Free Software Movement's Impact on Society
How do you think the Free Software movement will impact our society overall?
I have seen where the philosophy and principles that undergird Free Software are being tried out in fields of discipline well beyond technology. Stallman has argued that education ought to be Free (libre, that is). There is a growing Free Culture movement which is impacting art, books and music. How do you think the Free Software movement will affect other areas of our lives?
Maybe we don't want everybody else to find out how great FOSS is
Just occurred to me that maybe we should let the great mass stay on Windows and continue to attract and otherwise deal with the virus swarms, trojans, etc.
For all my proselytizing, I don't really know of many converts that I have made.
Mostly, preaching to the choir.
Perhaps we need a new spiel. Any ideas?
saludos.
[Edit: Just came across this: http://blog.anamazingmind.com/2008/02/why-linux-doesnt-spread-curse-of-b...
Maybe he has a better idea. At least for raising the value of software libre. rh. ]
I think you are looking at it in the wrong way
I really don't think that people are trying to apply Free Software discipline to other areas. As the philosophy and principles become easier for people to see, they are starting to see where they are present and taking the visibility as a chance to expand on that is already there.
At a recent user group meeting, we started talking about 'Applied Open Source Social Dynamics'. (For the purpose of discussion, we called the difference between Open Source and Free Software a pragmatic vs moral separation. That is a another discussion there). We starting looking at a variety of subjects: education, baseball, local politics, and a few others and broke down where they currently could be described as using free/open ideas and how one might improve them by using/expanding those ideas. It was quite revealing to see how many of the ideas, or structure, were in place. Does it mean those ideas where not there before? Perhaps to some degree but for the most part they WERE there already ... they now are just easier to see.