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Why Human Rights Requires Free Software
andyo writes "Why Human Rights Requires Free Software: Report on a practitioner's view of the critical role free software plays in the work of human rights activists around the globe."
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When we now consider the right to Free software a basic human right, I think we are all starting to take ourselves a little too seriously. It's not like someone is trying to outlaw the writing of Free software, or suppress the Free software movement (okay, maybe Microsoft is trying to talk trash about it, but they can't really do anything to stop it). Or is this the prelude to an argument that people should have access to source code for proprietary commercial apps, because not having it is a violation of their human rights?
Free software is good. But that doesn't mean that all software should be Free. It's a big jump from intellectual openness to Stallmanism.
And software most certainly is a tangible thing.
The right to life. The right to live well. The right to die well. The right to voice one's opinion without fear of imprisonment or death.
These are rights.
Free software? Sure, it can help human rights workers. But is it a right?
No more than my inherent human right to own a porsche. Someone call someone else, cause I don't see one in my driveway yet.
I'm sure this is quite offtopic, but what the hell.
/. is wasting a lot of space posting the transcripts of what some microsoft employee says, then the 20 rebuttles from the free softwar community. I think I could do without it. Any chance we can make "Free Software-Good/Bad" it into a category so it can be filtered out by everyone? Or maybe just throw it in with the "Jon Katz" category...
Is it just me, or does anyone else think it's overkill to give a spot on the front page to every article that expresses an opinion on how good/bad free software is?
Sure, the first few discussions that reach the mainstream public... that makes sense. Now,
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Doesn't he first state it should be "free" and not "open source" and later, he compares proprietary solution with open source?
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
Yes I am. Thanks for noticing. I noticed you didn't post a link to YOUR webcam, Charles Atlas...
Imagine an American scientist bringing a closed, proprietary encryption program or statistical package to political activists in a foreign country and saying, "Just use this; take my word that it works right."
As someone who works for a company that produces statistical software I found this comment to be rather close-minded and wrong. My company, along with most others, goes through extensive certification testing to make sure that our software produces correct results. Our software is used by a broad range of academics, private sector researchers, government workers, and not-for-profit groups; and not once have I ever heard anyone even suggest that our program produces purposefully inaccurate results.
Quite honestly, there are no open-source statistical software packages that even come close to offering the benefits of our package. Although R has shown some promise, the documentation that comes with our software alone is worth the price. I have yet to see an open-source package that comes with the same in-depth encyclopedic reference documentation that we produce.
Just because it's closed-source doesn't mean we're evil.
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In this case the College students were able to deliver better than the IT workers. This is in part due to reuse of old labor (code)as well as presumebly cheaper pay.
As far as cheaper pay there are already systems of natural and artifical checks and balances to keep an equilibrium of pay for services releative to the cost of living.
As far as free labor (code), the laborers have to feed themselves and therefore will have to dedicate resources to paid labor. Also, the "free" labor could have been part of an assignment for a class that would be bartered for college credits that would eventually be bartered for a degree.
So in conclusion, yes free software is causing companies to fire experienced professionals and replace them with part time college students. However, this is not neccessarally a bad thing. If the professionals are really that damn good they will be able to get another job. If they can't then society probally has little need for their labor and they will learn new other skills or work for what the college students are working for. The obvisious conclusion of this is there will be less college students taking up computer science/CIS and less free software written. This will cause a greater demand for programmers and greater rates of pay. Hence capatialism will keep the market in check.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Since when do you have a right to copy something you don't own or intend to buy? People like you are the reason why there are few that take legitimate opposition to draconian copyright seriously. Instead of arguing "I have a right to use my IP in any way I choose for my own use (commercial or personal)" you argue, "I have a right to do anything with any IP I encounter for my own use." Tell me, which one sounds more mature and one like the rantings of some child who never grew up?
Why, whatever did the framers of the Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution ever do before the concept of Free Software?
What a bunch of tripe. Human rights requires vigilance and dedication. Software systems are a non-sequitur--they can express freedom, but they cannot create it.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The level of nastiness that this post has generated is very disappointing. There are some silly comments in the slapdash story, especially the comment about closed and non-free software being inferior because it is less transparent. Mathematica, MatLab and the like should all be independently verifable simply by the inputs and results and also by the inclusion of results of those programs in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The point of the article, which would be a better point of debate, is that data collection and analysis by human rights organizations benefits from free software.
What free software provides human rights folks is a platform for doing specific kinds of work and letting a community improve that platform.
Here's a personal example: I'm developing a web based research and reporting system to track people who are kicked out of their HUD apartments for a drug or alcohol related arrest (not conviction) under the crazy One Strike law. We're both using free and open source tools and will, upon release in the near future, release this thing as quite modest free software.
The advantage is pragmatic: I can create a sophisticated system that other people can use to gather their own data on this subject and share/compare with ours. Are there nationwide trends and implications for this law beyond Chicago, the city where I work? Are there methods for analyzing this data that we're missing? Do other locales have specific pieces of information that we don't need to worry about in Chicago? Free software makes these questions easier to answer than proprietary software. Most of the mathematics required is stuff that any undergrad with numerical methods and statistical analysis under his or her belt can easily code, so that isn't really any issue.
It's a shame that the discussion on Slashdot thus far has been so hasty and angry, because even if it's a flawed article, it should really make people how they connect the "nerd" part of Slashdot with the "stuff that matters" part.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
It is one thing to argue that an author should offer his works of authorship to the world as public domain without limitations, or even with sufficient limitations to satisfy RMS that it is "free" as he defines the term. This debate is one thing, and I do not speak to that issue here.
It is entirely another thing to claim that the failure of a society or individual to do so constitutes some form of Human Rights violation. Frankly, to do so is inanely naive and demeaning of the importance and significance of human rights. It is entirely different to argue that something is a Real Good Thing, and another to argue that it is essential to the survival of a decent human condition.
If there is a case to be made for this proposition, the article doesn't set it forth. All it contains is a combination of turgid rhetoric, wild (perhaps false) overstatements and illogical rationalizations. The argument here is virtually indistinguishable from arguments that all property, real, personal and otherwise, likewise constitutes a violation of Human Rights. Fine, but that is a radically different debate -- and there are far more refined arguments to be made than are made here. This "argument," at end, is just sophomoric whining.
The thing about "it widens the imbalance between the rich and poor" is pretty typical Marxist rhetoric, but for one little thing. Marx would probably say that "widening the imbalance" between rich and poor is a good thing, because things have to get worse before they can get better. Only when the world has hit rock-bottom, economically and socially, will the working people of the world wake up to their circumstances and bring in the True Revolution.
Or so Marx would say. It seems clear from history that Marx was wrong about just about everything. He seemed to base his reasoning on the assumption that the upper classes (the bourgeoisie-- cool, that's in my spell checker!) are inherently corrupt and that the working classes (the proletariat) are inherently noble. Thing is, though, that if you take somebody out of the working class and put him into the upper class, nine times out of ten he'll become a died-in-the-wool capitalist. Marx didn't count on this aspect of human nature.
So yeah, I agree with you. This is, in fact, just bullshit, but I think so for a slightly different reason. See, the capitalist thinks that inequity is a good thing because it creates a slope of upward mobility that all people can aspire to climb, thereby inspiring all sorts of good things that make the world a better place. And the socialist or communist thinks that inequity is a good thing because it will, sooner or later, bring about the Revolution that will make the world a better place. I don't know of a rationalized political philosophy that argues that inequity between classes is something you should oppose directly.
I think the author of this article was probably an amateur.
I write in my journal