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Why Human Rights Requires Free Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the necessary-but-not-sufficient dept.

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."

4 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. [-1 Offtopic] Something I have been thinking about by C.+Mattix · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I have been thinking, and talking with my co-workers about this: I wonder how many jobs have been lost in the "tech downturn" because of companies using Free/Open software instead of developing things themselves. This came to mind after hearing 2 suits sitting at a table next to me at lunch (who worked for a large insurance company) talking about how they reduced headcount in the database division. They said:
    • A: Yeah...I was able to reduce the IT headcount by 5 last month.
    • B: How?
    • A: Well, you know we were working on that claims system in house, well with the budget cut I scrapped the project. Instead I hired a couple kids from Purdue who wrote basically the same thing with Perl and Post-something or a another. I let the IT guys go, and just hired the kids part time, and we don't have to pay for the software. The budget is now about a 10th of what it was.
    • B: Good deal...I've heard that the web group is doing the same thing. ...


    That conversation snippit really got me thinking about this. What does everyone else think?
  2. Re:Oddly Enough.... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Those that did survive the Holocaust did so with neither free nor spendy software. Heck, they didn't so much as have an Apple II!

    Many if not most of those who did survive probably owe their good fortune to one of the first "computers": the British Colossus machine that was used to crack German codes. This significatly shortened the war, stopping Hitler's plans before they were carried out to completion.

  3. what's the real reason for the article? by DuctTape · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I'm not exactly sure that what I read in the article (yes, I read the article) makes sense to me. Where Oram tries to make a case for where a human rights organization publicly presents its results, and it needs to be beyond dispute, he tries to say that the software has to be as trustworthy as the method used to collect the data.

    As well as it should be, but I believe that the effort to "prove" that the program used to process the data is trustworthy is going to be as difficult as "proving" that the collected raw data is trustworthy. One could, perhaps not easily, take the data that was collected and plug and chug it into another statistical program to see if the results were anywhere close to what the first presented results where. That could be considered one way to "prove" that the processing was legitimate, as long as the programs were not from the same software house.

    But just go ahead and try to prove that the data were correct. But that's not the argument here.

    I'm wondering if Oram's argument was more of an idealogical one rather than a practical one. I don't see why someone should be disbelieved just because they used a Microsoft product or a SAS product. I would also think it highly unlikely that a maker of shrink-wrap software would somehow be at fault, except perhaps through their own stupidity, for erroneous results, especially since their credibility is on the line.

    On top of all that, wouldn't an open software package created mostly by, or presumed created by, a group of a particular nationality (KDE presumably made mostly by Germans, for one) come under more criticism if that particular nationality was related to the question that the(ir) software was being used to solve? Hmmm....

    I'm starting to think that this article was an excercise in political correctness since I would highly doubt that someone would want to go through the effort in taking apart the program used to prove that it was correct. It would instead have to be an assumption that it was correct because it was Open Source. And how often have we had perfect Open Source programs that never needed patching?

    Disclaimer: I use Open Source software, except for Quicken (sorry).

    --
    Is this thing on? Hello?
  4. Re:I think we're stretching things a bit... by harvardian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In fact, it is a simple task to bias results from an open source product. Just change the source to bias your data, and you're pretty much guaranteed that nobody will find out.

    On the other hand, you can't change the source code of a commercial product, which as the parent post said, lots of people know how to interpret data from. This makes is significantly harder to dupe people with fudged data.