TUNES development startup - Part 1

[Massimo Dentico]

Francois-Rene Rideau wrote:
> 
> Dear Tunespeople,
>    I'm in contact with various people to found a startup company that
> would develop TUNES. Any advice, contact, funding, idea, etc, is welcome.
> We're particularly trying to define
> 1) a business plan.
> 2) a development schedule.
> The idea would be to raise funds thanks to an early prototype,
> so that the path to such a prototype is important, and advice is sought.
> Once funding is found, we can afford hiring some people almost full time
> on the project with a decent salary...
> 
> Yours freely,
> 
> [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
> [  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
> Brain, n.:
>         The apparatus with which we think that we think.
>                 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

I'm  sorry  for the delay. I have decided finally to  divide  this
long e-mail in different parts and to send each part separately as
soon as possible, when each is in a decent form (I hope).

RAISING FUNDS

IMO  the  best candidates as financiers, at least in early  phase,
are  public  institutions like European Union  (EU)  and  probably
little,   innovative  companies  particularly  sensible  to   free
software.  These  little companies are more  responsive  and  less
conservative  than corporations and we could gain a good  feedback
from  they  in the application of the Tunes framework to different
fields.

The  motivation  of  this orientation is principally  because  the
political, economical and philosophical choices on which the Tunes
project  is  based  are  against corporate  culture  (namely  true
liberalism vs. capitalism).

As   you   have  highlighted  Faré  (thanks  for  this   work   of
demystification),  true liberals make a moral choice  establishing
that  to  protect public interest is good. Then they  claim  (with
good  arguments and exemplifications) that public interest is  the
consumer interest, *not* the producer interest.

Certainly  I  don't share the extreme position  that  every  human
relationship is definable always and only in terms of  competition
and  exchanges in a "market", but I think it's the same  for  you,
Faré   (I   suspect  that  this  comes  from  false  liberals   or
liberalists).

Ironically  the free software cooperative model demonstrates  that
co-operators,  even  with  scarce  resources,  can  challenge  big
competitors. The liberal model of competition, placing the  accent
on free flow of information and on freedom in general, seems to me
more  similar to the free software movement than to the capitalist
model, with its patents, copyrights and false competitions (secret
or manifest trusts).

Besides  a  more  direct  involvement of the  user  base,  a  soft
distinction  between consumers and producers, thanks to  the  free
availability  of  sources, are distinct  advantages  of  the  free
software model in term of freedom for people.

In  any  case I want to suggest a truly transnational organization
based  on  the Net. EU is now particular sensible on these  themes
(tele-woking, partnership between EU citizens) but  I  think  this
project could do better: a worldwide network of collaborators  and
"federated organizations" (businesses or no-profit).

Organizing  such  network at an effective  level  of  productivity
(similar  to  ordinary business) is certainly not  simple  but  is
aligned with Tunes and its central idea of decentralization.

The forum "Jobs in the Knowledge Society" is quite interesting, at
least to understand the EU policy about these themes:
- http://www.ispo.cec.be/jobsinis/

For  the eventual objections to public intervention, I want to beg
all  you  to be realists: in Europe, when a big company  is  going
wrong,   capitalists   demand  public   intervention,   "to   save
employments"  they  say,  but when profits  return  to  grow  they
doesn't  refund  the  public nor they  share  profits  with  their
workers.  However, I want remember you the simple  but  true  fact
that public founds are our money (taxes).

-- 
Massimo Dentico