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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'."
Spyware Cookies, Banners, Popups, and Porn, oh wait thats the United States
can wait a bit longer. The kind of stability they need right now isn't in a computer operating system, it's in a governing system. They also need stability in what we consider basic utilities -- electricity, running water, etc. It also helps not to have to worry about car bombs, suicide bombers, and other daily attacks.
If you look through Maslow's heirarchy of needs, a good, cheap, stable, tweakable operating system doesn't make it in the radar quite yet.
Whichever side of the political divide we stand on over Iraq, I don't think anyone could disagree now that if we can help here then it will do good for them.
We don't have to wait for a stable government, we can work on multiple fronts at the same time.
At least with Open Source we're not asking for anything and we're not just blindly giving, we're sharing. They have an equal right to be able to contribute to open source.
For those in the US, please also lobby your government to remove the restrictions that stop you sending Linux (and presumably *BSD) to Iraq whilst allowing MS, etc, to sell proprietory systems.
Chris down under
Iraq doesn't have a stable government, economy or military and it is caught between Islamist/Islamofascist guerrillas and an international occupation force. Iraq needs political and economic stability more than anything else. We need to educate them on the benefits of non-violent and non-coercive political debate and discourse, not open source software. We need to educate them how to become a modern industrial country with an economy that isn't dependent on one industry. We need to train an army that is loyal to the country's constitution, not leaders.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Check it out here.
If Halliburton can get away charging treble the market rate for delivering oil, I seriously doubt there won't be any corporate skullduggery involved in the framing of government contracts for something like computing.
Wasn't ex-RIAA head Hillary Rosen consulting with the Iraqi Governing Council on how to write the copyright section of the Iraqi constitution?
Why not just write a mandate for Trusted Computing to guarantee the security of any imported US content and guarantee a RIAA-type organization can end up in control of whatever Iraqi culture blooms?
Iraq presents an opportunity for a democracy to form that gains all the advantages of hindsight. It would be the chance to correct all of the mistakes that were made with Amercian democracy (such as ignorance of money's impact on all three branches or the constant war of state vs federal rights). Unfortunately, now that corporate American wields such control, it seems highly unlikely that any new "democracy" we spawn would follow noble, altruistic ideals but instead follow capitalist whatever-makes-trade-for-US-companies ideals.
Futher proof that there is no room for democratic ideals in Iraqi is that the Shiite majority would easily control any democratic system that was implemented, something that I'm sure the US will not tolerate.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I'm just guessing here, but I doubt that trying to bring Open Source tools into a developing technology infrastructure would sap the effort to create a stable government.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Read the Letter Silicon Valley Linux USer Group put together to the DOD.
Unbelievable, but apparently true
Help fight continental drift.
I'm gonna call you on that. I don't believe MS is a huge contributor of the Bush campaign, and I don't believe that by using Microsoft software, Iraq forfeits their chance at a stable government.
This seems to be more corporate-demonizing hogwash that gets modded up here at /. Honestly, even if MS did make unusually large contributions to the Bush campaign, I fail (in my shallow understanding of politics) to see how that translates to an unstable government in Iraq. Please enlighten me.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Many European parliament's see several Governments in a year as parliamnetary majorities shift and collapse without a break in the provision of essential services.
strong independent intitutions and the rule of law might be what you're looking for.
the point is that a hell of a lot of things are needed to make what we'd view as a decent society.
A starting list for mine would be (in rough order of importance):
Once you have all those then free markets can flourish and people can buy what they want.
But careful who you say that to.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
First of all, Iraq is, or at least was until years of US/UN sanctions crippled the economy, a fairly sophisticated country. I am sure there are many intellegint, well educated Iraqi geeks and computer scientists and power users who are quite capable of deciding for them selves what Iraq needs. Second, there is this HUGE gulf between what we think and what appears to be thought, based on news accounts, in the Arab world. The clearest example is the widespread anger at the fall of Hussein as a humiliation, a view that I would wager is alien to most americans. People in the Mideast are just as smart as we are, and they are fully entitled to their opinions; if we don't like them, acting like a big bully, and telling people to shutup and do as we think is not going to help. I think there is a tinge of this in the post, we know best and you (children) will do what we want (unspoken or else)...
[bush@iraq /usr/local] rpm -ivh opensourcesoftware-0.1.i386.rpm /usr/local] rpm -ivh democracy-1.0.i386.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
personalcomputers.so.4.1.2 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1
electricity.so.0.9.6 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1
domesticlawandorder.so.1.0 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1
[bush@iraq
Segmentation fault: population not formatted for democracy-1.0
I should buy some cement.
This seems to be more corporate-demonizing hogwash that gets modded up here at /. Honestly, even if MS did make unusually large contributions to the Bush campaign, I fail (in my shallow understanding of politics) to see how that translates to an unstable government in Iraq. Please enlighten me.
Directly, you are correct--it does not translate to an unstable government. Indirectly, it could give Microsoft an edge on the building of the technology/information infrastructure. It would be yet another big American corporation sinking its meathooks into the money pot that is being used to rebuild Iraq, leaving the Iraqi brain pool out of the picture.
