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Net Pioneers Say Open Internet Should Be Separate
angry tapir writes "The US Federal Communications Commission should allow for an open Internet separate from specialized services that may prioritize IP traffic, a group of Internet and technology pioneers has recommended. The document, filed in response to an FCC request for public comments on proposed network neutrality rules, steers clear of recommending what rules should apply to the open Internet. Among the tech experts signing the document are Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple; Bruce Perens, founder of the open-source software movement; Clay Shirky, an author and lecturer at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program; and David Reed, a contributor to the development of TCP/IP and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab."
Internet2 was great for academia, but it doesn't help me when my ISP choices are monopolistic, greedy and don't have my best interests at heart.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Am i supposed to be happy about this or not?
I can honestly say I don't understand it. But it does sound like something that I end up paying for. Santax is Dutch and hates paying.
I propose we make a new internet, except with blackjack and hookers! Oh...
crazy dynamite monkey
And exactly how are people on these "prioritized" networks supposed to reach the "open" Internet?
Oh yeah. Through their prioritized network's traffic-prioritized peering point.
I summon Picard. Patron Saint of the Facepalm.
The answer to not liking those who apply such a technical response to a financial situation is NOT always "make another one that's separate and free". Sometimes it is "remove the financial incentive" for those that do.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How does this stop the "open internet" from becoming a second rate citizen?
These guys are all smart and should have known better than to hedge to this degree. They have written a lot but not provided any value with their enormous brainpower.
Besides, if you split the internet into two pipes, one neutral and one non-neutral, you kill net neutrality because you can prioritize the non-neutral bit over the neutral bit. In other words, you can't be a little bit pregnant.
is this making any sense to anyone? The entire internet should be open, we net neutrality lovers shouldn't be relegated to our own little corner. I for one, won't stand by while the internet is turned into the next radio or TV. Some other things: how will one access this 'second' internet anyway? and won't we just have a repeat after the ISPs notice how much bandwidth we're hogging? How long until we have to have a 3rd 4th and 5th internet? What if ISPs block access to the open internet to save money? IMO this idea is fundamentally flawed.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
When one part has the money and the other part is where the "poor" or "undesireables" go, this is not going to end well.
We had a chance in the past few years to make internet access a protected right and utility, much like access to power or water... but we failed and now it's going to kill the internet.
Rent-seeking predatory corporation are already licking their chops at all the potential "synergy" and "monetization" they can make of the soon-to-be-gone public commons. Once there is blood in the water, it will be a feeding frenzy for all these local monopolies.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Bruce Perens, founder of the open-source software movement? Are you kidding me??
Would marijuana law reform (analog: copyright law reform) figure into the solution? Or would the major drug and synthetic fiber companies (analog: the MPAA which controls the news media) continue to lobby so hard against it that it's considered unthinkable?
And it was awful. Why invent it again?
Who pays for a separate "open" Internet?
Idealism is great until you realize that someone has to pay for it, and that someone is always, without exception, YOU. And there's that annoying Fourth Amendment, and case law that would get in the way. Remember, if the government can muster the power to seize a major industry over ideological reasons, what defense would smaller companies (including yours, for all values of "you") have with the takeover of the commercial Internet as precedent? Ideologies come and go, but powers of regulation and seizure only linger and grow.
Don't feed the regulation-monster. Don't feed the confiscation-monster. It only makes them stronger.
There are problems that have to be solved, but there are no functional answers which don't involve imposing expenses on other people or allowing the government far, far more powers over Internet content and monitoring than it already has. It's quite possible that, warts and problems and all, what we have right now may be the least of evils. Please keep an open mind to that possibility.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
This sounds like an easy way to avoid the Net Neutrality debate and move the internet as we see it ever closer to obsolescence.
I love that! "Star Wars was George Romeros finest movie" hehehehe....
From the linked article, quoting the paper itself.
'The open Internet would not require network management "unless the congestion was caused by less capacity being available than the provider offers to subscribers," the Internet pioneers' paper said. "It would only be made necessary by the fact that the capacity represented as available by the providers is not available in fact."'
This reads to me like a freemium service; not an open and neutral internet existing alongside a managed, paid network, but instead a free service that would get stomped on if and when paying users' promised dedicated bandwidth / resources exceeded those available.
