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Iran: Even If Windows Is Free, Linux Is Preferred
gpwiki.org writes "Iran, a country which does not abide by international copyright law, is reportedly moving toward Linux. 'All the software in Iran is copied. There is no copyright law, so everybody uses Microsoft software freely,' said the secretary of Iran's High Informatics Council. 'But we cannot continue like this much longer.' The article suggests that a desire to enter the WTO, and Windows security issues are prime motivating factors. 'Microsoft is a national security concern.'"
I-ran away from Windows to Linux too.
Sorry, I have been waiting to make an "Iran" pun for a while. Carry on.
It's just as I have been saying all along... smart people wouldn't use Windows, even if it were free...
Joining the WTO would require Iran to abide by internationally agreed upon IP regulations (Bourne Convention) and the impact of suddenly enforcing copyright law against its citizens would be very heavy.
Even limiting enforcement to the government computer systems would result in significant layouts of cash to Microsoft (and other software makers). Iran is simply not in a position to make that kind of investment.
Likewise, it is difficult to see how Microsoft could do business with the rogue nation. It is under trade sanctions by the U.S. meaning that no American company can do business there without governmental approval. Microsoft itself may not want to involve itself in the possible arming of an "enemy of the state".
But in the end, it is laughable that the Iranian government would choose Linux over anything else. Though open source, Linux is primarily developed in the U.S. by American programmers working for American companies. Even Linus, Norwegian by heritage, now lives in comfortable quarters in Silicon Valley. Just because the code base is open does not mean that it is invulnerable to back doors. The official does seem to mention this, but the rah-rah tone of the article drowns this out. The Linux codebase, composed of hundreds of different, separate modules, is virtually incomprehensible in the whole and a full audit of the source code is essentially impossible as the code itself continues to change and 'improve'.
China had the right idea: develop your own operating system. While this may lead to a problem of lack of software, it can also be considered an economic boon as the market itself will be created by the demands of the government.
The High Informatics Coucil (HIC) is an organisation which has been talking for a couple of years now, about this Open Source thing, this Linux thing, and ect, but really they haven't done anything. They even don't have a clue what they are talking about.
I am an Iranian and I used to work for a company which was the first to start doing some Linux activities in Iran. We started by designing a keyboard layout for Persian, and when GTK 2.0 and Qt 3.0 were released and had enough Unicode support to enable us to write Persian using them, we started the FarsiKDE project http://www.farsikde.org and with the release of KDE 3.1, our small handicapped and fully underresourced team was able to add Farsi as an official language to KDE. Next step, we launched a community-driven website http://www.linuxiran.org to help build momentum around Linux in Iran. And then, we started building our own Debian-Based distribution called Shabdix, and it even had a couple fo limited releases. (all this was done in true Open Source fashion, free in both senses).
During all this time, the HIC did nothing to support us, althought they were fully aware of our program. The HIC is just so full of bearucracy, that it can't even decide what it wants to do, and which direction it wants to go. All they have done, with their massive resources and budget, is just publish a couple of already-available fonts as beta, and then also publish some meaningless Request For Comments to implement things that were implemented years ago (like UTF-8 support in toolkits such as Qt and GTK). They can't even decide on a standard keyboard layouy. The Persian Keyboard layout in Windows is a mess, it doesn't have comma, Persian numbers,... and the one in XFree86 is much better, but they can't even agree to use that keyboard layout. All these years, they have made many public announcements about deploying Linux systems in Iran, about how Linux is the future and blah blah, but they have yet to do a single meaningful action. And they failed to support the only group which was actually doing something and producing some actual code.
But Of course, they need to have the PR going, cause they need to get an increase in their budget next year, and well, PR is the best way to impress lawmakers to give them the budget. And Saying 'We won't even use Windows even if it was free' is certainly going to make headlines, and keep the PR machine going. While I personaly have been to HIC, and know that even they use pirated copies of Widnows all over the place, internaly.
Such a shame, so many resources is being wasted by this entity, for no use.
--
I walk along the avenue,
never thought I'd meet an OS like youuuuu
meet an OS like youuuuu.............
with free software and free gui
the kind that lets me live so freee
like speech and beer it's freee......
and Iran, Iran so far away,
and Iran, Iran so far away,
linux couldn't get away.
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
Unix is a creation of the west, AT&T, and was "opened up" by UC Berkeley.
Yeah, and the Internet was developed mostly with funds from the US Defense Department. Funny how people everywhere are ignoring that and adopting it despite its evil origins. Actually, the story is a bit similar to unix, since the actual development was done in a lot of universities and companies. The military took the code and cloned it, but left the public version behind, and it's that version that became the public Internet.
Apologies to Muslims, I don't know the term for your dietary rules.
The term is "halal" (with a few variant transliterations). The rules are nearly identical to the Jewish kosher laws, with a few differences from centuries of different religious interpretation. There are a number of food suppliers in the US that are certified under both the kosher and halal laws. Only the most rabid fundamentalists (Muslim or Jewish) would be offended by your confusing them.
And, of course, even if you don't believe in these laws, you still might buy the food because of its high quality. I even know a number of Muslims that buy Hebrew National hot dogs, because they like them and trust the maker to not contaminate them.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.