So Google has been talking a lot how open Android is, but unfortunately, if you are using to using a laptop or PC, then there are still quite a few restrictions in place. They still haven’t come clean about its statements like “Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices”. The have taken big steps in the right direction, but we need to keep the pressure on to make sure that they keep going in that direction.

So far, there is no SIP/VoIP stack included, you can get that with a Nokia N80i and some other Symbian devices for a long time now. As least Android is open enough that it seems that you can do add a SIP stack yourself, if you want. Some are saying that T-Mobile is expressly blocking VoIP.

It does look like Google has started to release the source for Android, which is great news but I haven’t heard yet whether or not they have really released everything. I am guessing they’ll probably do something vaguely like Apple Mac OS X, where the sources for the foundations are released, but as you go up thru the libraries and to the applications, less and less of the sources are released. It looks like Google has released the sources to the core apps, so they are already doing a lot better than Apple.

For more on the topic of the openness of Android, check out Android; The not-so-open open platform, it’s a well annotated discussion. The author discusses the trick of code signing, so that Google/T-Mobile can still control which code can run while releasing all of the source code.

Anarchism has gotten a pretty bad name, and unfortunately for the wrong reasons. So it’s a word I feel I have to avoid in order to discuss ideas about how to organize society without hierarchies. I never really understood it so well, until I recently got obsessed with the Spanish Civil War and Revolution.

It is an extraordinary period in history. All over the world, there were revolutions of all sorts, from communist to fascist, from anarchist to democratic, from dictatorships to returning monarchies. All sorts of new ideas about how to organize societies and economies were being tried, many failing. And as they failed, for various reasons, there were all sorts of conservative and reactionary responses.

Some of the most profound experiences in my life have been anarchic in their character, like the building of the jet fish called Death Rattler with Madagascar Institute. While there was supposed to be a leader of this project, he had been absent during most of the month of prototyping in New York, then arrived later than a bunch of us in Amsterdam, where we built it. We had a very capable and creative bunch of people, so rather than waiting for this leader to arrive, we just starting designing and building this project. At first, the leader seemed quite annoyed that we were not following him, but I think he was also taken with the enthusiasm and energy of the project, so he joined in the anarchy and we built a crazy machine from scrap metal in two weeks.

So then to see how spanish anarchists were just stepping up and organizing all
sorts of things, while trying to provide for everyone, it is really
quite inspiring. So far, I have dug deep into the anarchist side of
things, reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which is a
great book. Then read some of the writings of various anarchists, and I’ve watched all sorts of newsreels.

My obsession still continues… we just watched Libertarias, which was interesting, but unabashedly told from the point of view of anarchist women. Then we watched Spanish Civil War, Part 4: Franco and the Nationalists today, which is a typical documentary in that it tries to show both sides of the story. And I want to watch La Guerra Cotidiana (The Daily War) soon, I find that personal perspectives are the most important. What I am missing is a strongly pro-Franco view on the war, though I have looked. It seems that the Francistas were more interested in repressing any discussion of the war rather than even giving their side of it. Or perhaps there were lots of Francista materials that have since been repressed.

Back to Free Software: after watching Eben Moglen talk about Software and Community in the Early 21st Century, I think I finally realized why this piece of history has such resonance for me: first, the self-organization of the spanish anarchists really highlights two things that are very important to me: a sense of duty to the community combined with freedom from abusive power in as many respects as possible. I see a lot of parallels with the development of the internet and free software. The core ideals of free software are very strongly aligned with the core ideas of anarchism: the ideas of mutual aid and sharing combined with essential freedoms.

I’ve seen a number of betrayals of these ideals from people with in, like the watering down of core values of free software by people who triumph “open source”. And I’ve watched the forces of free software meet some very powerful opposition. In this regard, I think the people involved in free software have been much more successful than the spanish anarchists, but in a more limited realm. At this point, I think can say that the key difference is how they treated the opposing forces. Under the anarchists, there was the widespread burning of churches and violence against Catholicism. Mostly, the Free Software Movement has aimed to get people to join rather than to fight them.

The Free Software Foundation provides a good example of taking a very different approach. When enforcing the GPL, they have deliberately avoided confrontation as much as possible. Though they were entitled to damages and such, they have always pursued compliance over damages and even publicity. This in turn made it much easier for the companies who were initially violators to come to adopt the ideas of free software.

One thing I’ve been mulling over for at least the past decade is the state of utopian Capitalism that the USA has been in since the fall of the Soviet Union. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, there are not just one or two ways of organizing the human economy, but many. For most of the 20th century, we heard really only about two dominant systems: Capitalism and Communism. Capitalism and Communism held each other in sway over the decades in the areas of the world dominated by the Capitalist West and the Communist Block.

With the fall of Communism, we got a massive swing towards a utopian Capitalism in a lot of the Capitalist West. In the nineties, it was common to believe that we had “broken the business cycle” and there would be no more busts, only booms. Well, that was obviously false, and the dot-com economy collapsed, along with companies like Enron. But of course, Capitalism wasn’t flawed, there were other issues, so we did it again, this time with real estate and insanely complex and opaque financial instruments. And this time, it looks like we are in for a severe recession, or perhaps even a depression.

Even the previously infallible Alan Greenspan had to change his beliefs, he found a flaw his model. [1][2][3][4][5][6]. A while back, I read this interesting analysis of how the current system is getting things wrong like the pricing of large corporations, one of the very things the Capitalist system is supposed to excel at.

It seems pretty obvious that capitalism combined with democracy is a pretty good system for dealing with commodities and efficient production. But it would be silly to say its perfect, and to stop trying to improve upon it. Capitalism has a lot of waste and often ends up creating large, destructive hierarchies. Ever work at a large corporation? It can be mind-numbingly boring and stiffling. Just like Capitalism replaced previous systems like Feudalism, it is becoming quite obvious that digital media is starting to stir up the organization of a new system.