Shame on those high-profile personalities who signed this document. This is NOT a solution. This is taking it up the tucus.
The simplest solution is to not allow the companies to advertise their services as connecting to the internet, or world wide web. If they can't say they can access it, people will be hesitant to purchase their service unless they make it otherwise desirable.
Maybe they can offer private lines like our telephones.. The wire is already there.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
With all due respect to the 32 internet rock stars, it is fairly clear from TFA that these guys all remember when Keith Richards was young.
It sounds like they are selling out to the lobbyists that kiss their asses. Everything seems a bit too self contradictory.
A better question is "when did we ever think that the internet would/should/could be open and fair?"
Bruce Perens, founder of the open-source software movement?
Are you kidding me??
Yeah, you know, "Open Source", the movement started in the late 90s, defined in terms that make it a superset of all the various licenses that allow access to and adaptation of the source code? Bruce Perens was one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and the primary author of the OSI's definition of Open Source Software. That Open Source movement.
Much as "Open Source" isn't the same thing as software libre or "Free Software" in the FSF sense, so too are the founders of the "Open Source" software movement not necessarily the same as those of the software libre movement or similar movements, or the authors of the software in question.
Bow-ties are cool.
When the Internet first started, you had a backbone that was paid for by government dollars(tax money), and back in those days, it was easy to be able to advocate for that backbone to be covered by net neutrality rules. As the Internet became more commercial, it became more and more difficult for the government to be able to set rules for the overall Internet. What we have today is the result, where the old government sponsored backbone is only used by a tiny fraction of the overall user base, and setting net neutrality rules would not make much sense at this point since telling a private company what they can or can not do on their own network is against the very nature of private enterprise.
If the government were to really push for a massive backbone for the PUBLIC Internet, and put lots of money behind it, then rules could be applied to THAT backbone, leaving QoS issues to each private ISP that connects to it, but without much overall ability to impact service levels. The government could also set up NAPs at various places around the Internet where any ISP could connect to it free of charge(paying only for the line connecting them to the NAP) as a way to bypass any discrimination by private ISPs. The old MAE-east and MAE-west used to be some of the primary places for ISPs to connect to each other, but the Internet has grown and evolved, and with the old NAPs being privately owned and operated, you couldn't count on Net Neutrality rules working today.
Again, setting Net Neutrality for any privately owned and operated part of the Internet should be seen as the government pushing to control a private business without having been a primary financial source to fund that business. As a result, if the government has not paid to take a majority stake in a business, then the government should not have the right to demand ANYTHING, except for help in upholding the law in select cases, such as stopping kiddie porn, and even then, it is difficult to justify that an ISP MUST monitor traffic to identify illegal activity. Again, government forcing the private sector to spend money/resources for some new dictate just goes against the idea of government not watching everything private citizens are doing.
Erm, well, by that definition, I would consider Eric S. Raymond, rather than Bruce Perens, as the founder of the open source movement. After all, he coined the term "open source" and was the first person to "codify" its methods (i.e.;, CaTB)
My blog
I think AC still doesn't understand what "Open Source" really means.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
This sounds like a major concession by some of the pro net neutrality leaders. They shouldn't be suggesting this at all. By proposing a separate, open internet, they have pretty much given ISPs exactly what they want. What's worse, the average content provider won't know or won't care and will shovel out cash to enter the newly created walled garden, leaving the open internet to rot.
Unless there is an impartial third party whose sole charter is to resell access to the lines, there is no such thing as separate. It is a fine idea, but it completely ignores reality.
What we need to do, is exactly what Australia is doing; appropriate Verizon's fiber, and build out a national fiber network, to be shared by all ISPs and content providers with the desire to compete. (Sure, they paid Telstra, but the billions upon billions in subsidies here should more than cover it.)
Given a fair and competitive market, let Comcast/TWC and their ilk wall off their own little sections of fail. Without it though, any attempt at "separate" will completely ruin the Internet.
This sounds like a great plan. Everybody knows how successful HAM radio and public television have been.
I agree completely. if people want a closed internet they can fuck off and start a second one. we've already got an open one, keep that closed shit off my tubes
"Separate But Equal" anyone?
