[Consortium] [OT] to explain myself (and alternatives to bounties)

jaromil jaromil at dyne.org
Thu Mar 23 08:47:05 EST 2006


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sorry everyone for the OT which i started, but now i feel the need to
clarify my position about my "heavy" issue, which is not personal
against Mark or against Ubuntu, but it's just my way of life.

:: begin of OT

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 05:50:34PM +0000, Daniel James wrote:
> Hi Jaromil,
> 
> >2) i have nothing against African Words. it's just that I have problems
> >   sometimes with the way they are used by colonists owning swimming
> >   pools there.
> 
> Ouch! I don't know if Mark has a swimming pool,

i know Mako Hill personally since some years, he told me that Mark
hosted 10 debian developers in his big villa with swimming pool, that's
how Ubuntu started existing.

i share my concerns about Canonical and Ubuntu directly with him and his
replies convinced me that is not all bad in it, especially since there
is a foundation behind, but still we're having one man show and is about
the rich one in the whole project.

> but I do know he didn't choose to be born in South Africa, and also
> that he's too young to have been responsible for apartheid.

So as i wrote above i don't have a specific problem with Mark, my
position is more general: i fight private property and practice direct
expropriation since years, i hardly trust money-rich people and i seek
revolution and insurgency as a solution to such injustices.

given the above, you can probably guess how i interpret economical
differences among ethnical-classes in south-africa: they are a
responsability in apartheid by itself. maybe blacks are not shot and
beaten on the street anymore, but still they are the poors and pityful
in their own land, as a result of past and present policies.

for us western people it should be even more clear after what happened
in New Orleans: apartheid still exists, it just evolved into
"politically correct" practices to defend the private property of US and
EU colonists, after they achieved their money and power with genocide
and slavery of natives in various places of the world.

then my position regarding mister Shuttleworth's philantropy is that
devolving money in opensource to make your own brand of it is not a
relevant "humanitarian" effort for someone living in such a context;
plus i have strong doubts about the "single rich benefactor" way to
sustain free software.

:: end of OT. all the above is just IMHO and i don't mean to offend
:: anyone, in case it happens please consider it accidental ;>



> >i recalled the issue of bounties after mentioning that we should foster
> >better (equal, respectful of already existing projects, etc.)
> >redistribution of resources from Ubuntu in case we include it
> 
> That could be hard to achieve given that Ubuntu/Canonical is backed by
> private money and therefore has no statutory responsibility to be
> 'fair' to other projects.
> As for existing projects, Canonical is paying a lot of Debian
> developers to work on free software.
> 
> >and in
> >case we do it that should not be done in the form of bounties.
> 
> If you've got suggestions for a better way of distributing resources, 
> I'd be glad to hear them. Is there a middle way between bounties and 
> having hackers under contract, i.e. in proper jobs?

my vision of it is more related to "self-sustained" communities.

i explained myself in a roundtable held at piksel.no last year and Janet
Casey wrote an interesting text about our discussion here:
http://www.sustainablesource.net/?p=15

ciao

- -- 
 jaromil,  dyne.org rasta coder,  http://afrolinux.org

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