Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Tuesday 15 November 2011

Freedom Never Gets Old

A venturebeat.com article about mobile and Web apps says

But he [Jay Sullivan] doesn’t resort to the familiar (and tired) ideologies about freedom from corporate technological tyranny that figure large in Mozilla’s current ad campaign. Rather, he gets downright practical.

I assume "tired" is the reporter's spin, not Jay's. The pejorative use of "ideologies" is gratuitous; a better word is "principles".

The struggle to keep the Web open has been going on a while now and isn't going to end. I'm not surprised if people are getting bored by it. But we can't afford to weary of it. Vendors never get tired of binding developers and customers into their proprietary stacks.

Comments

Best Business Brands
"Nobody's free until everybody's free." Robert O'Callahan Have a great holiday!! Best Business Brands, http://bestbusinessbrands.blogspot.com/
Tony Mechelynck
There is something anarchistic, not only in Mozilla, but in the whole Bazaar model embodied in free open-source software. One may prefer cathedrals to suuqs the way, apparently, the venturebeat.com reporter does; but you need a despotic system, not an anarchy, to build a cathedral. Of course, proponents of the Cathedral model (and of restricted and closed-source software) will spare no effort to make themselves seem to be enlightened despots. Alas, there is no way known to man to guarantee that what started out as enlightened despotism won't eventually become outright tyranny.