"Remember when I said I would never lie? Well, that was the first time."
It makes me think of separate but equal. Man the internet wants to be open, let it be open.
Hey, if Woz is on board, then sign me up.
This is the most insightful analogy I've ever seen on /.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Actually, I signed it "co-founder". And I have a video of me acknowledging Richard Stallman, at the U.N. no less, so don't fault me on that. I say that we're standing on his shoulders, and Richard, no kidding, grabs his shoulders and covers them!
Bruce Perens.
a fast lane for advertising tv network gone digital slow lane virtual open slum for the rest?
I signed it "co-founder", the article gets that wrong. And of course I acknowledge that RMS is the founder of the Free Software movement and Open Source stands upon his shoulders, just as RMS acknowledges that Free Software existed before he came along. There are several online videos of me speaking in which I explicitly acknowledge RMS, one of them shot at the U.N. Summit on the Information Society.
Bruce Perens.
Actually, Christine Petersen coined the term "Open Source" at the meeting where the formation of a separate Open Source campaign was first discussed. She was at the time married to the nanotechnology guru Eric Drexler. I created the Open Source Definition 9 months before ESR got involved, as the Debian Free Software Guidelines. And I'm pretty clear that RMS writings came long before CaTB.
Bruce Perens.
How can we have a neutral internet with Bruce Perens appearing to nose about right in the middle of all our chin-wagging?
If you want to do that, you buy a 400-amp service. Or however high you need. Each home has a particular number of amps in the service that has been purchased for it, and that is the absolute maximum it can use, and that is set at a fair level that is regulated by the state public utilities commission. If you can't get service powerful enough where you live, you have to buy one where you can, and that's an industrial area.
The service actually does discriminate between resistive and reactive loads (see Power Factor). But they give you technical means to transform any reactive load into one that looks close to a resistive one. They don't say you can only have Republican electricity or Democratic electricity. That is what some folks want to do with the internet, and which we object to.
Bruce Perens.
I have just wasted the last 24 minutes loading all that Scribd garbage on this slow connection only to find that downloading the document requires a Facebook account. Why is this document not on the Open Internet, I ask? If an Open Internet is what is wanted, why use closed and privacy assaulting services like Facebook? What happened to HTML?
Scribd is only giving me the first 3 pages (of eight). I cannot download the page without identifying myself. Scribd is absolutely full of advertising -- probably three quarters of the time I just wasted loading the site. What is Free or Open about that?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
This is an absolutely terrible idea. Essentially allowing major corporations to engineer a closed internet, incrementally eroding any semblance of net neutrality, and then destroying the old internet once enough of their cronies have signed on to the new one. If this is allowed, expect paywalls, copious amounts of advertising, and strong authentication(i.e. no anonymity).
Enough with the lawyers and the experts and the founders and celebutards and the weasel words and the studies and white papers and the focus groups.
BUILD BIGGER PIPES.
You own the pipe? Then make it bigger. How many times do I have to tell you guys? Are you slow on the uptake? Get your wallets out and spend. This is the ONLY SOLUTION!
Dad said, 'No' so you ask Mom? Mom says no, so you try whining? I am sick of your whining.
Go to your room and don't come out until you got that cable plow gassed up and your steel toed boots on.
Throttlers will be hanged at sunrise.
Right beside the censors.
Get on the future already.
that the major issue here is that the backhaul planning for the net is based on projections based on a mostly "download" usage, where a user would download a web page or a new emails and then go quiet again. With torrenting, streaming media and similar, this changes. Torrenting is as much upload as download, while streaming media is a constant download rather then a short spike when the email checker kicks in or the user clicks a link.
With old style net use, the ISPs could sell a fast connection at the user end, and not touch the backhaul. This because the spike would be over soon. And the only time there would be a issue was when multiple users on the same backhaul tried to do something at the exact same time, saturating the backhaul for that short time.
Thing is that for the ISP, laying new backhaul is up front expensive. And especially in areas where they have a monopoly (for whatever reason), they will get a better ROI by getting people to change their usage habits then digging ditches (especially if they can get something like call minutes or kwh in there).
