@oshwm

You can trust @aral — he's shown long-term consistency, addressed his own issues (moved toward fully-FLO away from Apple).

But the rage-machine concerns are valid. It's one way to reinforce tribalism and manipulate activists. Purism is a witch-hunt style eat-your-own approach. The whole idea of badge-beliefs and of checking whether someone is "one of us" leads to all sorts fo dysfunctions.

That tribalism is exploitable by actual bad actors.

@deejoe @Shamar @cwebber @conservancy

@wolftune @oshwm @aral @Shamar @cwebber @conservancy

So, I've begun to think about what you might call the "freedom curve", plotted on an axes labelled "freedom" (y) and "reach" (x). I suspect it looks something like an exponential decay, with high freedom plotted at the far left, but with very little reach (let's just say for sake of argument that's where RMS and TdR and a Gideon's Band of others sit). As you move to the right, freedom falls away, but you cover more people.

@wolftune @oshwm @aral @Shamar @cwebber @conservancy

Assuming one can influence the shape of the curve, what do you do?

Do you try to increase the overall limits of freedom for the few on the left? I think someone should.

Do you try to increase the integrated freedom, under the curve, by lifting the broad but imperfect freedoms of people further to the right? Yes, that too.

I haven't used this model so much to think about privacy but it might be useful there too.

@Shamar

We can see how @aral handles Apple
in these sorts of discussions--is his stance yours also?

@wolftune @oshwm @cwebber @conservancy

@Shamar

I totally disagree about Microsoft being not-so-bad a threat.They remain powerful, they aren't embracing software freedom, and their approach to Google is to *try* to outdo them in surveillance-capitalism even.

All these entities, Google included, are mixed in some ways.

@deejoe @aral @oshwm @cwebber @conservancy