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Linux in Iraq
Nereus writes "The BBC News is reporting on the newfound popularity of Linux in Iraq. The article discusses how the Iraqi Linux User Group believe Linux will aid the Iraqi people in the rebuilding of their country, and the benefits of open source in Iraq."
They are united in their belief that open-source software like Linux could help their nation.
Of course, the absence of basic infrastructure (power, water, sewage) is a real obstacle to their goals; not to mention the monumental lack of security in many parts of the country.
Overall, however, a proliferation of F/OSS would be a positive step forward for Iraq, where proprietary software is very expensive. It would be interesting to find out what percentage of the population even owns a computer.
Sigs cause cancer.
A lot of high profile Linux users believe that Linux could be the savior to all areas of the world (developed countries as well as third world countries). How is this guy any different than the rest of those out there promoting and educating others about Linux?
"There is a shortage in power and water supplies, and sewage systems, so the last thing Iraq needs is spending billions of dollars on very expensive and overpriced products, especially software products," he said.
This enables the country to build its own infrastructure based on open source, on open ideas," Ashraf Hasson.
As of right now the "rebuilding" efforts of Iraq are in the hands of corporate contractors (from the liberating nations) who are being offered large sums of money to "help" over there. Will Linux be able to compete with the puppet-government mandated contractors who are likely more interested in filling their own coffers rather than those of the Iraqi people?
Let's see if we can get the electricity working first.
Best Windows Freeware
Linux cures cancer! And makes julienne fries to boot!
Come on, if they were using Windoze no one would say 'Windows is helping to rebuild Iraq.' I love Linux as much as the next guy who is even semi-informed, but come on people. It's not the next wonder drug.
Believe it or not, Saddam actually wouldn't allow people to have beards. His thugs would forcibly shave anyone who had one. This was to combat Islamist extremism, which he always found to be a threat.
The man war brutal and evil, but keeping him in power probably would have helped us in the War on Terror.
dinner: it's what's for beer
What features does Linux offer Iraq that Windows does not? Does it offer any special advantages besides the standard ones for open source? For example, are there better translations or special software used by people in Iraq?
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
Try turning it around, things don't necessarily start with Windows. What features does Windows offer Iraq that Linux doesn't?
From the article:
Both of them are firm believers in open source software. Unlike expensive proprietary software, open-source software can be freely distributed and modified, as long as the modifications are shared with other users.
This happens quite often is these discussions: people like the reporter confuse/conflate (the ideals of OSS) and (getting something for free). I believe the Iraqi gentlemen - even though they are coders - are looking at the free-as-in-beer aspect as the primary benefit. This is not a Bad Thing(tm) - it's a heck of an advantage - but it is not the same as supplying the Iraqi people with OSS so they can make and distribute changes.
Also from the article:
"This enables the country to build its own infrastructure based on open source, on open ideas," Ashraf Hasson.
No, it lets the country build its infrastructure for a heck of a lot less money than it would cost to do so using commercial products. What is wrong with saying "I like to use Linux [or whatever] because it costs me very little money"?
For the record, one of the reasons I like to use Linux because it costs me very little money. (I buy commercial distros about half the time so I'm not a total leech...)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
They might have been better off before we started dropping bombs on their country. I used to receive emails from some engineering students in Iraq who enjoyed using my software. I stopped hearing from them around war time, and have no idea whether they were killed, fled the country, or what. They were around my age, early 20s.
Anyway, my point being that it seems kind of silly to 'celebrate' rebuilding Iraq when they had all kinds of existing infrastructure before the US invaded. We just, uh, BOMBED it all.
Next Stop: Redmond. :-)
Apart from forces of one insane religious fanatic (George Bush) trying to kill the forces of another insane religious fanatic (Bin Laden) who is trying to do the same back, with neither party trying that hard to avoid hurting anyone vaguely in the same area I don't think there are any major problems with your business plan :-)
How do you think that that electricity is regulated and metered? By hand? How do you think that that the distribution points are monitored and controled? By hand? How do you think that the electric-plants run their offices. . . etc. etc. etc. You need computers to run the infrastructure they are building.
Linux isn't just something that sits on your desk at home like most Windows computers. It is actually QUITE approporiate that they are considering Linux at the same time they are building the nation's infrastructure. It's most common use these days is _as_ server infrastructure.
