[off] Do me a solid

[Kay C Lan]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 10:11 AM Mark Wieder via use-livecode
<use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> <cough>
>
> Is this the same Tim Berners-Lee who, in his capacity as Director of the
> World Wide Web Consortium, a year ago overruled all objections and added
> standardized DRM to the open web standards? Sided with trillions of
> dollars worth of corporate muscle against accessibility groups, security
> experts, browser startups, public interest groups, human rights groups,
> archivists, research institutions, etc?
>
> Pass.
Unfortunately I think the Free Software Foundation backed the wrong
horse.  Whilst it's mission to promote computer user freedom is
commendable, doing it via OSS in a world where the Internet is driven
by trillions of dollars, web search engines are driven by billions of
dollars and both of these are influenced by media giants and
governments with political agendas almost make the fact that you have
OSS on your device irrelevant.   I think individual freedom, let alone
computer user freedom, would better be served if, like linux, there
were a couple of versions of the WWW, some of which were truly Open
Source.  Although I use DuckDuckGo in deference to Google, I think
we'd all be better off with a few viable OS Web Search Engines - the
current ones are too small.

I think in the future we'll look back and realise that having a purely
open Search Engine and purely open Internet will be far more important
to us than whether the code of the app we are using, to take advantage
of what is available across the internet, is open or closed.