Me, myself and ECIP

Hi, it’s me, Tuomas. I’m not the most brilliant in introductions and while I’m at it, when I’m forced to do one, I’m quite brief. Brief as in one word brief. But let’s stretch it a tad further this time.

I’m studying currently second year of information processing sciences in the university of Oulu. In finnish it was called computer sciences but after a while the difference dawned on me. The difference being that (at least in Oulu) the information processing focuses quite a lot more to the soft processing of the information instead of the stereotypical basement dwelling kind. After my initial disappointment I’ve gotten quite fond of it though.

Sharing and ethics of computing are very close to my heart. I don’t know if it’s more because of tinfoil hat squeezing my head or the fact that my background is in classical music where the whole field of arts and culture wouldn’t even properly exist if the music wasn’t shared. Obviously with modern copyrights and license expiration times the whole world of sharing is quite different. In addition to that, I do think that when we handle all our personal data on our machines, we should be able to verify how the machine actually processes the said information.

When I started the studies, I delved deep in to research of ethics in computing and failed to find any meaningful research done when it comes to the ethics of free software. That was when it dawned on me that it might have to be done by me.

That is how my goals of just typing code furiously changed more to focus on ethics of computing. We’ll see what comes of me in the end but I’ll be sure to make noise while doing it. Either grumbling and swearing to my beard while trying to make sense of algorithms or proselytize the word of free software to unwilling listeners. To my benefit, Stallman was just deposed from FSF. Maybe I’ll just take his place.