On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 7:49 PM, Ben Finney <[email protected]> wrote:
> Martin Blais <[email protected]> writes: > > > On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 1:48 AM, Dominik Aumayr <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > > And I also get why people might want something else […]: > > > > > > - Ideological reasons (Google is evil for [some|many] people in these > > > communities) > > > > That's a very difficult argument to make. > > I don't agree with “evil”. A corporation is amoral, it doesn't have a > coherent personality and should never be regarded as a person. > > What I do say is that it's unreasonable to pressure members of a > community to entrust their social and collaborative data – highly > valuable to the community – to a corporation that has no accountability > to that community. > > This isn't ideology; it is a matter of trust. We have no good reason to > entrust the workflows that enable our collaboration, to Google. > You don't entrust it. You use it. Until you decide you don't. > > - What if Google Docs goes away? Exporting the content is a feature, > > > but then manually converting the content to fit a new system would > > > be neccesary anyway. > > Martin, you glide right past this important point Dominik makes without > addressing it at all. That smacks of dismissing the core complaints and > attacking a straw man. > > The freedom of a project entails the freedom to fork, if necessary. > Vendor lock-in for workflow tools makes it much harder to ensure the > There's no vendor lock-in. > tools continue to serve us well. > > > If you were focused exclusively on the rendering, you'd be overlooking > > the most important part of this: it's a dynamic and collaborative > > experience. > > That collaboration is extremely important, as you point out. It is too > valuable for the community to be beholden to any particular corporation. > > > But at the heart of this thread there is a subtle disconnect: I think > > most people on the list are focused on the ARTIFACT, and not on the > > PRODUCT. > > There is a disconnect: you are dismissing important issues of freedom of > our collaboration tools and independence from any particular vendor of > the tools. > > > Here, the task at hand is this: "TO PRODUCE GREAT DOCUMENTATION." > > If the end product was all we cared about, then I don't see why any of > us would care about software freedom at all. > > On the contrary, the resistance to vendor lock-in tools like Google Docs > There's no vendor lock-in. I thought I already made that point: You go to a doc or a folder full of docs. You right-click to "Download". 10 seconds later you have a zip file with all your docs, locally. You can export to .txt, RTF, OpenDocument, HTML and more. (Have you even tried it?) A hypothetical conversion from .txt to markdown of _all_ my docs would take no more than a disagreeable few hours of furious massaging of them using Emacs while listening to my favorite podcast. Once. is because we don't want any of our social, collaborative processes to > be mediated by a particular corporation. > In the meantime you have a inexistant hypothetical "libre" wiki server which once you get consensus over who will take care of it will require ongoing maintenance by someone who will stop paying attention at some point and then it will rot out of date within three months. I've been there before, maintained a few of those myself. In the meantime I have an real, live ongoing conversation with my users in the documents which are constantly lighting up with feedback, buttressed by 100's of world-class engineers on their own cloud. For free. But maybe you feel more free. And in case, I don't think I'm going to change your mind tonight. And I have some code to write now. Good luck with the politics, -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
