Re: Google modules integration

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Richard Stallman writes:
 >      > We should recommend that people not give Google Maps
 >      > specific addresses.
 > Huh?  That's very close to recommending not to use the service!
 > 
 > I am surprised you say so, since I use Google Maps.

You are not a typical user.

 > Instead of giving an address, I request a town, then look around it
 > and find where it is.

Maybe that works for you, but I assure it won't work for the majority
of people in Japan.  It's possible, but due to both idiosyncracies in
the addresses themselves and the dependence on public transit, with
extremely complex linkage of schedules, pricing, and even physical
connections, nobody with an appointment would do it that way.  It will
take too much time and effort to connect all the relevant information,
when Google Maps or Yahoo Maps will do it all for you, often in less
than one second, and at price zero.

 >     E.g., if the addresses are public knowledge anyway (eg, the
 >     location of the FSF offices), what's the harm?  Perhaps "not
 >     give personal addresses" is what you mean.

 > I would rather not give any address

Again, you are atypical.  You are extremely protective of your
personal freedom.  ISTR you have argued against such institutions as
(legal) marriage because the contract might bind you to a person you
don't feel like being obligated to any more.  You argue that the
purchase of a single proprietary program subjects one to a domination
akin to slavery.  I also suspect that you are more likely to attract
the attention of abusers of such information than most people because
you are a well-known activist.

However, most people are willing to accept that the benefits of
constraining others via such contractual relationships are worth
accepting similar constraints themselves.  Similarly, most people are
willing to accept a small chance that knowledge of the addresses
they're interested in might be abused.

 > unless I were going through TOR.

So go through TOR.  Assuming that, is there a problem with getting a
map to the FSF offices?

 >     This is grandstanding again.  Sure, the choir will use it, but
 >     we came to call the sick, not the healthy, right?

 > I don't enjoy being insulted.  If you make your point without
 > insults, I will read it.

I take issue with the word "insult".  I described your behavior, not
you.

However, I'm sorry it made you feel bad.  Let me rephrase: While
freedom is a universal value, not everyone values it as you do.  In
particular, many people see freedom as a multidimensional,
continuously variable attribute of society.  Many see freedom as a
relative value, which can be compared to and traded against other
values to a more or less limited degree (cf. marriage and purchases of
a single proprietary software program).

In the case of free software, this difference turned out not to
matter, because the open source movement was right: there were (and
are) sufficient economic advantages to free software to give it
momentum in some very strange places (eg, three of the companies most
active in the pursuit of the advantages of monopolized technology:
IBM, Sun, and Apple), as well as among ordinary hackers.  These
companies (well, two of them, anyway) continue to protect and extend
the domain of free software for those economic reasons today, although
they clearly do not hold software freedom as a principle as important
as, let alone more important than, profit.

However, you also were (and are) right.  Somebody has to talk about
freedom itelf, not just as an instrument of economic growth.  Freedom
is an essential value for human beings, and free software is an aspect
of that.  Unfortunately, as freedom-loving as you are, you
nevertheless found it necessary to build a wall between the free
software movement, and the open source movement, many of whose leaders
are just as dedicated to freedom in their own way, though without
making software freedom an absolute value, and who believed that it
was possible to promote software freedom in terms of its instrumental
values, rather than for its own sake.

What I fear is that you will once again draw a line between yourself
and those not as extreme as yourself, over the database-ization of
social networks, not just those which we call "social networks"
(F***B**k and friends), but also the implicit networks defined by
people traveling to meet friends or to eat dinner, making phone calls
to their mothers or their brokers, etc.  I fear we will once again
hear of "traitors to the movement" and "backsliders", and so on.  But
this time I think it matters a lot more to the success of the
movement, for the reasons set forth in my previous post.

To summarize those reasons, the economics of software are basically
the economics of programming behavior combined with network economies,
and this promotes growth of free software in several ways which do not
depend on the degree to which users value software freedom (although
of course that is an additional promoting factor).  The economics of
"social databases" (for want of a better name, and I don't think
that's a good one, although it's better than "Web 2.0" :-) is a
combination of network economics (as with software) and those of trade
secrets, which is not going to work strongly for "free social
databases" in the way that it did (and does) for free software.  It is
going to be important that all lovers of freedom work together.  We
will need (IMO) to avoid ostracizing those who find reasons to support
"free social databases" other than the pure value of freedom.

To misquote another great lover of freedom, in this case I fear that
if we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately.