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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."

3 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. 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.