[Its.an.education.project] Freedom is a good deal (Was: Ivan's latest blog entry on OLPC)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Hi,

Bernie's post resonates so well with my experience, that I need to
comment on it.

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 2:23 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> Martin Langhoff wrote:
>
>> No quite :-) but, I've been through the "early linux"->"linux power
>> user"->"pissed off by linux, got a powerbook"->"pissed off by OSX,
>> back to linux" cycle.
>
> Ah, me too!  My "OSX period" lasted almost 2 years, and yours?

~1 year, bought a PPC Mac Mini for coding in ObjC + Cocoa as I was a
big fan of OpenSTEP, but ended dedicating more time to python and
pyCocoa when I knew that OLPC had decided to go with pygtk.

The "just works" of OSX on Apple hardware  was nice, but I chose to
trade a bit of convenience (not much, IMO) for helping the efforts to
bring software production capacity to the masses.

> I also had a 4-5 years Windows development period.  A prerequisite for me
> to become profoundly disgusted by the whole proprietary software ecosystem.

Same here, with Borland Delphi. We contracted very expensive
professional support from some "serious" companies and frankly, its
quality lacked tons behind what you get today from the FOSS
communities.

> It seems to me that new users who have grown in this golden era cannot
> truly appreciate the amount of freedom they enjoy these days, after 10 years
> of steady growth of FOSS have increasingly forced proprietary vendors away
> from their worst practices.

Yup.

> Who remembers daisy chaining 3 hardware dongles to my parallel port just
> to use the software they needed at work?  And juggling a dozen different
> CDs just to install everything they required to use a new computer?
> Each time a machine would reboot, you'd get plenty of annoying splash
> screens of which you couldn't get rid.  Not to mention searching for
> cracks on astalavista so you could use a text editor and a zip archiver :-)
>
> Believe it or not, this is how computers really looked like in the '90s,
> when Microsoft was still dominating the (computing) world.

Matches my own experience.

> Now OSX is 80% open source, and Microsoft is forced to give away server
> applications unencumbered with per-seat licenses.  Would this have
> happened also without GNU, Linux, Apache, Samba...?  I doubt it.

My opinion as well.

> Most users, especially the non technical ones, feel more comfortable using
> a convenient mixture of free and proprietary software that solves their
> immediate computing needs.  Fine, but they should be aware how much they
> are actually benefiting from the efforts of thousands who stand still and
> work on providing alternative solutions.

Yes, some effort needs to be done in order to see the situation in
perspective. I guess journalists (or rather publications) are too busy
announcing products to analyze what happened during the last two
decades.

> If Rob Savoye and his friends were content with using Adobe's Flash, now
> we'd not have Gnash which works pretty decently, is portable to different
> CPUs, and can start the movies paused by default (a nice anti-ad feature).
> Check it out and help the Gnash hackers by reporting bugs or sending your
> patches.
>
> Freedom is not a theoretical issue.  It has very important practical
> consequences too, but these are sometimes harder to see, even when they
> are right in front of your nose.
>
> Yes, freedom may not be for free... but it's usually a good investment.

In my own words, FOSS in this education project has two main benefits:

- Short term benefit: communities ranging in size from international
organizations to regional administrations can be in charge of the
software, without having to depend on foreign corporations that have
very different goals and that _will_ abuse their disproportionate
power.

What OLPC has invested in Sugar to date is in reach of any government
and of most regional organizations in the world. This is like that
because Sugar is built on top of the work of thousands of individuals
and companies that chose to contribute their work to the whole
community.

- Long term benefit: the recipients of the machines can understand how
software and content can be created and distributed _by themselves_.
People can use knowledge to their own benefit without having to depend
on channels controlled by others.

At the end, it's a matter of giving power to the people, I guess
that's what makes me a fundamentalist and a terrorist.

Cheers,

Tomeu