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October 25, 2003

I Am An Impulsive Iconoclast

Wherever I go, I will find something wrong. For example, today, I went to the first AQP3L meeting. The AQP3L wants to be an institution for the promotion of FLOSS (which is, by the way, the new acronym for open source: Free / Libre / Open Source Software, it was first used in a report to the European Commission to empasize on the free as in speech aspect of open source (free is libre, in french). Although I think it's an excellent initiative, I believe there are serious flaws in the proposed constitution (I expressed the first two publicly at the meeting) :

• It is supposed to be an overall FLOSS advocacy body, so why the emphasis on Linux? As if it was the only FLOSS operating system out there, or as if there was a tautological relation between Linux and FLOSS. That's bad.
• There should be a strong emphasis on fostering activity for FLOSS development communities, not only local user groups (GULS, in french). Because users are actually rarely contributors, and contributors and project initiators are badly needed.
• Since the full name is Association québécoise pour la promotion de GNU/Linux et des logiciels libres and the expanded acronym is AQPLLL, the compressed acronym should have been AQPL3 (like in AQPL³) and not AQP3L. That is a serious mistake for a geek collective.
• And why stricly focus on software? We want open information, because information should always be free, no matter what.

To stay in the FLOSS subject, yesterday, I went to another meeting. This time, the nice folks of the TOT project (I have not been able to reach their site, yet), at the SAT, were presenting their advances in computer aided aesthetics. I will post more on this as soon as I get to know them better :-) There also was a debate on the cultural economy, and for the very first time, I could publicly express my opinion on royalties. And what perfect context : damn, how could creators using FLOSS ever possibly claim rights on the work they do!? This is ethical nonsense since a big part of it comes from people that decided to distribute their work for free. Oh yeah, artists are special, they need to be protected. Did I say I was pissed of by cool? I reject the word artist forever. Art is a pathology. There are only aesthetical engineers, like the fine people at Epsilonlab.

Posted by Vincent-Olivier Arsenault at October 25, 2003 05:38 PM