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The year of the FreedomBox

[[!meta date="2011-03-08"]] [[!tag debian blog editorial]]

I am involved in developing something coined as the FreedomBox.

Explaining it to my mum the other day, she wisely asks if, albeit clearly an exciting challenge we've picked, it really is doable? Agreed the World has gone sour, but is drastic change even possible?

Annoying question! And clever :-)

For some years, tech media has tried predict when Linux have reached momentum for ordinary users. That current or next year was to become the Year of the Linux Desktop. Funny thing, seen in restrospect, is how "the year" kept being postponed, and when finally OLPC paved the way for the boom of Netbooks and arguably we got there, the World had moved on: Now Free Sofware is as common and as usable on desktops as commercially driven systems. Is taken for granted, not praised, and we look forward for the Next Big Challenge (as geeks) or Next Big Excitement (as users).

Perhaps a similar fate is to be expected for FreedomBox: Initially when sparking our interest, and repeatedly since while we still have nothing concrete to demonstrate at all - heck, even before we started haccking on it or knew the name of our dreams

  • our Prophet declared the Year of the FreedomBox. Not explicitly, but cleverly abstracted as "right now".

I am excited and proud to be working on FreedomBox, and foolishly hope it will be ready for worldwide consumption in a very recent "right now"

  • well aware that most likely it won't happen like that. Thing is, I don't care how it happens, just that it does. The trick is our way of working: Hacking might be expressed as larger projects, but really is juggling piles of smaller pieces of the puzzle, constantly ensuring that each piece is usable in more than one way and across more than one project. I do not only work on FreedomBox, just as I did not only work on Sugar before that, or only with Debian as my platform:

I work on Freedom-enabling technologies and ways to frame them for the World at large to move itself.

I sure hope you take the results for granted. That's true success!