Why give large rebuilding contracts out to US firms, when there are literally millions of Iraqis who are unemployed - and will work for cheap - that are already in Iraq?
Not to mention the huge Iraqi construction companies who - over the last 20 years - built all of Saddam's palaces, military bunkers, etc. They certainly have the means, techinical expertise, and manpower to do that stuff. And they are already there.
That would go far beyond any Haliburton/Bechtel efforts to rebuild Iraq, as none of the money Haliburton gets paid goes to help Iraqis.
After all, the point in rebuilding a country is to eventually restart said country's economy so people there can work.
This almost sounds like Saudi Arabia all over again, with 80% unemployment rates - sans the monthly oil checks.
So Saddam is against Islamist extremists, and we bomb him -- but we do business with Saudi Arabia, the country that is home to the wealthy funders of Islamic extremism, and home to all the Sept. 11 hijackers? Let's not kid ourselves, there are bad things happening in both countries but only one of those two countries was the champion of Islamic fundamentalists / extremists.
I don't get it, it's too weird!
I think Knoppix or something similar is the easiest to start with. AFAIR from earlier slashdot articles and posts there is lack of proper localization for Iraq in Windows so it would be a great advantage for Linux.
Regards
Before MS goes and pulls a Halliburton on the country.
I submitted this story with a better headline... /one ticket to slashdot hell, aisle seat, please.
Well, that's your assumption - provided that the amount of work required to provide those services is more cost effective than buying commercial software and investing time in doing something more profitable (such as fixing oil pipelines or catching the remaining Saddam's lunatics)
Paying licensing fees to an American company means that this money is *leaving* your economy, and that there is no current expectation that it will come back. Paying it to a local contractor (especially if labor is cheap) may save you money, but it WILL certainly keep the money in the Iraqi economy, where it can be later used for these other things (fixing oil infrastructure, increasing security, building political institutions, etc).
This is not about one business's pocketbook. It is about the economy as a whole.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Unfortunately for you, the Constitution specifically protects my right to burn a flag if I so wish.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Trust me-when its a good friend you've known for over 10 years who is murdered like this, its way too soon for a joke about it. I still find myself breaking down over it from time to time.
Its one thing for a friend to die-in life you expect it will happen (you just hope it will happen much later in life). For him to be murdered, especially in such a public fashion...unless you've been through this, you really can't understand how much that hits you. Unless you have good, supportive friends and family (and thankfully I do), its hell to go through something like this. As for his family...its been rough on them.
You don't see many, if any, jokes about the events of 9/11 for the same reason-there really isn't anything funny about it.
As far as I'm concerned, the thing to get excited about is not, exactly, Iraqis running Linux on their desktops or what have you...
Rather, it's the notion of how OSS grows. It's a good thing if geeks in the west and geeks in Iraq can collaborate on an open source project together. (And if that, or Western/Middle-Eastern OSS collaborations become a more common thing.)
Granted, I think techies tend to be a little more progressive than the general population, but still -- people in the U.S. and people in Iraq being able to work on a project together and come to understand each other better as people, in any capacity, can only be a good thing for the people of both nations, and indeed even the world.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-1 1-Commission.html?hp
Why did Saddam not ever have any dealing with any Islamic extremists, including Al Qaeda? Because it would have challenged Saddam's rule. He was a dictator, and we helped support him because he was anti-islamic - just look at the 10 year Iraq/Iran war. We funded him because that ended up killing over 1 million Iranians (and Iraqis, too).
I don't even want to get into invading Iraq and stuff, but needless to say, we didn't find millions of pounds of weapons of mass destruction, mobile weapons labs, and missiles capable of reaching the US.
However, we have set up a lot of other tin-pot dictators that aren't in the middle east. Just look at Pakistan, Haiti (just a few weeks ago!), etc,etc, google if you want to.
The same morons who cry 'jihad' and drive planes into buildings, explode car bombs, etc.?
Likewise, would you like Americans to be called "the morons who try to impose their cultural and economical dominance to the rest of the world"? The problem is that you don't realise that you are probably more violent against the rest of the world than the rest of the world is to you -- even if it's a different form of violence.
This is not a flame. You owe respect to the other side of the conflict, otherwise you're no better than your unelected president who believes war prisoners are a subclass of the human species who do not deserve to have their rights respected. Does Guantanamo ring a bell?
