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Toronto Open Source Conference Report
derrickoswald writes "Today's Ottawa Citizen is running a report in the TechWeekly section on the recent open source conference in Toronto organized by U of T's interdisciplinary Knowledge Media Design Institute and last month's Real World Linux trade show. It highlights the extremely poor Extremadura region of Spain's success story using open source to bootstrap themselves technologically. Quotes from FOSS luminaries include: 'Who controls the software, controls life. Well, it had better us. That's the real political meaning of the free software movement,' said Eben Moglen. Open source 'was the default way you built Internet Infrastructure. You wrote code and released it without trying to commercialize and monetize it,' said Brian Behldendorf." Newsforge (also part of OSDN) has a series of reports on the conference: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.
"They have adopted entirely the ideology of freedom that is part of this software movement," said Ghosh, program leader at the International Institute of Infonomics
I couldnt have said it better....
-Imidazole2
That might be true for a small number of of obsessed geeks but the majority of people dont give a monkeys about who controls software. To them its just another product and their interest ends as soon as they have finished reading their email or their computer controlled car tells them it needs an oil change.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I am Portuguese and am currently working with a Spanish colleague who was falbbergasted when he read about the "extremely poor region of Extremadura". Hey, it looks like we're talking about sub-saarian Africa of something!
As a matter of fact, Spain is one of the best developed economies in the European Union. There may be some regions where e-development may not have reached somewhat high standards, but hold on! :)
... is that the facility hosting the conferance had computers and projectors in all of the conference rooms already...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Computer software *does* control your life.
For the vast majority of people in inddustrialized countries, softwate controls how they get paid, how the bank maanges their money, how companies track their habits, how they buy goods and services, how their cars work, how *they* work, how they get to work, how they have fun, how they communicate. It controls nearly every piec eof equipment in the modern military. Getting through a day without interacting with a piece of software is near impossible unless you're on a caomping trip in the middle of the woods.
Pretty soon, software is going to be controlling your whole household. It's going to control every applianc ein the house. It's going to control your security system. It's going to control all communications in and out of that house, and it will all be unified.
So here is the doomsday scenario - in 25-30 years, when this is all in place, if one monopoly controls all this software, they *control society*. All they have to do is hide some backdoors well enough to slip through detection and they have it made. Who would be there to stop them? Anyone who spoke out on any public forum is automatically detected and flagged as a terrorist in the national database.
Open Source software, especially for anything at the national infastructure / military level, should be *paramount* on people's mids. The only reason it is not is an educational one. Us people in the know really need to get the word out on why this is important, because as software becomes mroe powerful, we're treading downa slippery slope.
Last I checked, the FOSS geeks control very little. People who don't know/care about controlling software seem to be increasing the control they do have exponentially.
Be it energy or open-source software or broadband or rice genomes. If an entity, artifact or class of artifacts becomes a control nexus, it becomes a vehicle for the transition of incumbent power.
People I've spoken to that don't care about free software often don't care about free speech either. Believe it or not there are people who have a "meh, people don't say anything important anyway" attitude to free speech. Wanting your computer to just work without worrying about the EULA is in some ways like wanting to just live your life without worrying about your country's government.
The Free Software is for people who like freedom or like software. If you like both, then it's right up your ally.
I wonder how would one manage to get the accountants to hear/read of these "free as in freedom" ideas - for the ones that I came to know don't give a s*** about quality of software either.
gtkaml.org