Developing free and open platforms (was Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?)

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.org.uk
Fri Jun 23 12:20:28 UTC 2017


On Thursday 22. June 2017 21.31.07 Roland Häder wrote:
> 
> There is an idea circulating in the fediverse about writing a free-libre
> open source "youtube" ([s]of course, with an other name which I don't
> want to name here to not fuel domain sharks[/s] na, they already took
> the .org domain ... :-( ). But it remains only like that, no actual
> development took place after that. Mostly because of low human-resources
> (hackers willing to write it).

I guess that since I promised to discuss the matter of funding Free Software 
development, I'll take yet another opportunity to bring it up again. 
Generally, "hackers" are only willing to write things if sufficiently 
motivated and, crucially, sustained.

Although one can do such things "for the glory", portrayed as a noble thing by 
various neoliberal "open source" advocates who naturally want people to do 
stuff for them and their businesses for nothing, people get a bit tired of 
doing unrewarded "day job"-style work "for the glory" after a while.

> If the FSFE could put their resources more into such projets, it would
> be more helpful than setting linkings to Youtube, Facebook, Linked-In,
> Instagram (FB again) and all of these high-walled coorporate "networks"
> (not really a network, compared to GNUSocial/Friendica).

Just supporting existing Free Software initiatives would be helpful. I think 
Paul Sutton had some good ideas about that.

> But what now? There is no FLOSS-Youtube (you should not name it that
> way) and nobody seem to have enough time to do it?

I honestly thought that GNU MediaGoblin (https://mediagoblin.org/) was a sort-
of YouTube-like thing for media sharing. But the fact that there is a lack of 
clarity even amongst people like ourselves indicates that perhaps not enough 
advocacy is being done for those projects and services, which would certainly 
be a useful and less expensive first step towards a better world.

Paul



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