It also protect my right to own a gun. Intersting little document isn't it. So, you burn your flag to piss off the right, I'll fire my gun to piss off the left and we can both hold hands and sing kumbaya around the Constitution.
On a side note, the Constitution also counted slaves as 3/5th's of a human being, so just because it's in the Constitution doesn't mean it's a good thing.
No kidding. Look at the results of Aermika's evil imperalist nazi capatilist policies in post war Japan, West Germany and South Korea. Those nazi bastards!
Sometimes I scratch my head, trying to make sense of Team Bush's foriegn policy. There are some points to consider:
It's not a simple matter of Team Bush having an "Iraq fixation," or greedy corporations wanting to get their hands on Iraq's oil. Nor is it a simple matter of "defending the US when we're under attack." The Administration had valid national security concerns that were the reason for this war, but the geopolitics of the whole thing is so complex that most people don't understand them.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Yes, especially since cultural_dominance == car_bombs. Oh, wait, cultural dominace IS more violent than beheadings and car bombs. My bad. Seriously, What kind of moron actually moderates the parent as insightful?
In war, as in everything else, you don't owe respect if respect is not given to you. It's as simple as that.
Of course, these examples are from before the age of preemptive warfare based on secret evidence.
Secret evidence? I can't event count the number of UN resolutions relating to Iraq's illegal weapons programs on my hands.
And preemptive or not, it doesn't disolve the fact that encouraging US style policies and government on Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to increased prosperity and more cultural understanding on both sides. Is it right to impose US style of governmment on other countries? Ask yourself if it was right for the Taliban Or Saddam to impose their method of government. At least the US style builds infrastructure and prosperity.
In my town, we have a Japanese restuarant called "Kamakazi". Can you imagine a shop being called that 50 years ago? My hope is that America succeeds and brings freedom, liberty and prosperity to the middle east so that in 50 years my grand children can go to a Middle Eastern restuarant named Intifada.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as US style policies. The phrase seems to imply that the US wants to (and can) create the same kind of government abroad that we have at home. It may have been true around WWII. I think that today the US leaders are keenly aware that the most advantageous thing for the US is to disrupt a country's economy so it becomes deeply dependent on the US. Create poverty, because that creates cheap workers. We send subsidized agricultural products to the third world, which kills the rural economy, which sends economic refugees to work in factories, which gives us cheap imports.
A democratic, strong country that accumulates capital and crafts its own trade policies is a threat to the US. A helpless, chaotic country that sells all its resources to multinationals at cheap prices and lets multinationals drain off all its hard currency with tricks like foreign-owned utilities is an asset to the US.
I'm afraid the US track record shows a desire to prevent any new US-like countries from emerging. There are other, more worthy desires there - but don't ignore this one.
As to your very weak points, though they are much more reasonable than the justification Bush gave, they have serious problems. The first one is an outright lie unless you mean something very special by "security concern." Could you name three military dictators (out of dozens) who are a smaller security concern than a Saddam with unimpeded weapons inspectors crawling around every Iraqi warehouse? As we now see, he was completely disarmed, unless you happen to walk into RPG range of his people, which we stupidly did, and now we're dying.
Your second point is silly, because it suggests that we have an obligation to blow up anyone who violates the letter of some international agreement. But that's stupid, because we'd be equally obligated to bomb Israel, North Korea, China and a bunch of other places (including probably ourselves). To attack someone you need a further reason, otherwise, all of these other countries would have to be bombed. And I'm still looking for a good further reason.
Your third point reveals your ignorance about the secular nature of Saddam's government. Yes, he hated the USA, and according to documents he flirted with the idea of collaborating with Islamic extremists, but then completely rejected it, because he hates them more than the Americans (that might have changed since his capture). To speculate that he might colaborate with them is no reason to kill people, but apart from that, the speculation is based on complete bullshit. There is a far higher chance of fundamentalist Christian terrorists based in the USA cooperating with Al Quaeda than there is with Saddam ever doing so. And much more danger, btw, because these home-grown fundamentalists don't have to enter our country at an airport, and nobody looks at them with suspicion when they rent big trucks and buy lots of guns and fertilizer.
