Since what we really need is autonomous *web applications* we're facing
an uphill battle convincing people who think they're already pretty
FOSS'y that stopping at libraries isn't enough.

More useless anecdote below:

> My conclusion was just this: most people treat these sites as if they're
> "the Internet"; a poll taken on FaceBook is seen to be happening "on the
> Internet" because "who in the world would be on 'the Internet' without a
> FaceBook account?".  In other words, being on FaceBook and Twitter *is*
> being on the Internet now.  It's a monumental task, seems to me, to
> convince anyone who's not already at least somewhat aware and cares
> about software freedom to pay attention today to this problem.

This is accurate.  Approx 5 years ago when I worked at Google in the
datacenters, I was on a bus and when a grop of teenagers asked where I
worked, I said "Google", and when one of them didn't recognize it
initially, another one of them looked at him like he was an idiot and
without any irony (or anything like that word said) "You know man, the
internet!"  A couple of years later I taught classes on the GIMP in a
computer lab and would ask students to go to say, gimp.org, and approx
90% of the students would go to google.com and type in "gimp.org".

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