Consider this example. American firms estimated that it would take many months and millions of dollars to rebuild Iraqi cement factories, which are crucial to the rebuilding effort. Intrepid Iraqis did it in a few months for less than $100k. How? They didn't set lofty goals for state-of-the-art equipment and facilities. They cannibalized parts from remaining production lines to get at at least one production facility operating. This facility can, in turn, generate revenue through the sale of cement for use in the reconstruction (as opposed to expensive imports) and put that revenue into the factory and workers' salaries.
Likewise, why should we as taxpayers spend millions of dollars to import the labor and material into Iraq when there exists local talent to do the same job? If they're not as skilled, fine. TRAIN them to do the job, don't do it for them. Teach a man to fish and all that...
In short--use local resources (material and talent) to do the work as much as possible, and bring in outside talent and material only if needed. Iraq is NOT a feeding frenzy for big corporations looking to get a big government check (even if it looks like it is turning into that); the money should be a resource to help the Iraqi people rebuild their own country.
As a taxpayer, I'd much prefer to see my tax dollars spent to help the IRAQIS rebuild Iraq, not Halliburton, Microsoft, etc. as nauseum.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
There are few points I felt I need to reply to. yesm right now we (Iraqis) have no sovern country, yes we don't have enough electrcity, yes drinking water is hardly good enough for drinking and yes Computer and IT is just about the last on our list of necessities for survival. BUT, as Iraqis, teh ppl. who actully built teh first civilization, and got that wiped out and rebuilt more time than I have time to count in here, and as Iraqis, who were the first to come up with writing, and the first to write a law to govern the aspects of everyday life some 10,000 years ago. I think we are capable of rebuilding, and placing our country back at the level it rightfully deserves. As some guys mentioned above, we may not have enough electrecity, nor a sovern government. but we sure do have brain power. And since I'm speaking to a techincal crowd here, I assume most of you are familiar with "Multi-tasking", while we have ppl. who are capable of rebuilding a government system, law institutes and have the help to rebuild power station and other facilities, we, the "geeks" can at least start to raise our voices in parallel. Raise awarness of what Linux is, and what FLOSS is and most importantly how to benefit from it. So the argument that Iraq needs other stuff that are more important is kinda void, everyone should and must do what he/she can in his or her own field, and our field is Linux/OS. Anotehr point, people ahead of me talked about "Linux is free, the US won't benifit from it!" well, last time I checked, which is not too long ago, RedHat was a US company and the charge money for their solutions, minus Fedora. IBM, HP, Dell and other manfacturers make the hardware that Linux runs on it and it does cost money. I see the benefits for those companies just as good as the benefit of Microsoft and their technologies to the US. So that's another point that's void. Regarding Arabization, the majority of Iraqis are able to communicate in English as teh Iraqi education system teachs teh English language manditory starting at grade 5. University studies, specially for Engineering and Science are at least 85% English language. here is a report on why we have chosen English language on our Linux group web portal it explains how Arabic langauge, even though it's spoken by the majority of Iraqis, is not really a blocking factor in the way of English only technologies (Given that at least we have a browser that renders Arabic fonts and probably few mail and IM clients that does so too). So language also is not a factor. All in all, Iraq right now is *IS* a brand new harddrive, we have the brian power to run anything on it, and that anything better be Linux :P
anyhoo, I hope I made my points, comments are welcomed.
Nabil. (http://www.iraqilinux.org)
p.s.: I'm an Iraqi Living in canada right now, left Iraq some 3 years ago, and kept close contact with Iraq, so my information is up2date)
Won't somebody please think of the Karma!
Watch out before Apple moves in undetected and it becomes iRaq.
// ville
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/
Iraq has suffered mightily from ecological disaster during the regime of Saddam Hussein and in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War I, and Gulf War II. However, it was once the garden spot of the Middle East, and there is work already underway in restoring ecosystems in the Tigris/Euphrates River Basin.
Yes, there are a lot more pressing needs for the Iraqi people as a whole. But F/OSS is certainly better for them, as a developing nation, than bondage to Microsoft which is no doubt in Bill Gates' plans.
There's an old Union organizing song which has a line that says "we need bread and roses too." Iraq needs all the things people are saying they need in this thread. But they also need access to technology, both for practical and not-so-practical reasons. A developing nation needs bread, but that doesn't mean roses are out of the question until the bread situation is dealt with. We could do worse than to encourage F/OSS in Iraq. Certainly the Bush Administration, Halliburton and their buddies at Microsoft are hard at work encouraging other things to base Iraq's computer infrastructure on.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
For the most part, they aren't attacking us. The attacks are coming from a minority of Saddam loyalists or foreign Islamic terrorists.
You've been watching too much Fox news. There are no Saddam loyalists. The freedom fighters are just that - fighting for control of their own country. You can't dismiss as everyone who is anti-US as an Islamic terrorist, because you'd be branding practically the rest of the world as Islamic terrorists. And remember: one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
"Given that the US is already excluding foreign nations from lucrative rebuilding contracts in Iraq,"
Ah, the hazards of only getting your news from Slashdot. The DoD more or less backpedalled on that mere hours after that announcement (by putting the bidding on hold for "further review"), and there's been enough of a reverse on that policy that France and Germany are forgiving huge chunks of the Iraqi debt. Most of the media (including the ones who would be the last to believe the administration could be this shrewd or subtle) now seem to believe that the whole thing was a staged event to give James Baker a carrot to offer to the Paris Club, getting a promise to reduce Iraq's debt by giving them back something they never really lost to begin with.
You really should get out of the house every once in a while.