It's not because people are naturally prone to conspiracy theories that makes them think Bush is in Iraq to fill the wallets of his buddies, and for the political capital of calling himself a "wartime president". The reason why so many people think these are the reasons is because they realize there are no good reasons for this war to have been fought. Oh, and don't give me that "geopolitical" crap as a reason. The only geopolitical upshot of this is that we've made ourselves look like assholes and when we travel, waiters spit in our food. That, and Al Quaeda recruitment is through the roof, the Dollar is in the crapper, gas is expensive, we have the worst debt in world history, and foreign governments who support us are getting replaced by those who won't lift a finger to help us secure our country, making us far less safe. So I take it back, there are geopolitical implications of this war. Sorry, you're quite wrong to be an apologist for it.
"They're more stable, more sane, and would probably be great to do business with."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!! You think the CEOs in THIS country are "stable", "sane" and "great to do business with"?
Jesus!
Even if they were not assholes, competitors is the LAST thing these morons want in this world.
Some people - mostly ignorant Objectivist libertarians - seem to think that being in business makes one a free market philosopher. Forget about it. The average CEO of any major corporation is an asshole who got where he is for office politics and financial connections reasons - not because he is a "capitalist statesman".
And the POLITICIANS who run this country DAMN sure don't want any free-market countries in existence - not even the US!
"Capitalism" (in the common sense of people with money running everything) and the state can work together - the true free market and the state cannot.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
First off, I agree that this whole situation we have gotten ourselves into was a huge mistake. Any Civilization fan will tell you that Despotism is preferable to Anarchy. And I agree that Iraq was not the ideal front to fight the "War on Terror."
That said, there are some serious flaws in your thinking:
On the first point, you are forgetting that Saddam only has to play nice with the inspectors for so long. As soon as the international community gets tired of babysitting him, Saddam will kick the inspectors out of the country and go back to Business As Usual. Sure, as a short-term solution, containment is a good policy, but the Administration is trying to forsee long-term ramifications.
On the second point, it's not just that Iraq violated some letter of some international agreement. They attempted to take over a neighboring country (and before that, tried to take over another country with the help of the U.S.), and we had every reason to believe that, left to his own devices, he'd do so again. The idea is that the mere presence of Saddam was in impeding factor to the economic and political growth and development of the entire region. Saddam can't be kept in check without constant babysitting and crippling embargoes. Iraq suffers. The rest of the Arab/Persian world has to deal with a skewed balance-of-power in the region. They suffer. It was perceived as an unsustainable arrangement.
Let's not even get into Israel... suffice it to say that when the "international community" won't allow a people to defend themselves against butchers who send teenagers to blow up civilians on buses, that people has every right to thumb their noses at them.
On the third point (and I'm not saying I agree with it this thinking, but...) the idea is that 9/11 proves that there is a means in place to attack US cities and kill vast numbers of Americans. Organized, global groups like Al Quaeda are, in and of themselves, a powerful weapon, and a great delivery system for anyone who wants to attack the U.S. Al Quaeda PLUS rouge governments developing WMDs constitute a clear and present danger to the U.S. and to the world. Personally there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam would have "made a deal with the Devil" to attack America if he thought he could get away with it.
Your speculation about "fundamentalists Christians" buying guns and fertilizer, and cooperating with Islamist terror groups betrays vast misunderstanding of the nature of the threat. You need to understand a few things:
1. Islam teaches that all the world must be converted, by force if necessary, and anyone who refuses to convert must be killed. This is not an extremist position. This is orthodox Islam.
2. Mainstream media in the Muslim world regularly gives air-time to religious leaders and professors who state that suicide bombing is justified, and that America and Israel are the enemies of the faith, and must die. This hatred is primarily a result of their doctrine. The U.S. and Israel could bend over backwards to satisfy every demand of the Arab people, and they would still be infidels that must die.
3. "Fundamentalist Christians" do not kill people for the advancement of the faith. Yes, you have the odd-ball who kills an abortion doctor. Yes, people wishing to overthrow the government are sometimes right-wing Christians. But this has more to do with them being right-wing than being Christian - really, any religion can be used as an excuse for abominable political beliefs. The case of Islamist terror is very different. The terror and hatred is a direct result of their faith, rather than their faith being used as an excuse to justify their hatred and terror.
Now, all that said, I think this Iraq invasion was a stupid idea vis-a-vis the war on terror. But then, I don't know a thing about conducting a global war against rogue criminals. Our war isn't against governments. It's against criminals. But obviously, "law enforcement" as we know it isn't going to do a damned
dinner: it's what's for beer