Crowdfunding an Ubuntu smartphone (right now)

Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller hns at goldelico.com
Sat Oct 5 09:11:45 CEST 2013


Am 05.10.2013 um 08:28 schrieb Paul Wise:

> On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> 
>> You are mixing Free dom with Free Beer.
> 
> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
> 
>> But: some people are able to jump out of the window. So do you do as well?
> 
> I followed the FSF and Debian out the window a long time ago and I am
> fairly happy with the result.

Yes, but they all decided themselves to volunteer to contribute to FSF and Debian.
For no payment (or by being paid by others). And I have done that as well.

But it was always *my* decision to volunteer or not. And that is not something
we can discuss or you can convince me.

> 
>> Strange argument... jOERG is right...
> 
> To me his mail was a bizarre overreaction to a request for
> clarification of your reasons for wanting to keep goldelico in control
> of gta04 production.

I agree with him. We don't owe the community anything beyond what we
have voluntarily done or will do.

In general the offer of Free projects is: look, here is something others have
piled up in the past years. If you want to use it, please use it. But you are
obliged to give back your changes to support the community.

You are argueing from an egocentric point of view: look, there is something,
others have piled up in the past years. I want to use it. So they are obliged
to give me everything I think I need (even if you don't really need it) to support
me or others.

At least this is what I read from rah's and your arguments.

> 

> 
> The request for clarification was probably not needed though, you have
> made it fairly clear over a few threads over the years that you aren't
> interested in making the gta04 "Free Hardware" as rah and myself
> appear to define it.

I simply don't believe in the "Free Hardware" ideology.

The reason is that there is the idea of an "allmende" or "community"
behind, where everyone gets back as much as he/she invests by
volunteer work. This is good - in theory.

With Free Hardware I simply don't see that being balanced. I.e. you
can't expect to get back enough high quality volunteer contributions
from the general public to balance what you have to invest yourself
to get something 100% done. And hardware must be finished 100%
at some deadline (contrary to community software projects - just send
out 3.12-rc4).

The GTA02-core project has clearly demonstrated that some years ago.
The engineering community development model does not work for
hardware. So there is no need for Free hardware licences to regulate
the interworking of a big worldwide engineering team.

Let's say it with some perspective: everybody should do what he/she
can do best. E.g. donate money so that experts can live from that and
invest their time to develop great hardware that allows to run as much
free software as possible (and is well enough documented for that
purpose - but not more). This does not need "Free Hardware" in your
definition.

> So end of discussion for me, I'll try to avoid replying to any further
> mails on the gta04 topic.

Yes, there is no need for discussions about the "freedom" of GTA04.

But technical discussions are always welcome.

-- hns


More information about the community mailing list