I was reading Bradley Kuhn’s post over at Planet Gnome about feeling a lot of social pressure from within open-source communities to use proprietary communication tools such as Facebook, Google +, and Skype. Normally I don’t agree much with Kuhn’s positions when it comes to open source software. I’m much more of a pragmatist and don’t see any inherent philosophical or ethic issues with proprietary software.
That said, I think Kuhn is making a pretty good point and I think it is one that the Ubuntu community ought to think about. We went through this before with Launchpad (I wrote a post back in 2007 about that) when it was not Free. These days I do see quite a bit of communication done via Google +, Skype, and less on the stalwarts of open-source communication, IRC and mailing lists.
So my question I guess is, why? Why are these tools being used? Are they being used in place of IRC/mailing lists or in addition to?
Filed under: Ubuntu
