My Manifesto
My thoughts on open source, free software, and the state of the internet and culture today.
When I first started using the internet, it was about a year before the invention of the world wide web.
The internet at that time consisted primarily of:
- ftp sites
- gopher
- usenet
- BBSs and MUDs
- IRC
thus, in a time when available home internet bandwidth was somewhere around 5-6 orders of magnitude smaller than what the internet is today, we had almost all of the things that the internet consists of today, with the main exceptions of video, 3d/VR and advertising.
Even with the advent of the web browser, it was a very lo-fi experience, and took a few years before multimedia started graudually creeping in, and then advertising fully co-opted and ruined everything about the internet.
but the key thing to notice is that all of those elements, the foundations of the internet as we use it today, were free (as in freedom) and open source software.
There is simply no model for intellectual property which is as good for innovation as the free/open source model.
This is why I use Linux on my desktop computers at home, and try to use as many open source tools to create software and digital content as a I possibly can.
As I create things I will try to contribute them back to the movement, such as I consider them useful/good enough to share.
Software communism works.