What does winning look like?

[reddragdiva]

Freeculture.org asks us to share our vision of the future: what free culture looks like in five years.

Imagine your life after five successful years working on your free culture projects. How is your day-to-day existence different? What does a city look like? How have the lives of your parents and friends changed? What does it feel like to live in a more free culture? Does it smell different? Sound different?

They have a wiki page for the collected results. Let's assume Moore's Law, by the way: you're typing your response on a 32-core Opteron with 16 gigabytes of memory on your lap. And it's not even warm.

(And, for that matter, what do the Wikimedia projects look like in 2012? When did we leave Google in the dust? Do governments cower at our name and public broadcasters release everything under CC by-sa? How did we get there? Show your working.)

Edit: Dammit, the deadline was July 12! Bah. WRITE ONE ANYWAY.

Comments

[tintintin.livejournal.com]

FYI: Tomorrow's (ie Saturday's) Daily Mirror, p2, "Site of the day": Uncyclopedia.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It feels like the entrants don't have a good grasp of how fast things can change. Intellectual property will not disappear as a concent in five years. It would be nice to get an entrant with a good feel for the true pace of change.

[reddragdiva]

That's why I said "show your working."

Things tend to run along multiple parallel streams, with all being present at all times. Then there's an apparent sudden switch and people are amazed, but it was running along parallel lines for ages first - the fifteen-year overnight sensation phenomenon. c.f. the rise of Linux; it's been waiting in the wings for ages, but then Microsoft spectacularly screwed the pooch with Vista and it's way gaining word of mouth publicity.

So I'd pick only things that are clearly happening now, change the popularity and see what sort of world that looks like.

c.f. this, wherein the generic non-techie consumer clearly doesn't have to understand any of the mechanisms to understand the most important thing about DRM: why it sucks.

Note also that a process that is 10x or 100x its previous popularity or rate is no longer the same process, at all. Photoshop taking 30 seconds to run a filter instead of 50 minutes is a whole new world. A 486 was much, much more than a faster 8088. If you'd told me in early 2004 that Wikipedia would be top 10 by the end of 2006, I'd have looked at you funny.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Vista has the advantage of being a Linux-friendly "departure OS" - it self-partitions...

I hadn't seen any stats on the uptake rates; are they really surging that much in the last six months or so? Interesting.

[reddragdiva]

I haven't seen stats on Linux, I've seen a remarkable upturn in press coverage. Bloody no-one's using Vista, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I played with this for a week and decided "fuck it, installing Debian bor the first time ever will be easier". Vista is arcane - I've been using Windows fifteen years and I find it difficult to figure out what I'm doing, so god only knows what a newish user will think.

Interesting to think of it as a sudden upsurge, though; if memory serves, one of the large retailers is now offering preinstalled Ubuntu machines. Definitely promising, if we're using it as an analogy for the future of free content!

[reddragdiva]

Debian's not difficult to install at all, unless the very notion of a character interface is enough to explode your head. Ubuntu is even easier.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Install, easy. Beat into being configured properly, a little trickier. (Doable, certainly, but not without a certain level of expertise rather than simple competence). Admittedly, that was on a brand new machine - widescreen and fancy graphics cards are a pain to get right.

But once it's done, I would have no qualms leaving the machine for my grandmother - that level of reliability...

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Bloody no-one's using Internet Explorer 7. We've all reverted to 6. Actually, people around me in the office are taking my lead and installing Opera: the .NET web framework runs better...

I've mentioned (http://hairyears.livejournal.com/101843.html) that no-one's using Vista, too.

[reddragdiva]

The w3schools stats show IE7 at 10%, Firefox over 30% and Linux beating Vista. Note the steadily increasing market share for Macs too. The HitsLink OS stats show Vista with similar numbers but Linux getting lost in the noise; their browser stats show Firefox around 15% but don't separate IE6 and IE7.