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Iraq's Open Source Possibilities
An anonymous reader writes "In a Linux Journal article, Iraq's 2 person LUG describes the software consumer market in Iraq today, and their hopes for educating the masses about open-source software: 'Iraq is now a blank, unformatted hard disk and can be loaded with anything. Everything is open in Iraq right now. There are no regimented standards or massive expenditure in a particular monopoly's software'."
On Saturday, I had an Internet chat with Iraq, between a coffeehouse just outside of Washington, DC, and the Baghdad Internet Cafe.
One of their questions went like this:
baghdadic: LATEEF ASKS U HOW MUCH THE LATIST MODEL OF COMPUTER IN US ?
techartvideo: U can get good computer for 350 dollars, very good for 3000 dollars.
baghdadic: IT IS EXPENSIVE
techartvideo: How much for a computer in Baghdad?
baghdadic: 200 USD FOR P4 ( ASIAN ORIGIN ) TO 1300USD FOR LAP TOP
Which goes to show that the world is pretty much the same everywhere, especially for geeks!
While I agree that a stable government would be good, with all the corruption in Washington to institute standards concerning say cell phones, etc. I think others are watching this situation and drooling hoping that American instituted "standard" will hold in Iraq. Nonetheless, Arabeyes is a great place to start. I believe they just released an iso which contains a "working" arabized (Arabeyes -- get it!!!) cdrom image. It is a Knoppix base, if I remember correctly. I have only tried it a few times, but it seems to work well.
http://www.arabeyes.org/
Hadar has also released some material. I believe there was a drive to try and get universities in the Middle East to consider arabic OSS projects, not sure what became of this though...
Best of Luck, because I fear the next five years will be rough.
Linux doesn't have a kernel, Linux is a kernel.
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not the other 203 that supported the U.S.
203? I'd be impressed to see a list of countries that's just half as long. BTW, only countries that did send troops (and Saudi Arabia and Turkey) get to share the spoils. Rest of the countries get zilch.
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
The reconstruction of Iraq has largely been contracted out to anybody who cared to bid as long as they were American and Halliburton. Where does open source anything fit into that picture?
Now wash your hands.
There are many 'Blogs' by actual Iraqis. Check out this one by a particularly brilliant and inspiring Iraqi named Alaa: (in English)
http://messopotamian.blogspot.com/
This is the article they wrote and submitted to Linux Journal:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6992
"America has not "conlonized" a country we defeated in war."
If you don't want to consider the various possessions that fell into our lap after the Spanish-American War (Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc.), there's still the whole "northern half of Mexico" bit.
"I'll accept you as knowlegable about (American) history if you can give me an example of American "colonial expansion", due to war. I can think of one, but it was more than a hundred years ago."
I'm sure some people living on Okinawa feel as if they were "colonized" after an American victory. There's also the interesting fact that Japan is the only country in the world to have a foreign military base in its capital (we might not "take over," but we certainly don't leave)
We took the Panama Canal Zone from Panama a few seconds after we "liberated" Panama from Colombia. Sure, that was a while ago, but we only just gave it back. There's also the coup staged in Hawaii, which we only recently apologized for (a little late, I would say...). If you're willing to count covert wars, Iran can fit into that category as well.
Of course, these can be written off as "little" issues, since most of our expansion was during the Nineteenth Century. But did we stop because we're now nice guys, or simply because we're big enough? From the beginning of the Twentieth Century to July 4, 1946, from St. Thomas to Luzon the sun did not set in the United States. And even today it's still damn close.
As mentioned in the Linux Journal article, but oddly not in the Slashdot intro is this letter. Helping Iraqi citizens adopt Linux over the products of Bush's friend Gates is illegal and would be a good way to wind up in jail for promoting terrorism. The purpose of invading Iraq is to steal oil and make money for Bush's cronies, not help the people of Iraq. The chances of the Bush administration changing the law to subvert this purpose is nil. Sorry.
What makes these people the experts? Here what I do know.
During the time Saddam was gassing kurds and iranians he was a close ally of the US. We supplied him with weapons and more importantly intelligence. Our sattelites and spies informed him of iranian troop movements. Maybe you are right and he got the raw materials from other countries but he got the knowhow from the US.
Finally. After Saddam gassed the kurds and those awful pictures got transmitted the UN drafted a resolution condeming Saddam. The resolution never passed becasue the Reagan Administration (Reagan, Baker, Bush sr, Cheney etc) vetoed it.
I think that pretty much explains everything you need to know.
War is necrophilia.
I do think that Iraq has one of the best chances of any Middle East country of creating a stable representational democratic government, something that is in short supply there. Ironicly enough Iran is closest to that mark now, but (I think) will soon be surpassed.
Iran actually had a democratic government, it was overturned and replaced with a tyrany, because it wasn't friendly to foreign oil companies.
A representative democratic Iraqi government is hardly likley to be friendly to the US or its corporations. Do you really think that the US, as occupying force, will allow such a government to come into existance?
Historically the US has opposed US unfriendly democratic governments and supported (financially and militarily) US friendly dictatorships and tyranies.
I wrote the article in LinuxJournal on the Iraqi LUG. I thought I could clarify a few things.
First of all, of course Iraq needs a good and independent government, security, better water supply, a working economy, better healthcare, etc. And of course those have higher priority than software. But it also needs so many other things. I live in Iraq and have for most of the time since the war, I speak to Iraqis every day who are quite eloquent about their needs. One of the needs that many Iraqis have is to catch up on the decades of progress that has occurred in the rest of the world.
