[P2P-F] [Open Manufacturing] Source Control - Freedom through Sharing The Open Factory - an Open Hardware factory in an Irish Ecovillage.

Thu Jul 28 04:57:23 CEST 2011

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 12:31 AM, Devin Balkind
<devin at sarapisfoundation.org> wrote:
> Open source CMSs allow people who don't code to earn a living building
> websites, so in that case, free software benefits the 'users' more than it
> benefits the coders, especially the coders who used to get paid to reinvent
> the CMS over and over again.
>

Even in the case of CMS's (like Drupal and Wordpress for instance) you
have teams of people who program, maintain and configure the base
applications. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours go into the
CMS that makes it possible for a non-programmer to build a website.

> I think the trend in open source projects is that the skill level of
> developers/coers continues to increase while the skills level of
> deployers/users continues to decrease.  You'll earn the most money by
> operating in between - as someone who spend most of their time deploying
> systems but also spends time their time developing the code so they
> understand the project's capabilities and trajectory.
>

I can agree that this could be a current trend. However, I think it is
untenable (programmers do more and more, users learn less and less),
and that we're still faced with an urgent need for a significant
amount of people to obtain literacies of participatory media, abstract
concepts of programming (people don't have to become programmers, but
they will benefit from understanding how programs and computers work
in an abstract way),  literacies of cooperation and collaboration,
commons concepts, knowledge about food and energy systems, etc.

>From my perspective, access to tools and information is not enough of
catalyze change. Schemes of wage and labor also generally spin their
wheels in the mud of reality. People have to see how it applies to
their daily lives, and it's gonna take more than just a few of us at
the fringe.

-- 
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Sam Rose
Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC
Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
http://hollymeadcapital.com
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"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
ambition." - Carl Sagan