Jim, while not a huge deal, I do think deleting Johannes contribution from the below is a mistake. (I also don't know what "he not interested in herding what his entrance barrios are likely to be".)
No market starts with a vast majority. You need early adopters.
"Technology trends start with technologists," Marc Andreessen says. And he's right.
ProjectVRM is a *development* project. We're here to encourage that.
Like Nathan and others here, I like and value Graham's input on marketing. He's clearly one of the world's leading experts on that, and on related business topics. Meanwhile Brian and others here are among the world's leading experts on development. Most of the websites you visit every day run on Apache. Tip your hat toward Brian and his colleagues for that one. And consider how many $trillions in economic activity Apache supports.
It matters that the Net, the Web and email are all made possible by protocols not invented for commercial purposes, or with markets in mind at all. Like so much else on which we have all come to depend, they started with geeks wanting to "scratch their ow itch." That's what Johannes is doing with Indie Box. It's also why he's getting support for it.
There is an appetite in the market for independence, sovereignty and privacy. We can't get that from renting in others clouds. What we get is good for lots of things, but not those. And the market is not small, not just geeks, and not trivial.
We are here to encourage development, and I'd like Johannes — and everybody developing anything VRM-related — to get help and encouragement from this list.
Back to Brian:
Doc recently shared a Cory Doctorow essay that discussed this debate, which he framed as a coming civil war between *users* and *owners* of technologies and platforms:
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
Questions like what should be one's rights as a user, even when against the purely property rights of the owner, are what the war will be fought over. The copyright and general computing wars are just initial skirmishes.
The civil war is over general purpose platforms. Johannes' Indie Box is one of those. (So is Customer Commons' Omie tablet.) I think the Indie Box may become a leader in the category, especially if it gets a groundswell of support.
Tough questions help, of course. But bear in mind, again, that we're mainly about development here.
Doc
(on a tethered phone with a bad connection in a London hotel where the Internet has been down all day)
On May 13, 2014, at 11:28 PM, James Pasquale <
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And the vast majority of people with buying power don’t know any languages have no interest in learning one, unless your in tech all you want is for the dam thing to work, look cool and do what you want it when you do. Until the cable providers started setting the time, how many flashing time displays do you see in people’s homes…
just saying.
P.S. I’ve deleted Johannes from the thread as interesting as the conversation is, he not interested in herding what his entrance barrios are likely to be. And that’s too bad for all of us!
On May 13, 2014, at 5:19 PM, sylvain willart <
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I haven't any idea where to start from. The only computer languages I know are R and SAS...
(BTW, among the software I put on my box are Agora Project and Zotero, for work collaboration, they're pretty cool)