Re: [LUG] social media

I see your point and I don't disagree with you. The primary purpose of my creating the LinkedIn group and the Twitter account in the name of the LUG is advertising and recruitment, not discussion. I created them using Chromium (not Chrome) on my Debian system.

I do not see this as any worse than creating an A4 poster in your favourite Free Software application, printing out out using your favourite Free Software printing solution and then putting your output into a plastic document wallet (which is unlikely to have been manufactured using Free Software).

Certainly I would not stop buying or using plastic document wallets because they are produced using non-Free Software solutions.

I do think we should be using more open platforms too, but in my experience the people using things like Diaspora and Identi.ca are most likely already aware of Free Software, so you'd be recruiting the choir (to mix my metaphors).

On Apr 29, 2012 12:49 AM, "bad apple" <ifindthatinteresting@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 28/04/12 17:52, paul sutton wrote:
> Sometimes we have to put freedom to one side

With the greatest respect to all of you, and the best wishes for your
future LUG endeavours, I think this is where we shall have to part
philosophical ways. I really do not consider myself to be a
Stallman-esque fanatic by any stretch of the imagination: as a sysadmin
I by necessity have to be pragmatic in my work. Well over 50% of my
workload involves strictly proprietary systems (Windows, AIX, HP-UX,
IOS, etc) and I long ago learnt to stop patronising friends and
relatives with lectures on free-as-in-freedom whilst fixing their
computers. Each to their own of course.

But I think there is a strange dichotomy here. Whilst I can tolerate,
and in some cases even quite like, decidedly non-free software (Windows
server 2008r2 is excellent, SGI's IRIX is fantastic) I personally
struggle to understand the willingness of some otherwise die-hard open
source/free software proponents to sacrifice another, equally important
aspect of their digital-age freedom in what seems to me an almost
Faustian gamble. Sure, as modern cloudy, web-based software solutions
google+, linkedin, facebook, twitter and a plethora of other social
network platforms all run fine in our open-source web browsers on our
open-source operating systems, right? Why not use them?

Well, forgive me if you disagree, and you are of course more than
welcome to, but to answer my own question: because these 'solutions'
pose a considerably greater threat to their s/users/commodities/g
freedom in the broader, and I would argue, more important sense than
merely using a closed source software ecosystem ever could.

To sum up: I have (perhaps mistakenly) conceived of this proposition as
a gambit. Is it worth sacrificing privacy and independence to use
closed, corporate social networking platforms to spur the adoption of
linux? Or is it better to eschew the use of these platforms, retain at
least a semblance of one's control of one's own data and risk being
unable to evangelize linux and open source/free software because of the
lack of the exposure? Or as it has been put more bluntly:

> Sometimes we have to put freedom to one side

No. We do not ever have to put freedom to one side. It is a choice that
any of us can make individually, hopefully in full possession of the
facts and consequences thus entailed, but we certainly do not have to.
It is certainly not one I will ever take. This is just my personal
opinion. I was very surprised to see this issue even come up, and even
more surprised to see the seemingly universal positive response (users
immediately signing up, etc). This of course probably shows that I am
simply out of touch and stupid, and I don't for a moment think that any
of you shouldn't do precisely what you want and completely ignore me.

But the entire reason that I migrated inexorably from the DOS/CPM/VMS
environments of my youth to the open systems like BSD and linux was
because I valued my own independence and skills, and wanted to be free
to tinker, recompile, host my own webservers, mailing lists, IRC
channels, mail servers... I'm aware I sound a bit like a rabid American
pro-gun supporter or something when I say you'll prise my privacy from
my cold dead hands, but that's one of the chief draws for me: I can
always do things myself, rather than having to sell my soul to giant
corporate monstrosities like facebook or google. Do you really want to
betray one of the foundation principles of the open source/free software
'revolution' just because it might make it a bit easier to recruit a few
more people?

Apologies for a somewhat longer than intended email.

Regards,

Mat

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