Future Lengthy Dreck Entry
Regarding Compliler's thoughts
on philanthropic
engineering
I think your concept of philanthropy needs refining. There are several assumptions implicit involving
angst ridden lazy pricks which I believe are flawed for your stated objective: Making and leaving the
world a better
place.
Free software/open source as currently practiced attempts to exercise little or no control over
the recipients or make value judgements regarding their merit or the merit of their value systems
prior to giving access to the code. The code is given away for the purposes of the giver but
attempts to mandate little or no control over the recipient. (Perhaps the GPL viral properties
break this a bit but they only come into play with fellow "philanthropists" or developers not the
recipients or users.)
Let us consider for a moment the concept of free engineering. Let's say we engineer a solar
powered desalination still that can be manufactured with tools manufactured by hand tools, hand tools,
fire, and common refuse ...... say glass bottles and aluminum cans.
Is it really worth the overhead of patenting or copyrighting our design on specific tools, jigs,
techniques, processes, etc. and setting up tracking and monitoring so that it can be used on demand
in a 3rd world beach front country (say reclaiming the sahara?) but not by lazy pricks in Southern
California or Mexico
(now that they are getting rich off of NAFTA labor opportunities stolen from honest hard working North{er}
Americans)
who could afford to pay for the engineering if they chose too?
A system such as the above sounds suspiciously like the U.S. welfare state we were drifting
into over the last century whereby government goodies are available to the needy (as defined
by U.S. Congress) and corrupt well connected (takes a lot of expensive overhead to administer
a few billion dollars and efficiently pay out a few tens of millions in subsidized mortgages/stamps/
school lunches to certified needy people; abuse is rampant, undeserving kids fed all over the place)
but paid for the middle class taxpayer. Some without even any kids!
If you (or we, or they) or random engineering philanthropists have gone to the trouble to develop a solar
powered water still and manufacturing processes as described above for charitable reasons ...... Does it
really matter if
someone else sets up a manufacturing
line and freely exchanges units for cash, possibly at a tidy profit? After they (the lazy scumbags) have
developed the
markets, the original
engineers are certainly "free" to set up and compete with them ...... This seems unpalatable to me .....
could it be
that business critters and marketers bring something to the table that is valuable (and hard to compete
with)
despite their engineering ignorance?
Is it merely the thought of competing with well financed competitors who can now afford to reinvest in
better
methods? Then the answer is obviously to set up our business infrastructure immediately and develop
the market
ourselves ... then we are ahead on the capitalization curves. Of course we are now helping ourselves
instead
of the deserving needy (not the lazy pricks) we set out to assist somehow.
The freely available plans (assuming local internet access) online seem to imply that any
or all can setup manufacturing lines for
themselves, their neighborhood and friends, for wholesale or even retail purposes. The ease of entry
into the marketplace would seem to assure "free" markets come into existence better than
the current first world system of patent protection and legal harrassment so loved by corporate
behomeths seeking to control large enough markets to remain profitable or to profiteer
off of captive markets. What better way to influence "lazy pricks" than to allow them to
build their own desalinization still? If they build a couple for friends as well, then they are well
on the way to becoming addicted to productive effort, even though it has not yet been harnessed
on Wall Street balance sheets.
Is your implicit objective of being able to tell someone you disapprove of their lifestyle choices
(and resulting inability to pay cash up front) more important to the objective of leaving the world a better
place than helping assure (by lowering barriers to entry and freeing manufacturing markets)
fair trade between diverse cultures and people is feasible via voluntary exchange of goods and services?
If all effective manufacturing processes and data are owned by multigenerational multinational
oligopolists and monopolists what
are the lower classes resulting from generations of lazy pricks and erroneous cultural practices (e.g.
farming
cotton instead of manufacturing textiles and cannons) to
do when they see the light and embrace capitalism as defined by those who descended from
Northern warmongers and the party of Lincoln?
How would you determine where the fault lies in complex cases where artificial barriers are
put into place restricting access to medical care, education, nutritious food, etc.?
Historical trends seem to imply that conflict or trade are inevitable. What if the Greeks
had allowed Pythagoras (or his employer) to patent his trig theorems and maintained a large enough
standing
Navy and Army to assure that patent infringement was not undertaken lightly? How many U.S. citizens
would pay royalties to pursue engineering and attempt to compete with Athen's Triangle Machines
and Software company today? Keep in mind that England probably did not attack us (the U.S.) when
we stole steam engines from them (a technology guarded in the national interest) only because
we had already proven expensive and difficult to chastise.
