[Freedombox-discuss] Freedombox's pursuit of perfection undermines its goals

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 6:26 PM, Robert Martinez <mail at mray.de> wrote:
> I can not see how you're not just saying "Hurry up!".

Actually, he is saying "maybe releasing something simple soon is
better than releasing something fancy later".  This is very similar to
the "release early, release often" motto of many free software and
open source developers.

He is also pointing out that lots of people in oppressed places have
long ago come to the conclusion that any communication is better than
no communication, and as tools go, Facebook and Twitter and other
social media tools are actually really quite powerful and useful.

To put it another way, the problem isn't that Facebook sucks, it's
that Facebook is actually pretty awesome, so people use it. :-)

The worrying thing about this, is that Facebook (and Twitter, and
Google) is a central database run by a corporation which can be
pressured (or bribed, or hacked).  If a "bad" government or other
oppressor manages to somehow compel these companies to hand over data
about their enemies, these people may discover their communication
tools have been turned against them.  The magnitude of this risk only
goes up over time, especially in the case of Facebook which appears to
follow an internal policy of never deleting *anything*, even if
explicitly asked to (see http://europe-v-facebook.org/ for details).

So it's tempting to go "oh shit, can we just release something,
anything, right now?"

My reaction to that is... well, it's already been done. :-)

A whole bunch of tools are *already* out there. The FreedomBox is
barely about creating new tools at all, it is mostly supposed to
compile existing tools and make them more easy to use (in a safe way).
And that is a process that is very hard to rush, especially in a
volunteer organization.

That said, I also would like to hear an update from the Foundation,
it's been a while!

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/