Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Representatives Torpedo UN Information Summit
StoneLion writes "The United Nations World Summit on Information Society was established to 'harness the potential of knowledge and technology' and to 'find effective and innovative ways to put this potential at the service of development for all.' You'd think open source software would be a natural for many UN member countries. But NewsForge's Joe Barr discovered that the US is driving policy for the organization, and its official position is that 'using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit'; in other words, they want to make the world safe for capitalism." We've mentioned WSIS before. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
"Using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit"
Thank you Captain Obvious! Using free software keeps companies that sell software from making a profit on software they don't get to sell. This guy's got to be an economics major...
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Shouldn't Open Source just be considered competition? After all, it's just code. The automakers in Detroit seem to be doing fairly well, even with cheap foreign competition.
The software companies have gotten fat and lazy. Open Source came at them from left field and they still can't figure out how to honestly fight it. That's why they go crying to the politicians after contributing money to their campaigns.
Trolling is a art,
the US is doing the same thing it's always done in the UN -- attempt to provide token participation in a body that is sometimes useful for achieving otherwise-difficult ends, but that can be easily bogged down or otherwise rendered useless when it tries to do something that we don't care for.
I would even go so far as to say this isn't about maintaining capitalist dominance or corporate dominance per se, so much as it is derailing something that could potentially be highly disruptive to the US position as a technological leader and controlling force on third-world technological innovation. Open Source would drastically lower the barrier to entry for pretty much any country looking to develop an information technology regime, which puts countries on a much more even footing to do things the US doesn't like (organize, provide information to people, utilize cryptography, and heavens! even provide a means for impoverished people to have true democracy), let alone making governments more effective. Strict politics-of-power thinking would suggest that other countries having strong, independent governments is not in the US' interests, because such governments and countries (and ultimately, populations) are much harder to manipulate...
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Both open source and closed source can happily live in a capitalistic society. However I do think that closed source and closed standards lead to a monopolistic capitalism, while open source and open standards lead to a free market capitalism. I personally would rather have the free market capitalism, but I don't think we can force a free market to be free, it must free itself. In technology this is what seems to be happening. I hope it continues.
There are three ways to get wealth: inherit it, marry it, or steal it.
Given that most of the wealthy nations of the world got that way through theft of some kind or another: colonial resources, natural (many would say aboriginal) resources, intellectual property (North America in the 19th century, witness China doing the same today) or labour (slavery or equivalents). I suspect the third world may take note of the precedent in their drive to get out of poverty.
We in the west are a little too comfy, I think, with the idea that our priveleges are entirely a product of our own innocently industrious natures. I think we are in for a painful readjustment. Even now countries like China are gathering the capability to put our currencies in the toilet. I am personally hoping it only takes stolen "intellectual" property to get the third world out of poverty.