This is not really different to how local call could be free, while long distance was by the minute. This because everyone in the local zone had a wire going to the same switching station anyways, and a wire could only carry a single call, so a second caller would get a busy signal anyways. Long distance however was a limited number of wires out of the local zone, shared among all the people in said zone. As such, keeping the individual uses of those wires short meant more users could be served by fewer actual wires.
So they are trying their best to stuff the "always, everywhere" genie back into the lamp...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Heh. I searched for "bruce perens" in the comments just to see if anyone else picked up on this. My first reaction was also "huh ?" especially since the summary doesn't capitalize Open Source and just refers to it as a concept. (note this is nothing against Mr. Perens, who is certainly a beg cheese in Free/free software, just against whoever wrote the summary).
This would effectively create two Internets--one free and one premium. The free one would likely become clogged in time--much like the model envisioned by Orson Scott Card in Ender's Game. For something written in the mid-'80s, Card's picture of a two-tier Internet was quite prescient.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I believe the question of what shall become of the Internet is very important. I would be fascinated though to hear what possible justification there could be for letting WOZ sit on it. The class of people that should be thinking about this issue are people like the folks that designed the Internet to begin with, BBN. Perhaps some representatives from Anti-virus companies to explain Internet pollution. The fellow that did most of the work on DNS. Some people from the telecoms that understand the growth factors. Having invented the cheapest floppy controller does not make one an expert on the Internet. Marshall Rose would be a good candidate because he foresaw decades ago the need to transition into IP V6.
crap about rules for the internet. I'm getting close to hauling out the old modems and firing up the bbs.
Shirky's no "Net Pioneer", he's a hack burped up by the "Silicon Alley" ripoffs central to what caused the .com Bubble to collapse.
Woz isn't a "Net Pioneer", either. By the time Apple was on anything like the Internet, Woz had already spent several years since his last worthwhile pioneering effort at Apple, and hasn't done anything technologically interesting since then.
None of those people really can claim any demonstration that they know what they're talking about today.
--
make install -not war
Actually, I signed it "co-founder". And I have a video of me acknowledging Richard Stallman, at the U.N. no less, so don't fault me on that.
I didn't actually fault you on anything... I was just clarifying a point in the summary which, honestly, gave me the same initial (if momentary) reaction as that of the AC.
Bow-ties are cool.
How can we have a neutral internet with Bruce Perens appearing to nose about right in the middle of all our chin-wagging?
I know, right? I mean, here I am expecting a bunch of chins and suddenly there's this nose to deal with...
Bow-ties are cool.
Wozniak? Perens? and who is this Shirky guy? like what net-related activities were they involved in the '70s to dub them 'net pioneers'?
User maintains more than a dozen sockpuppet accounts on Slashdot.
OK. Thanks.
Bruce Perens.
You mean you were expecting the usual crowd of horse's asses on Slashdot and suddenly there's the horse's mouth :-)
Bruce Perens.
Sigh. I signed it as "co-founder of the Open Source movement in software", in an attempt to get some credibility for the issue. Unfortunately a lot of the folks who were in favor of Net Neutrality in congress aren't going to be in congress any longer. We are in a really bad position and this is an attempt to get some movement back on the field.
Bruce Perens.
You mean you were expecting the usual crowd of horse's asses on Slashdot and suddenly there's the horse's mouth :-)
Heh. Maybe I'll be a horse one of these days. If that doesn't work out I guess I could chase my dream of becoming the king of the pirates. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
in the world.
Governments set market rules and are responsible for deciding what is GOOD business and what isn't. The "free market" idea simply says that all business is good business, which it isn't.
Blogging because I can...
...and you may, of course, disagree with me, is that the internet WOULD be open if there was an open market. As it stands, this market is only available to a small percentage of companies, because investment is so high. After all, every company needs their own network. Reselling makes even inventive and unconventional companies dependant on the network provider's prices. This means that onlyx a very select few companies control access to the network. In Switzerland, that's basically two companies: Swisscom for DSL and Cablecom for, you guessed it, cable. There cannot be real competition with only two networks.
I propose that the government should own the network (as it should gas, water and electricity lines, railways, streets and so on) and 'hire' a company to maintain and upgrade it. This should happen in a non-profit fashion and the available capacity should then be sold at the lowest price possible to providers (of internet, TV, phone services and so on). There would only be one line to your house for all data related services.
