Infrastructures
by Jeff
Image text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.
This comic is a satire of the recent concerns regarding the ever popular social network Facebook and what Facebook is doing with the information, pictures and videos everyone shares with Facebook.
This comic is saying that some bearded (possible professor) has been concerned about proprietary software and has been (since 2003 or earlier) advocating for open source software.
Obviously saving your documents in a file type that only one software can open is different than giving all your information to a closed source for profit company, but they are similar. Both are proprietary shells held by a single for profit entity.
In the image text, CC licensed means Creative Commons license is a license from a non-profit organization that allows people to share their work. Diaspora is the new NYU student-created "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network".
May 21st, 2010
The mention of the tiniest violin is a reference to the film Reservoir Dogs. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105236/quotes
May 21st, 2010
And the expression ‘this is the world’s tiniest violin playing’ means you were looking for some sympathy, but you won’t get any. (Just something that isn’t that obvious for us foreign guys)
May 21st, 2010
@matzo ahh okay, now I got the last chart of the comic. I understood the whole thing, then I read the last chart and was confused…remembered that there is this website somewhere, googled, found…read the article, which only explained what I already knew and then I found your comment…now I can sleep
May 24th, 2010
Also, the last part of the ALT (”whenever that project gets going”) is a refference to the downside of open source: unlike a business software, its aim goal being “let’s make money” translates to “we must have a product ready” (and, obviously, without complete debugging), open source projects are not profit driven, hence basically volunteer work, hence tend to be developed quite slowly (or, even worse, starts with a bang as the initial enthusiasm drives it quickly, but without a strict deadline the move from beta to finished debugged product is very slow.
May 24th, 2010
That “bearded professor” is obviously Stallman! Do you not notice the beard? The comment is that his insistence on freedom has more bearing on us than we think. Hence the lack of sympathy.
May 24th, 2010
I was thinking stereotypical Unix geek but without the rainbow-colored suspenders it’s hard to tell