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Man Tries To Live an Open Source Life For a Year
jfruh writes "Sam Muirhead, a New Zealand filmmaker living Berlin, will, on the 1st of August, begin an experiment in living an open source life for a year. But this is going way beyond just trading in his Mac for a Linux machine and Final Cut Pro for Novacut. He's also going to live in a house based on an open source design, and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process.""
...if you try, why not go a year without DRM?
But... but... hasn't Stallman been doing this for years already?
I really don't want to know is how one programs in toilet paper. Worse, visions of managers telling me I have to eat more taco bell because my... production... is too low. Oh, the puns, the humanity. -_-
More seriously, it would be more accurate to say that he is trying to live a lifestyle in which only products that are part of the public domain or the mechanisms by which it operates must be made available for inspection, and any changes documented and also similarly made available, without cost. Considering how I have even found 'patent pending' stamped on spoons and forks (really, I mean... really?)... I don't imagine he'll be able to survive the year. At least not without a lot of rationalizing and hair pulling.
But while the experiment will probably ultimately fail, it will at least show beyond any doubt how deeply corporations have penetrated into every faucet of daily living. It is simply not possible to live in modern society without giving the devil his due.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Even then, he's gonna starve in the short term.... takes a while to grow. Guess he could make his own bow and go hunting & gathering...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
You do realize that "Open Source Women" are the one with the pretty old professional skill set???
Perhaps, but men are the retards that keep paying for a free product.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What makes you think that? Like many folks in Europe, Germans aren't big on GMO foods.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Honestly depending where he lives, he might not have an issue. Local farms are a source of meat, if you talk to the farmers you can find out what they feed their stock (most of them are more than glad to answer actually). Lots of foods can be foraged (I make trips once a week to forage as a hobby) and during the summer it can yield several pounds of berries at a time. These get canned, preserved, or jellied. I grow a huge garden and what I can't eat immediately gets either dehydrated or canned. Public water here has its contents documented, so we'll consider that open source. I grow my own hops, and brew my own beer with them. Honestly after a good growing season, I'd feel comfortable saying that I could live around 70% off of foraged and homegrown foods. I could easily up it to 90-100% but my fiance would kill me for taking over the yard. Not that my case is the norm (and foraging is a weird, albiet fun and fulfilling hobby to get into), but if he is dedicating himself to it and preparing in advance I don't think it would be that difficult.
...you consider that good?
No woman for this guy. I guess they want the finer things in life!
You need to get out of the basement more. Women don't want the finer things in life. They want the finer people in life. Most women I know who married a rich guy feel they married beneath them. They went through relationship after relationship, meeting asshole after asshole, and finally they decided that if they couldn't have someone who was intelligent, kind, humorous, and compassionate, they'd settle for getting knocked up by some rich guy... at least their kids will be provided for, and there's some chance of being loved in return then.
This guy is willing to take a year out of his life to experiment with art, to answer a question about existance and meaning. This is a guy who is confident enough in who he is and has a solid grasp of what he wants out of life. Unless he's a 4 bagger, odds are good someone will take him home... idealists tend to be compassionate and considerate, and will likely treat his woman with respect and kindness. Now all he needs is a job, a car that doesn't have the death rattle, and some living space... he'll have trouble keeping the girls away.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I once spent 2 hours walking around with RMS looking for a restaurant that he liked AND served pepsi. This was in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, where most good restaurants have an exclusive deal with Coca Cola. In each place we entered, he asked if they served coke, and in a few places he insisted on speaking with the manager and when he got his way, he explained to him in gruesome details all the atrocities the Coca Cola company did in Colombia to workers.
I firmly believe in Free Software, and I admire RMS for everything he has done for the world. I try to uphold my principles, but this semi-religious thing of taking it to the extreme and avoiding anything even remotely related to something you disagree with, as if it was permanently tainted by immorality, is just plain stupid.
My company tries to free under the GPL as many products as possible, but if we freed certain things, we would be out of business. If I refused to use privative software at all, I couldn't even use a phone (even if the soft is free, the GSM firmware won't be).
What this guy is doing is just a publicity stunt, and a fairly stupid one at that. He thinks he's sending a message, but it's not the one he's thinking about.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I took a dump today.. Seriously this is just attention seeking, link bait. If I didn't know better I'd think it was a paid /. add.
It's a lot more than that; plenty of non-GE crops are patented. For example, say you go to buy a Fuji apple. What could be more open source than that right? Not if it is a Gale Gala, a patented bud sport of Fuji, or if he picks up a peach, it might be one of the many patented Flamin' Fury peaches. If he eats a carrot, it might have the patented line S-D813B as a parent, or if he eats a pepper, it might be the patented hybrid 9942815. Lots of plants, not just genetically engineered ones, are patented, so avoiding every patented fruit, vegetable, grain, nut, oil crop, ect. and any food produced with them would be quite the challenge.
