Release early, often and with rap music.

March 13, 2010 11:00 PM

The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. You may know them from such projects as How to build a fake Google Street View car, public domain donor stickers, internet famous class, the first rap video to end with a download source code link, or their numerous firefox add-ons (such as China Channel, Tourettes Machine, or Back to the future). FAT members have been hard at work standardizing various open source graffiti-related software packages, including Graffiti Analysis, Laser Tag, Fat Tag Deluxe and EyeWriter [previously] to be GML (Graffiti Markup Language) compliant. Fuck Google. Fuck Twitter. FuckFlickr. Fuck SXSW. Fuck 3D. FAT Lab is Kanye shades for the open source movement.
posted by finite (8 comments total)

Awesome.
posted by koeselitz at 11:52 PM on March 13, 2010

That caught my eye too, koeselitz. Looks like a little mathowie or cortex or pb in the making.
posted by amyms at 11:57 PM on March 13, 2010

Nice to see people organizing around the idea of "host your own" Web 2.0 analogs. There's no reason why Facebook, twitter, Flickr and other sites couldn't just operate as self-hosted applications, complete with point 'n' click software installations if people were motivated to make them. Hosting prices are dropping quick, and I doubt the cost would exceed a few a few dollars a year for most users. The only reason server administration is a pain is because it's generally not worthwhile to spend time on nice GUIs and install systems.

Except no ads -> no revenue -> no programmers. That's really the problem that needs to be solved for this to take off.

Also this doesn't look like Unbuntu to me... hypocrites!
posted by delmoi at 12:00 AM on March 14, 2010

nsfw
posted by koeselitz at 3:18 AM on March 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's no reason why Facebook, twitter, Flickr and other sites couldn't just operate as self-hosted applications, complete with point 'n' click software installations if people were motivated to make them.

I'm already doing this for RSS readers (that is, hosting it so I can reach it from the Internet). Status.net/identi.ca replaces twitter. I know there are Facebook replacements out there, but I haven't looked into them.
posted by DU at 5:50 AM on March 15, 2010

Holy crap, that Graffiti Analysis thing is great!
posted by joedan at 10:48 AM on March 15, 2010

Except no ads -> no revenue -> no programmers. That's really the problem that needs to be solved for this to take off.

A ton of web 2.0 was built on venture capital with the -expectation- of advertising or some future paying model to be determined once the VC dollars rolled in: twitter continues to employ programmers, etc.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:09 PM on March 15, 2010

:)
posted by finite at 3:23 PM on March 24, 2010