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Juien posted his audio thoughts on our open/free movement discussions, here: Open source movement and evolution. He talks about things from the creative/podcasting perspective. Using say creative commons, fighting against DRM, allows a bigger, wider, more fertile creative space for people to put together art of one kind or another. He’s got a great take on empathy too: that even the evil drones who work in big corporations in fact are very empathetic, human people who have similar ideas to you & me. The problem is the structure & systems we’ve build up which define what those people do. So what we’re doing is creating a new system and a new structure.

et puis, notre ami dans le lutte pour le mouvement libre, sylvain a repondu en format vlog … et voici son point de vue: Le Frog Show - Une réflexion sur le mouvement libre

Sylvain adds his 2 cents to the multi-media, asynchromatic, geographically dispersed conversation about the open/free/libre movement. some interesting ideas about architecture, public space. He’s also a real live practictioner of the free software/open source movement, having built a business around providing these solutions. So Sylvain takes a more practical concrete approach to the fundamentals of the movement in the software context, and, according to Sylvain, those are: synergy, spirit, and democracy. Synergy: the abilitity to put different GPL tools together makes open source tools powerful (see Firefox!); Spirit: the scientific spirit, sharing of information, developments, projects makes innovation happen faster; Democracy: a social contract rather than just a legal one, and the principle that tools are developed within a bigger context, and it’s the context that defines their usefulness.

All this I think gives a better context to this idea that in the long-term, the free movement is about being able to make better tools to solve the problems people want to solve. About creating the systems and structures that allow it to happen.

I know this reduces the discussion to something specifically non-idealistic. But I guess my thought is that my own idealism is good for me, but idealism does very little to convince others. Often ideologies are more about methods than about outcomes: most people want to end world hunger, say, but some think debt reduction & foreign aid is the way to get there; others think mass market liberalization is the way. Left and Right, same long-term objective, very different methods.

So rather than look at the free movement as a idealistic movement, why not fight for it on the basis of it’s long-term effect on innovation?

Thanks for joining the conversation Sylvain; good job Julien…anyone else want to join in the fray?