I just don't quite see how it could ever be a good idea to privatize infrastructure the public is so very dependant on.
As long as it is the Porn the gets priorotized then i'm all for it!
I'm observant of the fact: I'm being irradiated by no less than 6 strong WiFi signals networks at any given time (12 at the moment) in Houston.
Turn all those into ad-hoc networks, and connect the overlapping nets together. It's not much different than the wired web. It's still a bunch of routers between me and my destination that I really don't trust.
Whatever happened to Packet Radio?
Personally, having a BBS back in the day, I envisioned The Open Internet as a fusion between HAM radio & high speed FidoNet. Where anyone could just hook up a signal repeater and join what we call "the cloud" today... Today's Internet is so far from "the cloud", it should really be called "the grave", yeah, see, it's actually in/near the ground & everyone eventually gets there if they try hard enough -- plus, "in the grave" sounds exactly like how using dial-up (or any AT&T service) actually feels.
When I found out "the Internet is going to be Wired?!" I thought, nah, this is a just a phase, our wireless utopia will be here soon, boy was I wrong -- totally underestimated the telco's greed & unwillingness to spend money on infrastructure.
Naturally I was equally unimpressed with "Internet2". This most recent "Open Internet" sounds just as closed as ever to me.
Cellular packet data is closer to what I call "the cloud", Wimax, and LTE, etc is getting there, but if we're using wires for the majority Internet mk2, count me out... Meanwhile, I'll be hooking up my wifi router to my HAM equipment & building a truly open global ad hock WiFi network instead.
George Soros buys Comcast, turns it private, and pushes Fox News and all other right-wing media to the absolute back of the bandwidth bus. A Network Neutrality bill will be passed and signed into law within the week of purchase.
Al Gore isn't helping?
I'm sorry analogy invalid. /. requires all analogies to involve cars.
Telecommunications Infrastructure Access Provider (IAP) is the internet (1 & 2)... plus..., sort of like the multinational power-grid of the US and CA or the EU and others. What typically (almost always [I Guess] 99.999...%) travels across the infrastructure is vanilla/electricity to the infrastructure. There is a cost for the infrastructure, a cost for connecting to the infrastructure, and a monthly, Internet Access Providers (IAP, like the infrastructure AP ATT, Comcast, Airport WiFi...], utility fee for connection and volume/quantity, but no charge for quality, purity, uniqueness....
Information and services are always vanilla to the IAP singular core business of selling bandwidth/volume and access/connection. IOW: Power/Electricity generated in Canada may be in use by customers in Alabama with many infrastructure owners in between the product/service producer and consumer; So, only the product/service provider and consumer care about access and availability. IAPs and their investors want a stable/hostage customer-income/profit base.
Yes, an IAP and the Gas-Company can be an ISP for marketing, billing... purposes, but the primary purpose of the IAP is just like any utility. The IAP pays the (telecommunications) infrastructure company a fee for providing adequate bandwidth/volume to meet customer demands for the gas, electricity, bandwidth... and global telecommunication infrastructure utility connectivity/access.
The W3 is the presentation of information and services globally by Internet Service Providers (ISP). There are (I suspect) globally more than a few million ISPs, from small family/business websites to major .Com, .Gov, .Mil enterprise http/https web-portals.
If the W3-ISP want to charge for providing a service to a customer (information, pictures, movies...), then that is business. If the IAP wants to charge for more bandwidth and/or connections then that is business. I like capitalism.
If the IAP wants to vary prices on the basis of what the ISP provides, then that (IMO) is double-billing, fraud, theft of property, plutocratic-bullshit, has nothing to do with capitalism, but is governance by statist-socialism.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
So wouldn't it be better to lobby our new representatives for what we want, than to compromise to something that we can only guess that they may like?
I mean, you're selling the ranch for a horse and the market isn't even open yet. It's good to plan ahead, but lets not abandon all hope before we even talk with the new group of legislatures.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Am I right in thinking that this is the 'money quote'?