I don't know how things are in Germany, but I'd have to imagine they grow their share of patented crops there, and even if they didn't he'd have to watch out for anything imported from countries where those varieties are grown. You'd pretty much have to eat exclusively whole fruits and vegetables that you know the variety, or things where the varieties are very likely to be not under patent like lychee or persimmon, and maybe things that haven't had much breeding work done on them like kiwanos and jícamas.
No most crops are still non-gmo, well lab gmo. We've been modifying livestock and breeding plant species far beyond anything natural for centuries and playing with genes before we knew what genes where.
GMO is generally scary because it is done in a lab with white coats. The white coats apparently add the danger.
What is objectionable about existing toilet paper from an "open source" point of view? Plain toilet paper isn't a creative work (specialty paper with artwork on it might be), so it can't be copyrighted. And patents only last about 20 years while toilet paper has been manufactured for much longer than that, so any patents on the manufacturing process or the paper itself would have expired some time ago. Shouldn't he be OK if he just buys a generic store brand without any fancy new features or copyrighted art on the package?
Of course any toilet paper brand name is likely to be covered by a trademark, but if that is enough to make it not "open source", then Firefox is not open source software either.
What I cringe about "open source" that it is used as some kind of synonym for something that makes everything automatically good. I bet that by large the biggest benefit of open source software is that it's usually free in cost.
it's never free...
"he'll have trouble keeping the girls away."
And when the girls do come a running Open source condoms therefore are going to be a much more "interesting and possibly painful process." I suspect.
I think in this case, I'd choose closed source condoms lest i get open sores.
I'm far more scared of Monsanto than I am of white coats.
Sent from my PDP-11
No woman for this guy. I guess they want the finer things in life!
You need to get out of the basement more. Women don't want the finer things in life. They want the finer people in life. Most women I know who married a rich guy feel they married beneath them. They went through relationship after relationship, meeting asshole after asshole, and finally they decided that if they couldn't have someone who was intelligent, kind, humorous, and compassionate, they'd settle for getting knocked up by some rich guy... at least their kids will be provided for, and there's some chance of being loved in return then.
So, your evidence that women want finer guys and not rich ones is that the women you know who married rich guys claim that although they were totally selling out and marrying for money it is OK because all men are assholes anyway? Of course they feel they married beneath them. They chose to marry someone for economic reasons rather than the quality of the person. Or maybe you meant to say "Women want the finer people... but when it comes down to it, they would rather settle for the finer things and rationalize that it is OK since all men are assholes anyway."
What about open source babies(whatever that means)?
Well... I assume in most cases it means someone had an idea of how a baby should behave, but he couldn't make changes to existing babies, so thought it'd be a good idea to create his own baby, possibly much like many other babies out there, although different because he could make it behave the way he wanted it to. He had all kinds of grand ideas and greatly enjoyed the process of making the baby. But after it was made, he realized that it actually takes a lot of work to keep it running. The baby relies on volunteers to get it going and fix problems - sometimes that happens, other times it doesn't. Lots of people want to do the easy and fun things (like play peek-a-boo), but no one wants to do the hard work (like changing the poopy diaper). Few, if any, are willing to donate money to offset the costs of developing the baby. But they will definitely tell him how to manage his baby. Many are rude in doing so. The whole thing becomes a big hassle and he starts to lose interest in his baby. Eventually the baby ends up abandoned waiting for someone else to take interest in it and keep it alive.
http://freebeer.org/blog/about
Nooo...its scary because no matter how hard we worked in centuries past we couldn't cross corn with a starfish, or fruit with squid and THAT is why GMO is scary, because frankly some of the shit they are coming up with can't even be truly classified as plant anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sounds like he lives on the street.
This might come close: http://www.localmotors.com/
More complicated:
Selective breeding = tinkering with parameters and settings.
GM = changing part of the program binary.
Actually, it's quite fascinating, how flexible the genetic code is, because all dogs for instance share the same genetic code, the chihuahua has the same genes as the pitbull or the the scottish border collie. The only difference are the allels, the actual settings on the individual genes.
Until the year is up, since there is no readily available open source CPU to run any open source software on.
I don't think there is any such thing as a fully open source hardware computer
If not absolutely open in all ways, I believe the Lemote Yeeloong is the closest it's possible to get to it; its firmware is entirely free software, and it's the only hardware RMS will endorse.
