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Stallman Convinces Cuba to Switch to Open Source
prostoalex writes "It's a big victory for Richard Stallman in North America, as Cuba decided to adopt open source software on the national level. Both Cuba and Venezuela are currently working on switching the entire government infrastructure to GNU/Linux operating system and applications, the Associated Press reports from Havana: 'Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code.' The AP article doesn't mention the distro used for government workers, but says that the students are working on a Gentoo-based distro."
I am quite certain that we will see things saying how appropiate. Yet, it will be overlooked that Windows is the dominant in totalitarian states. In fact, MS over the last 2 decades sold it into East Germany, USSR, Cuba, Communist China, Panama's Noriega, Huisein's Iraq, and even into Syria. All in all, pushing Linux into CUba is simply doing the same thing that MS has done for decades. While I like seeing countries pick up Linux, I am not certain that I want Stallman going into every country that MS is at.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"So, how's a dose of reality for a spin?"
Indeed. The irony when more-or-less communist regimes adopt free market solutions like open source while supposedly capitalist countries revel in state-granted monopoly production is palpable.
Looking at the economic history of communism and western economies it's more blind luck and communist incompetence and mismanagement than actual free markets that had the western democracies outperforming the soviet block eventually and for long enough to matter. Our own craptacular market failures like intellectual monopolies could very well have been enough to tip the balance the other way (and, heck, are part of what is tipping the balance the other way compared to China (despite Chinas own economic deficiencies)).