There are many, many Iraqis who are well-educated, ambitious, middle-class (by Iraqi standards), whose NUMBER ONE desire is to develop their education and understanding of the world's progress. They are outraged at the suggestion that nobody should help them until there is a free government, clean water, reliable power, etc. They want to catch up and quick.
Linux is just one of the things that these people are asking for. Electrical engineers want books and information about progress in their field. So do doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. I'm working with a group of Iraqi artists (www.iraqartists.org) whose number one need right now is to know what has happened in the art world in the past few decades. I know of similar efforts among engineers, academics, physicians, attorneys, etc.
I don't know how I can, personally, bring Iraqis democracy, sanitation, power. But I do know that, without much effort, I can give them Linux distributions and a few bucks and a few books. I know that I can, personally, put them in touch with artists.
If you saw the look of unimaginable joy on the faces of the Linux geeks in Baghdad when I told them that I'd try to get some folks outside of Iraq to help them, I don't think you'd argue that we should put this project aside until every other problem is solved.
If you are in a position to transform Iraq into a democracy, or bring it power, or security, than by all means, do those things. But most of us can't do any of that. But we can send some URLs of useful information, or just an encouraging email, we can ship books and magazines about Linux, we can ship some CDs, and we can send them money. It will make life better for some Iraqis and has the potential of helping to ensure that Iraq's new government will be more open-source friendly. And, I believe strongly, open source knowledge and open source friendly laws will make Iraq a more successful country.
Also: to those who think every penny (dinar) spent in Iraq is controlled by the US and M$, you are mistaken. Of course, the US has very publicly shown that it intends most of the big contracts to go to US companies. But those are US construction companies, for the most part, who will build bridges, roads, schools, telecom centers, hospitals, etc. They are not software companies. Most of the actual work will be done by Iraqi subcontractors, who are free to use whatever OS they choose. Also, billions more will be spent by Iraqi government ministries who are not so directly controlled that they can't choose whatever OS they prefer.
And the Iraqi laws are being written by Americans AND Iraqis. The Americans writing them are career civil servants, many of whom are privately critical of Bush and are not beholden to M$ or any other proprietary solution.
There are certainly many profound problems with the way the US is running Iraq and I report on these all the time on Marketplace (www.marketplace.org), but it is not the complete and total corporatist sell-out that many imagine.
To sum up: if there are ways you can help Iraq that meet their most immediate needs, then do so. If you are someone who can offer Linux support--by offering yourself to be on-call for tech questions, suggesting useful URLs, sending books, CDs, and money, then that would be wonderful.
If you've already decided that the whole thing is a done deal and Bush and corporate America have complete c
Iraq was called the "Fertile Crescent" when it was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Biblical legend had it that the Garden of Eden was at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The people of Southern Iraq are sometimes known as "Marsh Arabs" Because of the flood plains of the rivers.
Iraq is similar to Egypt in that rivers have provided sufficent water in an arid part of the world for people to form urban populations since pre-history.
The infrastructure in Iraq is a HELL of a lot better now than it ever was under Saddam. I'm not going to quote articles about this b/c I don't give a damn about improving my excellent karma :), but I know there are some stories out there about army engineers bringing running water and electricity to villages in Iraq that *never* had them under Saddam. As far as food goes, if you think that more people are starving now than under Saddam, you're a fool.
Electricity was restored to most of the areas it was knocked out very quickly. The US went in to help the Iraqis, not to exploit them, despite what your tinfoil hat theories are.
There are some (very few, but some) legitimate arguments for why going into Iraq was a bad idea, but saying that Iraqis are worse off now than they were under Saddam is stupid.
I'm amazed how much you know about this. I won't claim that I know, but judging by the interviews and reporters I've seen from Iraq, many say they are far worse off at this moment. For instance, all prisoners were let out of jail when Saddam fell. A political and unfair law system may work better than no law at all... I've also seen a few interviews with people who say they used to have electricity, petrol, water and heating, but haven't got it anymore. I guess some people are better off, and some are not. Judging by the (quite extensive) coverage from Norwegian TV and radio, I believe most people are temporarily worse off. But then again, Norwegian media are probably communist.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
I think you've got your dates a little off. Iraq was known as the Fertile Crescent more in the era of the Assyrian empire than the Ottoman one!
You're giving Mr. Hussein way too much credit here. He didn't turn Mesopotamia into a desert with 25 years of bad ecological policy; no, that took thousands of years of over-irrigation. Of course it's true that the Tigris-Euphrates valley was once quite green and lush and that it's the source of that old Semitic legend, the Garden of Eden. But this was thousands of years ago, not hundreds.
The deserification of Mesopotamia was the result of thousands of years of intensive agriculture. Artificial irrigation, when done for thousands of years, slowly but surely cakes the once-fertile soil with salt. Salinization of the soil is the primary reason the fertile crescent [very] gradually turned into a desert.
It took longer than 25 years since the installation of Saddam Hussein or the 85-odd years since the end of the Ottoman Empire. The culprit wasn't the B`ath (I don't know what the proper Romanized spelling of this political party is) party's bad agricultural policies, it was the "bad agricultural policies" of:
(Of course, there really is no such thing as an "Iraqi". There's Arab Sunnites, Arab Shi`a, and Kurds. Three different nations, not one. Iraqi nationalism and the Iraqi people are, in my opinion, the creation of the B`ath party, but I'm sure George Bush and Saddam Hussein would disagree.)
-Lawrence
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