Most of what Stallman complains about would go away if there were no profit-seeking corporation sitting in the middle. If no one were trying to collect a 20% tax on taxis, you wouldn't need to pay with a credit card and you could have anonymous cash rides. Heck, without the need for a company to have something to take a 20% cut of, you could have actual ride-sharing.
A free, open-source app could be written and verified to not track its users, beyond the need to provide location services at the moment a call for a cab is placed.
So why haven't I ever heard of the free, open-sourced alternative to Uber & Lyft?
How about safety? I wouldn't get into a vehicle (esp. at night and / or in a dodgy neighborhood) driven by a stranger without any record, vetting, or background checks and where the premise of our interaction was that no one would know they had picked me up, and no one would be able to track me from there.
And I'm a man; I can imagine many women would be even more skeptical.
That's similar to an idea I had a while ago. A cryptocurrency based open source application, using a margin generated on rides to fund maintenance and insurance, but I decided to pick something else (which I thought could be more helpful) as a startup idea.
I'd love to see if there's been any work on something in this vein regarding any company in the sharing economy. Traction/Marketing would be hard though.
Most of what Stallman complains about would go away if there were no profit-seeking corporation sitting in the middle. If no one were trying to collect a 20% tax on taxis, you wouldn't need to pay with a credit card and you could have anonymous cash rides. Heck, without the need for a company to have something to take a 20% cut of, you could have actual ride-sharing.
A free, open-source app could be written and verified to not track its users, beyond the need to provide location services at the moment a call for a cab is placed.
So why haven't I ever heard of the free, open-sourced alternative to Uber & Lyft?