Terms of Service - Didn't Read: help them grow!

MJ Ray mjr at phonecoop.coop
Tue Sep 18 11:26:52 UTC 2012


LĂ©opold Baillard <leobaillard at fsfe.org>
> Maybe you've heard about Hugo Roy's wonderful initiative: Terms of
> Service - Didn't Read that he launched recently with Michiel de Jong and
> Jan-Christoph Borchardt. Their project aims at making you aware of what
> you agree to when you click without thinking on the "I accept the terms
> of service" on all the websites on which you have created an account. By
> rating them from A (good) to E (very bad), they help every one of us to
> actually now about what we are getting into.
> 
> Here is the website: <http://tos-dr.info/>.

I don't see much about free software on there.  Some free software
is mentioned briefly, under "No Class Yet".

The site itself claims to be free software (I have my doubts because
it looks like a derived work of other peoples' terms of service, so
wouldn't it be covered by their licences too?  Which would probably be
AGPL-incompatible, leaving an undistributable mess), but doesn't it
mainly promote use of non-free software like Twitter at the moment?

> These three people have lives and they do not allow them to contribute
> as much as they'd like to the project. That's why they want to raise
> money to be able to hire someone to help them.

"Hire someone" or "pay part-time and full-time expert curators".
What's the business model?  Where will the money go?

If they reach the 10k (euros or dollars - it varies depending where
you look), that's a basic living wage for about 33 people-weeks. Even
that's ignoring the costs of hiring people.  So say they pay 3
curators, where one is full-time and two are 0.5-time.  That's 16
weeks at most - and then what happens?  Another begging bowl?

It's a great project in some ways, but I'd like to know there's a plan
beyond burning 10k in maybe three months, else I feel there are better
projects for the money.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/



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