Zealotry, ad absurdum
Right now, my Firefox RSS Live Bookmarks are showing side-by-side top stories of “Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Released” and “Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Released” (Slashdot and OSNews, respectively). I had this mental conceptualization of these being the first two horsemen of some open source-driven apocalypse, with the two extended middle fingers of a brazen Mark Shuttleworth completing the foursome.
I don’t think you, whoever you might be, need necessarily get in on all this action. There are a lot of highly- (and also just somewhat-) technical people who are driving this thing forward, enjoying it, learning from it, and saving a lot of money using it. But know that there is a world out there that halfway works economically and is thriving altruistically, and that world is doing all it can to provide reasonable, workable alternatives to the stuff that forms the “gold standard” today.
It’s a fun time to be a nerd. Music is pretty blah, art is off the radar, movies seem to star Will Farrell more often than not, and even computer hardware is in a sort of postmodern funk, but the software and web world moves along at a high rate of speed.
What we really lack today is a distributed file system for the People. Whenever this truly comes to exist (expectation: Google), the People will not know this as such. It may be “Live Files” or “Shared Files” or “Web Files.” They will know it as that thing that lets their cell phone’s files be used by their laptop, and what lets them edit their report on a computer in a public library. It will also let them send and share files between their friends and families without the cumbersome trappings of the e-mail system.
This Firefox extension, AllPeers will probably have to survive an RIAA/MPAA firestorm, but it is a start. We’ll see where that goes from here.