“Tangible Bit is a project intending to …
“Tangible Bit is a project intending to link together all aspects of digitial manufacturing through a series of datasets. The aim is to create a database of sites hosting manufacturing equipment or inventory, objects, materials, manufacturing processes and so on. [...]” http://tangiblebit.com/
Free Software has been around for a while, and Free Content is coming to be an integral part of our culture. Now we need Free Infrastructue. Tangible Bit is above all a Free Infrastructure project.
But it’s also a software project, so of course Tangible Bit is free software. It is developed and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0. The datasets made available through Tangible Bit are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
The reason for this is simple: We believe that the stated goals cannot be acheived with competition for maximizing profit, but only with cooperation to minimize profit. In the current legal model it is all but impossible to encourage any form of cooperation within the production sector, but we believe that by adopting a copyright policy that allows for free sharing of information and code with the requisite demand that others contribute to the commons we can achieve our goals faster. [...]
We believe in the freedom of the individual, and we believe that the individual cannot be free while enslaved in the current industrial paradigm. Liberation from this is what we strive for.” http://tangiblebit.com/welcome/free-infrastructure/
“Industry 2.0 is the movement to redo the industrial revolution with humankind at its core and not the ownership of ideas. This provides an implicit promise for the reduction and demarketization of required work – the golden age of unemployment – and the elimination of artificial scarcity, which has for decades dithered and confused priorities regarding the manufacture of all products worldwide. [...]
Tangible Bit is an Industry 2.0 application in that it is built around the understanding that the current industrial model is unsustainable, and that only with a deep understanding of the world’s supply chains, materials economy and manufacturing methodology can we avert the demise of humanity. The goal of Tangible Bit is to make the world’s first global scale indstrial information system. No less.” http://tangiblebit.com/welcome/industry-2-0/
