[P2P-F] Cory Doctorow on techno-optimism and techno-pessimism

[Michel Bauwens]

 Cory Doctorow on techno-optimism and
techno-pessimism<http://groups.google.com/group/building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet/t/424df9f64195995e>
Jon
Lebkowsky <jon.lebkowsky at gmail.com> May 03 01:01PM -0500
^<?ui=2&view=bsp&ver=ohhl4rw8mbn4#12fb80db2d453032_digest_top>

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/05/cory-doctorow-techno-optimism/

"To understand techno-optimism, it’s useful to look at the free software
movement, whose ideology and activism gave rise to the GNU/Linux operating
system, the Android mobile operating system, the Firefox and Chrome
browsers, the BSD Unix that lives underneath Mac OS X, the Apache web-server
and many other web- and e-mail-servers and innumerable other technologies.
Free software is technology that is intended to be understood, modified,
improved, and distributed by its users. There are many motivations for
contributing to free/open software, but the movement’s roots are in this
two-sided optimism/pessimism: pessimistic enough to believe that closed,
proprietary technology will win the approval of users who don’t appreciate
the dangers down the line (such as lock-in, loss of privacy, and losing work
when proprietary technologies are orphaned); optimistic enough to believe
that a core of programmers and users can both create polished alternatives
and win over support for them by demonstrating their superiority and by
helping people understand the risks of closed systems.
"While some free software activists might dream of a world without
proprietary technology, the pursuit of free software’s ideology is generally
more practical in its goal; like good technologists, they view proprietary
technology as a bug, and bugs can’t necessarily be eliminated. It’s just not
possible to squash every bug, so programmers track, isolate, and minimize
bugs instead."

~ Jon

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