<a href="http://groups.google.com/group/building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet/t/424df9f64195995e" target="_blank">Cory Doctorow on techno-optimism and techno-pessimism</a>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Jon Lebkowsky <<a href="mailto:jon.lebkowsky@gmail.com" target="_blank">jon.lebkowsky@gmail.com</a>></span>
May 03 01:01PM -0500
<a href="?ui=2&view=bsp&ver=ohhl4rw8mbn4#12fb80db2d453032_digest_top">^</a><br>
<br><a href="http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/05/cory-doctorow-techno-optimism/" target="_blank">http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/05/cory-doctorow-techno-optimism/</a><br>
<br>
"To understand techno-optimism, it’s useful to look at the free software<br>
movement, whose ideology and activism gave rise to the GNU/Linux
operating<br>
system, the Android mobile operating system, the Firefox and Chrome<br>
browsers, the BSD Unix that lives underneath Mac OS X, the Apache
web-server<br>
and many other web- and e-mail-servers and innumerable other
technologies.<br>
Free software is technology that is intended to be understood, modified,<br>
improved, and distributed by its users. There are many motivations for<br>
contributing to free/open software, but the movement’s roots are in this<br>
two-sided optimism/pessimism: pessimistic enough to believe that closed,<br>
proprietary technology will win the approval of users who don’t
appreciate<br>
the dangers down the line (such as lock-in, loss of privacy, and losing
work<br>
when proprietary technologies are orphaned); optimistic enough to
believe<br>
that a core of programmers and users can both create polished
alternatives<br>
and win over support for them by demonstrating their superiority and by<br>
helping people understand the risks of closed systems.<br>
"While some free software activists might dream of a world without<br>
proprietary technology, the pursuit of free software’s ideology is
generally<br>
more practical in its goal; like good technologists, they view
proprietary<br>
technology as a bug, and bugs can’t necessarily be eliminated. It’s just
not<br>
possible to squash every bug, so programmers track, isolate, and
minimize<br>
bugs instead."<br>
<br>
~ Jon<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
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