I find a lot of the talking points in this article and its comments to be insightful. Do you think that just “walking away” from a system that, more or less exploits us to their own ends is the answer? http://www.alt-market.com/articles/301-want-to-defeat-the-banks-stop-participating-in-the-system
Yes, change can be uncomfortable, yet at the same time, it is inevitable. Being that change is going to happen (whether you like it or not), it is not time to reflect on this a bit and see how we can make it better than what we are seeing today? Folks, the system is just not working anymore as anyone with eyes to see can tell.
For instance, the sudden surge in open source applications verses “paid for” applications? To tell you the truth, I ask myself “why do do this for free?”. Then I have to ask myself “Why not?”. “It is about time to change the paradigm, and live up to your capabilities don’t ya think?. Things are just so out of balance these days it boggles my espresso laced mind. (Pardon me, yet I have about 4 hours before the espresso reaches its peak.)
So, well, just my morning musings, sorry if you got bored or anything. http://www.alt-market.com/articles/301-want-to-defeat-the-banks-stop-participating-in-the-system
I think that just maybe I shall be requesting payments to me for my services be in gold, it is kind of interesting to have direct access to your savings (after all, they are yours).
Hopefully, this is not political or religious, just a quest for an honest evaluation of “What is, it is”.
By the way, I personally don’t like being a sheep, Duh, some goat must have kicked me in head!
/me/sees stars floating all around in my consciousness.
When it comes to moving away from commercial apps. in the hopes that the FOSS arena will respect you more and have better ethics compared to the big software companies, while you do get the advantage of being able to use similar technology at a zero-cost barrier, the ethics/respect part of it may not always be there.
You look at cases like the GIMP where there’s a fervent developer ideology that the dev. team will try to follow at the expense of user feedback and suggestions, the users want this as a way to improve their workflow and experience with the app. but the developers insist on going another way according to their vision and not the users’ (and as a result leading to developers leaving, users going back to apps. like Photoshop, and GIMP development itself now being just above a one man show), it also includes people getting caught in flame wars because they did so much as criticize or point out a weakness in the app, so in some cases the ethics shown by some of the developers and users are even worse than that of the average corporation.
Now in Blender’s case, the devs. and contributors have had a pretty good record at meeting user requests compared to the dev. teams of many other apps. (commercial and open source). Though we have had our share of negativity, notably when people were becoming more skeptical of where Blender will end up due to the long process that was the 2.5 project, things are now looking up again due in part to work on Bmesh being a lot more active, the aim on giving Blender a new professional-grade rendering engine through the Cycles project, and the new features coming in through the GSoC branches along with dozens of patches.