"If a service provides prioritised access to a particular application or endpoint/destination, it is not an open Internet service," the group said. "Representations as to capacity and speed for the Internet must describe only capacity and speed allocated to Internet service."
If I understand this correctly, an ISP could only say 'up to 8MB per second' with regard to the Open Internet. I like this. It means that they can't use their proprietary services as the benchmark in advertising or rate/price setting. Only their performance WRT the open internet would count.
I would only add that they should also be required to provide speed data including a continuous profile of their entire system on an hour-by-hour and day-of-the-week basis, and speed should be defined according to a more useful model than 'Up to blah'. IOW the bandwidth should be only legally describable as what a typical user can reasonably expect at a given hour on an average day of the week, according to a single industry-accepted model. This would allow us poor users to judge our ISP or a prospective ISP according to common standards. In fact, in the ideal world, all ISPs would be required to publish their hourly average for the last 365 days, and show lag times. This is analogous to airlines' on-time data.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
We end up paying even more rediculous amounts for access to the "free" internet, in addition to still paying the outrageous amounts we already pay now. It'd end up being some sort of tiered service. No. Fuck this. Net neutrality all the way, or NO internet at all.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If I read the article correctly, especially this quote ...
"If a service provides prioritised access to a particular application or endpoint/destination, it is not an open Internet service," the group said. "Representations as to capacity and speed for the Internet must describe only capacity and speed allocated to Internet service."
... then we are talking not about physical connections but about how the ISP promotes services - if they provide a proprietary service at 100 Mb/s, and the 'Open Internet' at 8Mb/s, then they can not advertise that they provide 100Mb/s internet. So in the common measure of performance they must compete on the basis of access to the open internet. Of course they can still advertise about how they provide 100Mb/s for their cool game, but they can't call it an internet game.
Then the market will determine what happens - some content providers (from me and you to CNN, for example), will make the choice of which way to go and the network effect becomes a significant factor in the decision.
I haven't finished reading TFA entirely yet so I'm sure there is more to it, but hey.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Sweet I propose we create a new internet without accountability. A 100% anonymousness network.. the Anontranet! the high level protocol stack will be encrypted by default. No IPs no static route just lazy swarming data streams going to-and-fro ... what a wonderful world it would be...
Would you care to restate your question? ...or, perhaps we can argue about the big companies, who stood to profit BIG from that war, putting money into politics, side-stepping common sense regulations?
Maybe you are just a bit pissed, because governments do actually make the rules, and business isn't always to be trusted? ...or, failure to find a operating free market is frustrating?
Longing for the wild west again, where the rich got really rich, and a lot of other people just died, or maybe the roaring 20's filled with robber barons, crashing the economy, in a fashion not unlike what we saw recently?
Or does the idea of corporate welfare more or less disturb the free market idea entirely? Seems to me, hard core free market ideology applied to those huge financial corporations would have brought us all ruin, because they pushed all their cost and risk onto us?
You know, privatize the profits, socialize the losses kind of thing?
So we bailed them out, government working for the people right there, got paid back, and that just goes to show how risky truly free enterprise really is?
Heh...
Big business used a light regulation environment to gamble the nations wealth away, while outsourcing it's jobs, leaving the people poor, unable to meet their own needs.
They hatched the plan, they paid to get people elected, and they did the work to break the middle class. That's your free markets right there. Freedom to persue unlimited and socially unjust exploitation for private gain.
No thanks.
It's a damn good thing no such market exists. It would be very dangerous.
Me? Since I am part of the government, and in the US, it's supposed to be about WE THE PEOPLE, I think I'll take the side where Government watches over my ass, keeping me healthy, free of toxins, living in a place that I can appreciate, and working for wages that makes sense, over big trans-national corporations doing everything they can to push their costs and risks onto ordinary people.
When government is doing it's proper role, representing the people, business is checked, so that the product of all of it is good for everybody, not just the owners of the businesses. That's the key distinction worth noting.
Without that check, it's every person for themselves, fuck the future, fuck the other guy, because it's all about the money, and nothing else.
You don't matter, I don't matter, nobody or no thing matters, but the money.
Believe it. It's the total, naked truth.
Blogging because I can...
Open Source is a dead movement and a failed project. RMS has turned out to be correct on everything. Long live Free Software.