Michael S. Hart y el Proyecto Gutenberg

A propósito de la oferta de la Fundación de Software Libre, (elegir un regalo de un producto recomendado por la FSF), dando una recorrida sobre las sugerencias, se observa la oferta de libros electrónicos del Proyecto Gutenberg (junto a otros especialmente interesantes, como GIMP, Least Authority, o Trisquel GNU/Linux). Luego de revisar unos minutos el sitio del Proyecto Gutenberg, hay dos elementos que quisiera traer a primer plano: La noticia de la desaparición de su fundador, que desconocía, y la advertencia del Proyecto acerca de las negociaciones establecidas bajo el paraguas del TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), para asegurar la protección de derechos de autor globalmente.
Respecto a la desaparición de su fundador, Michael S. Hart, sólo me entero un par de meses después. Quizá se deba a desatención, pero me resulta curioso no haber conocido antes la noticia ¿relegada a noticia de tercer orden? no podría asegurarlo, pero no hay duda de que su actividad de por sí iba en contra de quienes tienen en sus manos difundirlo.Sin duda le debemos -y le deberemos- mucho a Hart, en la medida en que su esfuerzo ayudó a preservar un espacio abierto de conocimiento, y a contraponer otro modo de valorar la escritura y su difusión. Dice The Economist sobre Hart:

Everyone should have access to the great works of the world, whether heavy (Shakespeare, “Moby-Dick”, pi to 1m places), or light (Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, the “Kama Sutra”). Everyone should have a free library of their own, the whole Library of Congress if they wanted, or some esoteric little subset; he liked Romanian poetry himself, and Herman Hesse's “Siddhartha”. The joy of e-books, which he invented, was that anyone could read those books anywhere, free, on any device, and every text could be replicated millions of times over. He dreamed that by 2021 he would have provided a million e-books each, a petabyte of information that could probably be held in one hand, to a billion people all over the globe—a quadrillion books, just given away. As powerful as the Bomb, but beneficial.

En un contexto en que la obra literaria o científica es cada vez más manejada como un producto que se debe comprar, llevado a extremos que van contra miles de años de transmisión del conocimiento, el Proyecto Gutenberg nos recuerda que la Ilíada y la Odisea se transmitieron por siglos verbalmente, y que si se hubieran seguido los criterios que hoy se pretenden pasar por "naturales", ambas probablemente se hubieran perdido.
Por lo tanto, quisiera enmendar el olvido cometido con Hart, transcribiendo su visión de la misión del Proyecto:

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Simple, y fundamental.
En otra nota hablaremos de la iniciativa trans pacífica, que requiere tiempo.