Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Free as in Freedom Access to Hardware

[Bryan Baldwin]

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On 07/08/2012 06:15 AM, Thomas Harding wrote:
> I fully agree with that. A strong, good "constitution" is needed to
>  try to avoid problems.
> 
> A point of failure is "who is in charge" of hardware/sysadmin. In 
> fact, even on Savannah you are in lack of admins, as it needs huge
>  capabilities.
> 
> Another is : "there is a unused amount of money, what is the next 
> investment?" Worse: there is an hardware failure we can't afford 
> with "federal reserve", who can afford?
> 
> The Debian ballot model could be a good start point on
> "decisions".
> 

I find this moving away from a situation that is easily for a GPL analog
to address. There are arguments, discussions, and fighting in all
societies everywhere all the time over what model is most appropriate
for the management of resources. I don't think we can come up something
would be good enough in every situation in a mailing list discussion,
but, the way in which FSF handled peer review for version 3 of the GPL
and friends might be a good starting point.

Part of the problem is scale, and part of the problem is availability.
When only a small number of people have what is required to provide a
global resource, they themselves become the attack vector for abusing
that resource. Before coming to New Zealand, I remember a rather
disturbing black out in the Northeastern United States (and parts of
Canada), which was able to occur because power networking is too
centralized.

Borrowing from Professor Moglen's ideology, free hardware (runnig free
software) is the second step in attacking this problem. In this case,
we mean that the specifications, designs, and interfaces for the
hardware we use to effect our destinies are shared in the commons in
the same way that human-readable source code is shared in the commons
by copyleft licensing.
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