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Open Source Enables Terrorist States
chill writes "Where to begin? OpenBSD Journal has a couple of update articles on the business of DARPA cancelling POSSE and OpenBSD's grant. And here is a message from Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD big cheese, with a quote from a military spokesman. How does '...due to world events and the evolving threat posed by increasingly capable nation-states...' grab you? Does open source and freely available security support terrorism by its very nature?"
All this post-9/11 paranoia is getting really ridiculous, and I can't wait till someone in power finally realizes how stupid we are being.
Have you not considered the possibility that the post-9/11 paranoia will in some way be key to keeping the people currently in power with their current realisations in power?
cough*dmca*cough
cough*patriot*cough
cough*homelandsecurity*cough
cough*probushwebsites*cough
Jesus Christ! What the hell is wrong with the GWB administration? France opposed the war with Iraq because on the grounds that there is no sufficient evidence that Iraq has not destroyed its WMDs - and now after the war, the evidence is still missing! So far France seems to have been right and these morons are still intent on "punishing" the France for trying to prevent this unjustified, unilateral war (the true motives, of course, were regime change, oil and GWB's personal issues with religion and his daddy).
BOO! TERRO
Democracy? Let me see... you've got somehere between 280- and 300 MILLION citizens in the USA and by some absolute miracle the current king/president is the SON of the previous Republican president. What are the odds? It's a plutocracy you're living in, your American dream means NOTHING.
Bill of rights? Don't make me laugh - how does racial profiling, Guantanamo Bay and the Disney coyright extension fit in with THAT?
That was classic intercourse!
The GPL will force them to return all of their changes to the kernel and we can review their patches and keep track of what they are up to! It's all a very sneaky calculated move. Stop complaining or you'll screw it up.
What the Bush Administration wants to see is the perpetuation of a world where the US has no rivals militarily, economically, politically, or technologically. This is also deeply unhealthy and pursuit of this goal will likely profoundly injur the US economy as the interests of businesses are turned aside in the name of keeping the money here at home. Open source does not suit that vision very well, nor for that matter does globalism. But it is anti-globalism for the wrong reasons.
Actually, keeping the money at home is not the goal of the neo-conservatives like Bush. Open Source is a threat because it can cross borders for free. Bush, and those like him want a world where they have no rivals, and the only way to do this is to make the US dollar the one and only currency used for world exchange. One can't do this if innovations are quietly slipping in and out of the United States without an exchange of currency that is controlled by the United States.
If a majority of the software in the world were commercial, and the majority of the companies providing that software resided in the US, it would only serve to strengthen the position of the dollar (since it would be the standard currency by which most software would be traded).
The Euro is (was) the only other currency which stood to give the dollar a...heh...run for its money. All the smoke and mirrors about terrorism and the UN security council and human rights were all bullshit when it came to the invasion of Iraq. It came down to one thing: economic power:
France and Germany got a lot of their oil from black marketeers who bought and sold oil from Iraq. The Euro was gaining acceptance as a standardized currency for these transactions, giving it weight and legitimacy as a world currency (one might scoff at the term "oil standard", but today, that's really what determines the value of a currency more than (m)any other factors).
The US wants to control the oil moving in and out of the states with which it has increasingly poor relations due to its incessant (and often irrational) support of Israel. Diplomacy would take too long, as it would allow the Euro to become seated as the standard method of exchange. The solution: invade these countries, control their oil (or at least enforce that it is traded with the US dollar as the standard currency), and send any contending currency back to the stone age (along with a few insignificant cultures). You'll notice that Syria Jordan and Iran are suddenly popping up on the radar as increasingly "bad".
Software is no different. It is a smaller market, sure. And it doesn't really stand to be the major determining factor of a standard world currency, but it does have other stop-gap effects. The theory is that those who control the flow of money can also control the flow of technology. They want to be able to create an artificial discrepancy so that the US always has the most advanced technologies. They can't do this if software is available for free. What they don't understand is that there are innovative people outside the US. OpenSource will live, whether it exists in the world, or in the world minus the US. The US just hopes it can starve those people out of existence before they become too powerful.
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