[FC-discuss] Free Software and Free Culture

[Nelson Pavlosky]

I took the liberty of appending my response to the end of Matt's blog 
post, and I am also posting it here for your convenience:

UPDATE:  Nelson Pavlosky says:  I think free culture is about many 
things beyond free art and free software.  The bottom line as we've said 
a number of times in the past is cultural participation: how can we help 
people play a more active role in the world around them?  Clearly free 
software / open source is one important way to do that, by giving people 
power over their own computers and the ability to participate in any 
software project that interests them (among other things), and I think 
the consensus has been that we support free software.  Indeed, <a 
href="http://freeculture.org/blog/2007/04/25/free-chapter-web-hosting-part-1/">our 
national website runs entirely on free software</a>, as confirmed by the 
"virtual Richard Stallman" program.  Our tagline in the early days of 
the organization was "free speech, free software, free culture", 
although that was more intended to clarify the meaning of "free culture" 
rather than to claim that free software accounted for 1/3 of our activities.

That said, there has been no consensus on to what extent we should 
promote free software to the exclusion of all else... must all students 
involved with FreeCulture.org run free software all the time?  Our goal 
as an organization has been to be a "big tent" that all students 
interested in free culture can get involved with.  Some of our students 
may be less interested in the free software side of things, and being 
dogmatic about free software would no doubt drive some people away.  As 
the notes from the national conference workshop on free software imply, 
there is some debate over how important popularity is to the free 
software movement... is it more important to have lots of people using 
(some) free software (some of the time), or a smaller number of 
passionate free software activists?  (Josh Sullivan of the FSF says, "It 
doesn't matter, I would rather have 100k people that support the ideals 
vs. 500k people who use GNU/Linux because it is technically better -- 
the 100k will support you in legislation, advocate to others, etc.") 

I don't think FreeCulture.org should take a side in that debate, but 
there is one thing that is clear: free culture is about many things 
aside from free software, and we have taken the position that it is 
better for our organization to have lots of students involved in lots of 
free culture issues than for us to have only a few students who are 
especially interested in any single issue, such as free software.  Our 
purpose is not to push specific agendas, but to serve as a meeting place 
and organizing structure for students who are involved with our issues, 
without mandating that they be involved with all of our issues at once.

Peace,
~Nelson Pavlosky~
Co-founder, FreeCulture.org

Free Culture blog wrote:
> Something I've been thinking about lately - what role should Free
> Software play in Free Culture? Is Free Culture the combination of Free
> Art and Free Software? FreeCulture.org and the students of the United
> States have a golden opportunity to set an example here, by switching to
> using only Free Software.
>
> [Some notes][1] came out of the National Conference about Free Software
> and it was great to see the [Free Software Foundation][2] and [Defective
> By Design][3] represented.
>
>    [1]: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Workshop/Free_Software
>
>    [2]: http://www.fsf.org/
>
>    [3]: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/
>
> URL: http://freeculture.org/blog/2007/05/29/free-software-and-free-culture/
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at freeculture.org
> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
>