Libre Cooperatives from HVAC to Media Libraries: An Economic Proposal for Better Tech

If you, like me, feel that everything is suffering from the increasingly inescapable pressure to make someone else big bucks quick or perish, then I hope to offer you some uplifting ideas (including refrigerant trivia and some Building Science). Let's explore the synergy between libre philosophy and employee-owned cooperatives, and how this combo can both be sustainable today and thrive in the future. We'll take a look at the ongoing transformation of the entire HVAC/R industry and see how building mechanical systems are primed for an open-source revolution. Then we'll push the principles further and imagine what's possible when the underlying economic engines are tuned for stable, sustainable improvement rather than growth. I'll introduce a concept for a "local personal data system" and how such an abstraction can tie together the technical and economic aspects of this potential future. Throughout, we'll ponder how we can all benefit from, and gain more agency over, our own work and devices (and indoor air quality). Libre Is The Only Way to Plug-n-Play, so let's build a tech economy to make that happen.