We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all machines are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of open source firmware, operating systems, & the freedom to connect via open standards.
I studied meditation for many years at http://www.clairvision.org and what I learned there made me a more robust yet fluid person. Now I intend to go back for further studies.
This is how I feel Hacker News works. I read Hacker News precisely because of the comments section which often illuminates and provide more context and grit to the referenced article.
Or have something like the EFF but focused on young web businesses which could be funded by web business elders [those who already made money from the common web ecosystem] to protect the rights of web businesses especially those who are just starting-up and to advocate/design/lobby for legal systems that are conducive to the web ecosystem as a whole. For legal practitioners, this would arguably be a better place to work for(if one can earn a living from it) rather than let's say working for patent trolls.
How about Iceland? At least this web hosting company http://www.orangewebsite.com/ is touting "better level of privacy and lower censorship" as a selling point. (Although, I note it itself is using .com) Anyway, I think it won't be long until some countries or territories will wisen-up to create internet freedom friendly jurisdictions as a competitive advantage to lure tech capital and talent away from the increasingly hostile US with its IP and military industrial complex weapons of wealth destruction.
We need more people like David. I think every developer should pursue to create the internet according to the way they think it should be and users should use apps and software that make sense to them and which they want to use.
Variety and alternatives are good. Opinionated software is good! Mono-culture, design by committee and one single way of doing things (no matter how good or efficient) are all bad.
For example, look at what happened to the US shuttle program, the public manned space program is now limbo because of dependence on a single way of doing things. Thank goodness for the private space enterprises bubbling along and competing on the periphery where there's a glimmer of hope.
Let structures emerge from the outer edges of the internet that are in constant flux. As long as we all agree on the basic protocols in the core of Internet, we'll be fine.
On the other side of this wider debate, my friends think I'm crazy for switching from a very nice Mac GUI, MS Office, QWERTY keyboard et al to Ubuntu et al and work my way up the command line, emacs and relearn Colemak keyboard typing.
I'm starting to enjoy the pay-off of my crazy efforts. My 'sensible' friends don't know what they are missing.
