I am enjoying reading the "Moneyflow" article discussion.
The more I think about it, the more certain I am of a few
things. First, the Internet is kind of at a crossroads
right now. It has the potential to start getting really
cool, or keep getting less and less useful. Second, I am
fed up with copyright law, and I am planning on starting to
write my various governmental representatives. Third, I
think a lot of the problems with payment on the Internet, as
well as nifty peer to peer filesharing techniques, can be
resolved with a robust, standardized system for Metadata.
How else can you find the little guy? How else can you know
who to pay? We can't work under the assumption that the
consumer will go to the creator's website to get whatever
there is to offer. Building copy protection and payment
mechanisms into protocols and file formats is a really bad
idea. It institutionalizes the middle man, and hurts Free
Software. It also encourages piracy rather than diminishing
it. Systems that will work are ones that don't treat people
like criminals, and allow individuals to pick a proper
"reward" for content creators. Furthermore, I refuse to
believe that artists create just to get paid. If they do,
the really are just not artists. Whenever I choose to
create something, there is not much profit motive there.
Some of the greatest works ever were created without any
notion of copyright. I do believe in the original ideals of
copyright law, but as it stands now, it is vastly contorted
and rewritten to favor distributors rather than the people
that matter - artists and appreciators.
I am becoming more and more interested in figuring out
ways to leverage public domain works for the public good.
There is a lot of absolutely incredible stuff out there. I
have the feeling that a lot of people don't take advantage
of it, either because it is hard to find, or they don't know
they can. I want to figure out a way to unify a lot of the
"virtual library" type projects out there, so people can
search and access this stuff using something with more of a
napster feel. Websites are all well and good, but we should
be thinking of them more as "leisure" sorts of things. We
need better searching so we can find what we want initially,
and then can choose if we want to bother with the website or
not. Sometimes I just want to browse through some Van Gogh.
Other times I want to read about each painting, and find
out about their relationships. We need ways to facilitate
this. We need solid metadata systems. We need means of
cross-referencing large bodies of work on the fly. We need
ways to tip the people that make this all available for us.
And we need it all to be in open file formats that are
designed for searching and portability. Documents should be
in well-structured XML. Audio should be in open formats
like Ogg Vorbis. Images should be in JPG or PNG. Ok,
enough ranting on this. One more rant to go:
On the topic of people complaining about various features
(or lack of features) of advogato: Really, I think that the
current structure of advogato is what makes it a unique and
well-defined community. The diaries allow everyone to see
what various community members are working on, and the
public conversations are interesting to follow. The
articles have no real need to be threaded - there are
typically few responses to articles, so we may as well keep
them as open conversations. Threading can be nice, but at
the same time I see it as limiting conversation styles. The
other thing that I have been kind of annoyed at is people
asking for certification to a given level. It seems kind of
antithetical to the idea of *trust* metrics that people ask
for a given level of certification. The idea is that you
prove yourself in some manner. While I'd like to be ranked
higher than Apprentice, I realize that since I haven't been
ranked higher, there is probably a reason. So I am
perfectly content with my Apprenticeship, and am confident
that when I actually deserve it, I'll be ranked higher. I
certify people as a result of taking part in discussion with
them. To me, that is the best indicator of where they
should be in the trust metric system. The trust metric is a
pretty damn cool system, and I see it as having a ton of
useful applications. But it becomes pretty pointless once
it is no longer about trust. So if you're not being
certified up, it is probably because you haven't shown that
you should be yet. Ok, that's the end of my rant.
