Open Fabs

[Zenaan Harkness]

On 8/3/15, Lodewijk andré de la porte <l at odewijk.nl> wrote:
> 2015-08-03 8:22 GMT+09:00 Zenaan Harkness <zen at freedbms.net>:
...<things agreed>
>> We have a plan for a better world. It starts with money. Money and
>> trust. Trust. But not without money. More money. And technology.
>> Technology and money. I'll leave you to contact Goog to start this
>> ball rolling.
>
> Your comments are neither in depth nor self evident.
>
> I'm not going to expand on the virtues and evils on capitalism.
> It suffices to say that money is here to stay, and we better
> make good goddamn use of it.

I agree. Thank you for bringing things down to earth - that is in fact
a much more useful approach to (pick an adjective of) comedy in most
circumstances.

> We'll need it to live well, and allow others to live well while
> supporting the cause.

In general, and for most people, yes.

For many years we have occasionally seen large endowments (in the
order of say $1 million USD) to fund developers for this or that.

A lurking thought for me is that this money could fund say one house,
and the interest on the remainder could pay for rates, internet and
electricity. Then somebody could live in that house, and grow their
food, and have most of their time for programming without having to
find rent each week. Yes some money is still needed, but a lot less
than in a "normal rental" situation.

There might be better futures still of course - this has just been a
self posed question of "how can we harness resources better in
general, so our results/ efforts are more long lasting".

> I think it's better to deserve (earn) the money than
> to beg for it. If capitalism is a remotely sane system that
> must be possible. Feel free to propose an alternative.

Exchange of human energy using money as facilitator is the extremely
dominant reality right now, so we must work with it.

One of the greatest insights into "a new reality" that the Free
Software movement shows us (as compared with traditional capitalism)
is that many of us humans like to contribute their talents and skills
back to the community and don't require proprietary land and profit
maximisation. Many of course are happy to develop libre software for a
wage, some "hard core" programmers have sacrificed significant
monetary income in order to build something truly free and community
based - witness Paul Davis of ardour.org fame, and Tom Lord's arch
version control back in the day - these and others have made personal
sacrifices which very few ordinarily would.

So how might we expand the comfort zone for those willing to make some
sacrifices? What other transitions (slow movement away from base
capitalism) might make sense?

> I talked about trust a bit before. There's always going to be some trust.
> If you're reasonable about the amount and type of trust it's entirely
> workable.

Agreed.

Thanks again,
Zenaan