Yes, "completely" was not the appropriate word. I meant it as "it has an enormous weight", rather than "it completely defines (as the one and only factor)". I d

Yes, "completely" was not the appropriate word. I meant it as "it has an enormous weight", rather than "it completely defines (as the one and only factor)". I don't really speak english either. About more gratuitous, it's tricky, and the problem is not that Wikipedia isn't free enough, but that it's kind of an exception. There are quite a few ways in which "free spaces" can compete/coexist with "commercial spaces". The first group of options involves the commercial spaces not eating the whole landscape and getting all the attention (drowning out the rest). In theory this can happen when: there's no viable lucrative strategy for the space (not the case here), the commercial explotation of the space incurs in obvious ethical concerns which can't be covered up (some might think this is the case right now, but for the general public it is not, or companies can keep the perception muddy enough, or the trade-offs are considered acceptable in practice even if the issue is acknowledged [this could be discussed much more in depth]), the commercial spaces degrade enough for free spaces to catch up and get enough attention (but this is likely to be only temporary), the kind of value that commercial spaces can provide is different from the value that free spaces can provide (I'm tempted to believe that this can only happen when the commercial space is not profitable [so, back to the first case], but maybe there are some forms of social organization / solidarity that can only happen in free spaces?), there's regulation specifically protecting free spaces (not sure how this would go or if they wouldn't become counter-productive artificial walls), or they provide the same~ value but the free version has less ethical concerns (some open software can go here, but in most cases where open source succeeds, it's because it's good enough... but free, in which case it simply becomes more accessible [in a capitalist world, this is subsidization. we are actually doing good on the software side, but then there's also hardware and maintenance, and... well, that's for the next point]). Most of these are already happening. Right now it's not enough, but hey, maybe the current recipe is good and we just need to keep cooking... I'm not completely skeptical, but I'm also interested on others options, like reducing our dependence / weakening commercial spaces, talking about that publicly. There's a balance. The more critical money is to our survival, the less we care about the ethics of what we do. And in general too: everyone yells when they get stomped, but when it comes to our own jobs we are much more willing to rationalize stomping on others. And maybe society has a very perverse idea of what "value" and "job" mean and we need to get more to the root of the issue. Let's get people to have a clearer idea of what contributing positively to the world means, and have them focus first on what they are creating or offering to others. Most of us already agree~ with that, but there seems to be too much noise and too many options, and we can't organize effectively. Maybe trying to find "the" organization or "the" consensus is impractical. Maybe we have to find more "exceptions" like Wikipedia. I'm personally favoring projects that I can start with little money, trying to free as much time as possible to be able to work on them, and try to make things that can work starting from my town, that can get people involved beyond the online world, and that can expand with clearly different premises from commercial projects. And keep scaling. If we can create enough exceptions like Wikipedia on different fronts, taking advantage of the inertia of good ideas, and getting people involved in new free spaces instead of discussing "how could they ever come to life", that might be a good way to start moving in a different direction.