Worst cases

Revision as of 16:22, 24 June 2003 by Jukeboksi (talk | contribs)

Worst cases are bad things that happen if we design or run this wrong. We pick licenses and hardware and design and data in order to minimize the risk of these things happening. Therefore we must exhaustively list them before we make binding choices. The Consumerium Governance Organisation will have to devote a lot of time to expanding this list.

Rather than edit a case, it's better to write a new one that is more general or more specific. Make the cases very specific or very general, but stick to things you think really can happen. If you think they can't happen, they are threats, and document them anyway, since someone thinks they can happen.


If we chooose to use Consumerium Software License two things could result:

  1. The anarchist types think that we are too "mainstream", "sold out" or control freaks and decide to make a GPL version that runs without any cooperation with the companies, that make and market products thus making strong worded, weakly substantiated attacks on companies and persons possible and the result is that this Anarchist Consumerium Fork stays out of the mainstream and never reaches the general population of consumers
  2. The executives at big businesses think that we're too anarchist, free speech and bad for "profit by exploitation"-practices and make a Proprietary Consumerium Fork for the opposite reasons from the Anarchists (This possibility does not very much depend on our choice of Licenses)

Consumerium simply doesn't work, and often clears purchases that are morally offensive to the customer, or just fails. Ultimately, it is ignored, and just gathers dust. Hardware acquired to run it is used for other purposes. Another good idea that failed. The reasons it might "not work" include at least:

  • bad data
  • buggy software
  • incompatible hardware

Company X and other enemies create their own modified schema, AND modified software. The modified software works with and even EXPECTS the altered grammar, and now you have a fork. Each promoter of a new fork gets "friendly" content poured into the altered grammar that we can't get first, and (depending on content license and source) can't even copy or validate. The "new improved" Corporate Consumerium takes over with careful marketing of itself to retails. These professionally-marketed alternative software turns the same green or red light, but, with different criteria. The idea that "you own the hardware you decide what software will run on it, not the customer" is heavily promoted to the point of sale venue owner (retailer). Advertising benefits are tossed in. Since it serves the interests of retailers, and maybe pays them, it will be preferentially installed to use the standard hardware deployed to those retailers by Consumerium. We get crowded out, like Linux has been crowded out, and are used only in a few backwater places that the mainstream marketers ignore. Consumerium has maybe 2% of a market in moral purchasing, and does all the hard work, but is not the source of innovation.

Actually: There no hope of them ever giving consumerium any credit as a source of Intellectual Property (read: The Concept), so it won't be a fork in the sense that they would have to say it's based on GFDL'd material from http://consumerium.org . It'll just be a big money, fancy "service" that's not "not invented here". Big companies hate "not invented here" things.