If I refused to use privative software at all, I couldn't even use a phone (even if the soft is free, the GSM firmware won't be).
Yes, you can. Try OsmocomBB (http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/). It's a free software GSM solution for several Motorola phones and the Neo Freerunner.
Fair enough. Now explain grafting.
You say this:
and I admire RMS for everything he has done for the world.
then you say this:
taking it to the extreme ... is just plain stupid.
The only reason he has done all of that stuff is BECAUSE he takes it to the extreme. You cannot have one without the other.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
One is that women are actually people too (I know this seems to amaze many geeks) and as such are varied in their wants and desires. What one woman finds ideal may utterly repulse another. There is no one "What women want," standard. Were there, it would be well known. In all of human interaction there is no One True Way(tm) that makes everyone happy, so any time someone tells you they know what it is all women want, you know they are full of shit.
Another is that women (like all people) lie about what they want. Not just to others, but to themselves too. You will see a woman claim they want one thing in a relationship and yet seek out the exact opposite time and time again. That is no coincidence or happenstance, it is because what they claim they want and what they actually want are not the same thing. This is particularly problematic when they haven't analyzed it for themselves and are lying to themselves, so they aren't even really aware of what it is they are actually seeking out.
So just because a woman says "What I really want is a nice, caring guy," that doesn't mean that is what she actually wants. Also even if she does it doesn't mean that it is a particularly high priority. She may have other attributes she values more but doesn't say. For example she may like a nice caring guy but place a far lower value on that than having a guy who has a lot of money and an "alpha male" personality. She'd take it all if she can get it, but when it comes down to it she'll trade nice for the higher priorities.
Finally there is the problem of unrealistic expectations, which again all humans suffer from but research indicates with regards to relationships women suffer from it more. Women rate the majority of men as below average. That is of course statistically impossible so the real problem is one of perception. A great many women feel they are having to settle for someone who isn't as "good" as they are. They have unrealistic expectations, and and unrealistic assessment of what they bring to the table.
You can see this in online dating profiles where you will have someone who specifies a massive list of must and must nots for their potential partner, something that cuts the potential dating pool down to essentially nobody. Thus they either remain single complaining about how bad everyone is or they "settle" for someone "beneath them" since nobody can meet their unreasonably high and specific standards.
For that matter, "settling" is what you have to do. Nobody is perfect, you have to deal with another person's flaws. Dan Savage has a bunch of great things to say on this topic but one of the best is that there's no "the one" out there, no perfect person for you. There's just the 0.64 that you round up. You find someone you love and you pay the prices of admission, dealing with the things they do that aren't perfect for you, because the whole package is worth it.
Hi, I'm the one doing the stupid publicity stunt. Yes, it's a publicity stunt, but not for me, rather for the idea of free software, libre hardware, and alternative ways of licensing. I'm from outside the world of software and tech, and very few people I know have even heard of open source or copyleft. I want to reach those people, as well as publicise and give credit to people who are doing amazing work in the fields of free software and libre hardware. I'm not saying that everybody should try to live 100% open source. In the current situation and economic system, that would, as you say, be stupid. This is about taking an idea to an extreme to get people thinking about how products are licensed, to think about how different business models could work and affect their industries, and to rethink the way they live and the things they buy. And I'm quite prepared to look stupid doing it.
Grafting does not influence the genome or the genome settings. You could even argue, that the grafted plant is not a single individuum, but in fact two plants, or even more, if you graft more than one scion on the same stock. My parents once had a pear tree with at least five different scions. So grafting would be akin to have two (or more) copies of the same program with individual settings coupled together. I even have a setup like that running at a customer site, where a minimal Lotus Domino installation at one server works as connector between a non-IBM-software on the same computer and the real Domino server. The minimal Domino is grafted onto the original Domino installation.
I should probably explain a couple of key points about the project. Yes, it is a naive and impossible aim. I am probably not going to have lived 100% open source by the end of year, if that is even possible. But that does not mean that the project will have failed. The project is about the attempt and through that, I want to get the ideas of open source into as many people's minds as possible. As explained in my video, for some aspects of my life I won't be able to find a suitable solution, and I might not be able to be develop one, even with help from experts and others. This project is about trying to find the limits of the philosophy, both the current limits (as in where free software, libre hardware and open source stands today) and also the theoretical limits (could an 'open source' airline ever exist? should we allow access, modification and redistribution of swine flu?) It's also about trying to summarize and define different approaches - for many people, copyleft, permissive licenses, public domain and traditional copyright are unclear terms with unclear consequences, and I hope that by holding these ideas up against different products and services that we use in our everyday lives, people will gain a better understanding of them.
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html