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.
. . .the U.S. has more than its fair share of open source development houses. . .
Like, Ooooooh, IBM? You think they might want to leverage Open Source for a piece of the "I" pie?
Of course identifying the particular interests would go a long ways too....
Ooooooh, Oooooh, don't tell me Mr. Kotter. I think I know this one.
KFG
Here AGAIN we see IP working as intended. It's shame that almost nobody realizes that the whole idea of IP is truly evil. But there's money to be made, so carry on.
What?
The United States position, formed at the behest of the Business Software Alliance, CompTIA, and other organizations dedicated to maintaining the status quo and curtailing the growth of free software, is that no software development methodology -- closed and proprietary versus open source -- be recommended over any other.
This is a far cry from torpedoing open-source. This is the way it should be done, regardless of whether it's UN or not.
Not to say I disagree with your general point, but like every every attempt to compare two (or more) seperate events as the same, important differences are left out. For one example, when it comes to Pakistan vs Iraq, Pakistan never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, and hasn't defied a whole host of UN resolutions and acted as guilty as possible while doing so. Even if you believe there is no justification for the war in Iraq, the situation there is not especially comparable to that of Pakistan.
The UN is pretty much irrelevant now anyway. We ensured that by attacking Iraq when the UN really, really didn't want us to. So now the UN has been proven a farce, but the rest of the world won't admit it because they're afraid of what the US might do if they did. The UN was basically started as a deterrant against future wars. The fact that we so easily sidestepped them with absolutely no consequences (and the fact that the rest of the countries in the world started sucking our dick after we began handing out "rebuilding contracts") proves that the UN is completely meaningless.