Man Tries To Live an Open Source Life For a Year

jfruh writes "Sam Muirhead, a New Zealand filmmaker living Berlin, will, on the 1st of August, begin an experiment in living an open source life for a year. But this is going way beyond just trading in his Mac for a Linux machine and Final Cut Pro for Novacut. He's also going to live in a house based on an open source design, and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process.""

Re:food?

[scubamage]

Honestly depending where he lives, he might not have an issue. Local farms are a source of meat, if you talk to the farmers you can find out what they feed their stock (most of them are more than glad to answer actually). Lots of foods can be foraged (I make trips once a week to forage as a hobby) and during the summer it can yield several pounds of berries at a time. These get canned, preserved, or jellied. I grow a huge garden and what I can't eat immediately gets either dehydrated or canned. Public water here has its contents documented, so we'll consider that open source. I grow my own hops, and brew my own beer with them. Honestly after a good growing season, I'd feel comfortable saying that I could live around 70% off of foraged and homegrown foods. I could easily up it to 90-100% but my fiance would kill me for taking over the yard. Not that my case is the norm (and foraging is a weird, albiet fun and fulfilling hobby to get into), but if he is dedicating himself to it and preparing in advance I don't think it would be that difficult.

Re:no woman

[girlintraining]

No woman for this guy. I guess they want the finer things in life!

You need to get out of the basement more. Women don't want the finer things in life. They want the finer people in life. Most women I know who married a rich guy feel they married beneath them. They went through relationship after relationship, meeting asshole after asshole, and finally they decided that if they couldn't have someone who was intelligent, kind, humorous, and compassionate, they'd settle for getting knocked up by some rich guy... at least their kids will be provided for, and there's some chance of being loved in return then.

This guy is willing to take a year out of his life to experiment with art, to answer a question about existance and meaning. This is a guy who is confident enough in who he is and has a solid grasp of what he wants out of life. Unless he's a 4 bagger, odds are good someone will take him home... idealists tend to be compassionate and considerate, and will likely treat his woman with respect and kindness. Now all he needs is a job, a car that doesn't have the death rattle, and some living space... he'll have trouble keeping the girls away.

Re:A life without Coke?

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I once spent 2 hours walking around with RMS looking for a restaurant that he liked AND served pepsi. This was in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, where most good restaurants have an exclusive deal with Coca Cola. In each place we entered, he asked if they served coke, and in a few places he insisted on speaking with the manager and when he got his way, he explained to him in gruesome details all the atrocities the Coca Cola company did in Colombia to workers.

I firmly believe in Free Software, and I admire RMS for everything he has done for the world. I try to uphold my principles, but this semi-religious thing of taking it to the extreme and avoiding anything even remotely related to something you disagree with, as if it was permanently tainted by immorality, is just plain stupid.

My company tries to free under the GPL as many products as possible, but if we freed certain things, we would be out of business. If I refused to use privative software at all, I couldn't even use a phone (even if the soft is free, the GSM firmware won't be).

What this guy is doing is just a publicity stunt, and a fairly stupid one at that. He thinks he's sending a message, but it's not the one he's thinking about.

Toilet paper? Really?

[JDG1980]

What is objectionable about existing toilet paper from an "open source" point of view? Plain toilet paper isn't a creative work (specialty paper with artwork on it might be), so it can't be copyrighted. And patents only last about 20 years while toilet paper has been manufactured for much longer than that, so any patents on the manufacturing process or the paper itself would have expired some time ago. Shouldn't he be OK if he just buys a generic store brand without any fancy new features or copyrighted art on the package?

Of course any toilet paper brand name is likely to be covered by a trademark, but if that is enough to make it not "open source", then Firefox is not open source software either.

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Re:food?

[Sique]

More complicated:

Selective breeding = tinkering with parameters and settings.
GM = changing part of the program binary.

Actually, it's quite fascinating, how flexible the genetic code is, because all dogs for instance share the same genetic code, the chihuahua has the same genes as the pitbull or the the scottish border collie. The only difference are the allels, the actual settings on the individual genes.