Anyway, being a lazy prick myself, by local standards
(professionally I have tended to get promoted into project management, department management
and later owner/proprietor) I can attest that much coding skill and even computer science can
seep into lazy engineers attempting to install and setup complex aggregates of charitable donations
freely downloaded. As a result, I may even contribute something back someday, if I ever figure
out how.
This raises another issue: Requiring lazy pricks to pay steep prices or do their own engineering
leads inevitably to an incremental increase in the supply of engineers. While this is regulated in the U.S.
in
some disciplines via the P.E. requirement, it
seems to be less so elsewhere. Perhaps we should be giving the engineering data away to help keep
the supplies of foreigners practiced in the engineering arts (green card professionals, foreign design
shops, etc.) low and
thus the salary potential of engineers in the U.S. high?
Alas, I seem to have raised more questions than I answered ..... perhaps some clarification
will result somehow somewhere if appropriate incentives develop. Microsoft and the recording
industry certainly seem interested in legislation of some clarification due to the incentives provided
by free software, even though it is available to lazy pricks as well as politically correct corporate
citizens everywhere. The resulting bruhaha even seems to have given some recording artists some
uppity ideas about getting a fairer piece of the revenue pie! Some are even thinking publicly
about working with small businesses or going direct retail themselves! Talk about free market efficiencies!
If U.S. farmers emulate this rebellion, ADM may be in trouble ..... what if geneticist/farmer teams start
bioengineering
high yield strains of seeds that reproduce themselves rather than hybrids ..... big step! Somebody
will probably try selling high yield hybrids direct first just to verify they can not beat Dow or ADM
at their own game before giving the rights to future yields away, by selling viable seeds.
So how many Willie Nelson farm aid concerts are necessary to fund the rebellion? Say ......
wasn't Willie Nelson being kinda lazy scum-like a few years ago? The IRS found him guilty of
tax evasion on the farm aid revenue raised and he apparently did not have the money to pay the
taxes and penalties! Lazy angst
ridden prick! No free software or engineering for him! No sir! OTOH He has alleviated some
of my angst occassionally ... I kind of like his stuff most of the time. O.K. He can use it, but
no other pricky angsters ... no sir! This moral slide has stop somewhere and this is the line
I draw in the sand.
What! Sir, if you insist on your incorrect line of reasoning, instead of mine;
I see a fork impending in our project's future.
Let us hope the duplication of effort leads to more rapid innovation and success rather than both
projects failure through a lack of interest or talent. Perhaps you should work on the windmill
pump station while I hand the really most important part of Free Irrigation ..... the desalination
still.
We can possibly still cooperate on the forge and casting furnace designs for the glass and aluminum
but only if you eloquently admire my past work and we find somebody with some industrial zoned land
where we can
discreetly hide from those blasted green/kyoto fanatics. What net CO2? We are merely recycling on a
longer term
basis than most energy consumers, they should be providing us with grant assistance.
The way I see it, freedom is only really perceived as dangerous when the other guy has it, I certainly
do not misuse mine!
Except for occasional rambling in my diary of course. I better leave the editing for another
day, last two attempts just made it worse.
I propose that a premise of "free engineering" be that we make the engineering data freely available
online and let the
random user/developer who chooses to sort out how
they wish to use it for themselves. That way we get to do the detailed real engineering and somebody
else does
all the blasted paperwork involved in whining and arguing about the ramifications of actually
producing some useful physical results with it.
Besides, embracing an fs/os approach accelerates our efforts by decades. If we stick with AutoCad and
ProEngineer how are we to deliver our data to the needy around the world? Stacks of A, B, C, D and E
get expensive and As are useless even though cheaper if they are unreadable.
By making common cause with the militant code commanders we have a larger group of interested
parties pushing to get the internet available worldwide so it can be used for delivery on demand. We
also have the potential of excellent free engineering software tools becoming available as free tools.
This not only lowers the cost of doing free engineering (assisting in growing our movement to change
the world) on the home desktop (away from pesky corporate intentions to patent/copyright the fruit
of our labor) it allows the deserving needy (yes and the lazy angst ridden pricks among us) to begin
participating as soon as they gain access to a cheap computer and internet access. We do not need
to be concerned with access expensive workstations and engineering software suites such as 100K
combinations
of ProEngineer Suites/hardware platforms.
We merely need an adequate website to start our FreeEngineer suite and perhaps an organizing
foundation
to facilitate articulating and growing our community values and membership. An advogato style site with
some wikis for brainstorming, savanah for data and project organization and archival, perhaps later some
slash/dot or other style filtering methods to sort the noise into some signal bands and we would be well
on our way. Meanwhile we can participate in fs/os projects which look like promising components of
our future "FreeEngineer" desktop.
