A Qua, 2004-05-12 às 22:31, Niall Douglas escreveu:
On 12 May 2004 at 16:19, Jo=E3o Miguel Neves wrote:
I've never seen such a system work. They're always pieces of art that are ignored by such systems and it usually puts to much power in the hands of those deciding what is a work under copyrgiht.
Such a system would fail if encumbered with government intervention. Consider sourceforge as an example of what I mean - people upload projects and people download them. Most projects on sourceforge will only ever be of minority interest and probably half will be near useless due to lack of quality or attention.
I don't see any government creating a sourceforge... but that's just me.
Technically impossible to do. This conclusion is a result of my work with the National Library of Portugal. We don't have the resources to manage that.
We could end world hunger tomorrow if enough political will was present. There is certainly no technical reason why not.
Just the cost of logistics that noone ever agreed to pay for...
Same goes with the system I outlined.
Not really. I can see how that would work with an improved (highly-scalable) bittorrent tracker. My issue is that something like bittorrent doesn't guarantee the existence (preservation) of the works (maybe I'm just affected from working in a Library and that's not an important issue).
I doubt free software as the FSF defines it will last the course. It
My bank account disagrees with you when you say free software is not sustainable, but who cares?
You are one of a very tiny minority. I would regard myself as technically pretty capable yet I couldn't earn a living working like you do because I don't possess the necessary social skills such as gracefully tolerating idiots and naturally networking with the right people.
Those were all acquired skills for me. It was hard, but worth it. Realising that we're all idiots at some point helps in the tolerating part.
Of the people I know who do make a living from free software, they are either employed by someone like RedHat and are of outstanding quality in the technical field or they aren't particularly technical at all but are great organisers and naturally build contacts easily.
Maybe I could fall in the technical part, but I'd have my doubts of calling myself "outstanding". And the organiser part is way off.
A good proportion of people just want to be told what to do at their jobs so they can serve their 9 to 5 and get money. These people are fundamentally unsuited to working with free software which demands a high degree of self-leadership. Another good proportion like me lack key non-technical "soft" skills. All together we make up an overwhelming proportion of the workforce which hence leads to my assertion that free software is not sustainable in its current form.
Those people don't care about if it's free software or not. And there are already an interesting number of companies using free software.