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."

Comments

An Old Canard . . .

[P(0)(!P(k) P(k 1))]

Irony in TFA:

And the start of the open-source sessions was delayed as organizers fiddled with the computer running their projector. The conference room screen had been displaying the words "Windows XP."

There's this old canard about GNU-latry and a certain proletarian dictatorship that I'd rather not repeat. I will say this, though: the eagerness with which the Cuban communists adopted the rhetoric of “proprietary software” is comical.

I wonder how RMS is going to spin this victory to his States-side detractors?

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[stoolpigeon]

I wonder how RMS is going to spin this victory to his States-side detractors?
 
not only the existing ones- but all the people who don't know anything about open source. i think this could be a good thing for linux globally, but for those of us in the u.s. this is going to be the source of a mountain of fud.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[chaoticgeek]

They will probably spin it as "Hey Cuba uses Linux and Free Software. Do you want to be a Communist too?" Reminds me of the picture that says something along the lines of "When you pirate music you help communism." Or something like that.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[UbuntuDupe]

I wonder how RMS is going to spin this victory to his States-side detractors?

He could say, "Wait a minute ... Microsoft replaced 'My Computer' with 'Computer' and 'My Documents' with 'Documents' ... and Gates says it's open source that's communist?"

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Teresita]

Reminds me of the picture that says something along the lines of "When you pirate music you help communism."

Gosh, maybe Stallman is pitching GNU/Linux to Osama bin Laden in his cave right now, and we can bring the War on Terror into this.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Rydia]

Of course it is. Friend Computer would never consort with evil mutant commie traitors. To think otherwise would be the height of treason.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[SECProto]

speaking of FUD....

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[troll -1]

It's a misnomer to associate the GPL with proletariat or Marxist ideology. That's not at all what it's about.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.

A lot of capitalists are making a lot of money off Linux. I work for an Internet company that runs on a +2000 Linux cluster. We were recently sold for $4 billion. Linux is not about socialism, it's *not* anti-capitalist anymore than Google or IBM is.

The GPL has nothing to do with social equality. It's purpose is to ensure that great software will continue to evolve. The main restriction it places on a programmer is that he must ensure his code stays open for others to improve upon. He can sell and profit from writing code, and be as much a capitalist as he wants. The GPL doesn't prevent that in the least.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[dfghjk]

You apparently don't know what FUD is.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[eobanb]

maybe you haven't been paying attention the last twenty years, but despite a few oddities (lack of recent imported automobiles, thanks USA), Cuba's economy is remarkably healthy despite the USA's deliberate attempts to sabotage it.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[kimvette]

You can do with your computer what we allow you to, Comrade. We're watching your every move with WGA.

Your comrade,

Bill Gates

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[kz45]

"A lot of capitalists are making a lot of money off Linux. I work for an Internet company that runs on a +2000 Linux cluster. We were recently sold for $4 billion. Linux is not about socialism, it's *not* anti-capitalist anymore than Google or IBM is"

Do you even know the meaning of socialism? Here it is (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/socialism) :

"a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole."

This would fit the definition of linux and the GNU, except for the fact that the Free Software foundation is at the top (many people give all of their IP rights to the GNU..as described in the license), so, this fits more in this definition:

"a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state"

Which is communism.

I guess you can decide which one applies to linux, but I feel it is somewhere in-between.

If I buy 2000 machines and put linux on them, will someone buy them for $4 billion? I didn't think so. The purchase for 4 billion had nothing to do with linux. It was more about your customers, IP, and work that was put into the company.

"The GPL has nothing to do with social equality. It's purpose is to ensure that great software will continue to evolve. The main restriction it places on a programmer is that he must ensure his code stays open for others to improve upon. He can sell and profit from writing code, and be as much a capitalist as he wants. The GPL doesn't prevent that in the least."

It's not about social equality, it's about software equality. A business does not want to put thousands of hours into R&D (which costs lots of money), sell a piece of software, and then allow anyone to sell it or give it away for free (without having to put any R&D into it). From this aspect, it does not make sense as a business model. It does, however, if the business selling it is not the original developer or they are using it to somehow save money in licensing fees.

When anyone can do something (or in our case, download it), the value of it starts approaching 0.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[jcr]

Cuba's economy is remarkably healthy

And that's why so many people are risking their lives in tiny boats to get to Cuba, right?

Oh, wait...

-jcr

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[a.d.trick]

Linux is not about socialism

Actually, I think it is about socialism (and capitalist too). It's socialism done right (which is very much unlike Marxist socialism). The Free Software movement is about a community working together to produce good software. The difference with Marxism is that which Free Software, this community is free: membership is optional, and your free to make money as long as you follow the licensing rules. The difference with traditional capitalism is that with Free Software, the most important resource, source code, is free; so it's difficult for large corporations to hijack the market and set up an abusive monopoly. Incidentally, this makes it a much better capitalism than what we currently have anyways.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[wrook]

You're falling into a common misunderstanding about Free software.

With Free software, you *still own the copyright* to your work. If you want to put it in terms of IP (a term that I don't particularly like), you own the IP to your work. So there is *no* common ownership. It is not socialist in the least.

In most countries (probably all, but I don't know for sure), you can not own an idea. The term "Intellectual Property" refers to a monopoly granted by the state for certain things. In the case of copyright, it's a monopoly on making a copy. In the case of a patent, it is a monopoly to use or build a device. In the case of trademark, it is a monopoly to use a picture, phrase or name in a certain context.

You can own these monopolies. You can not own source code. Or rather, you can own the disk that the software resides on, but you can not own the code itself. It's not an ownable thing. All you can own is the IP (right to make copies, right to use the "software device" or right to use a name). Free software doesn't restrict your ownership of this IP.

Now if you want to talk about the GPL (most Free software is licensed under the GPL), there are some conventions. If you want to use software *that I own the copyright to", and that I have licensed under the GPL, you must agree to certain conditions. The conditions are spelled out in the GPL. This is the compensation I get for allowing you to make a copy of the software for which *I own the copyright* (Please make special note of the fact that *I own the copyright*).

Since *I own the copyright*, you have no right to use the code unless I agree. This is fundamental in the working of the GPL (and most other Free software licenses). Now, for the most part, I can ask for anything I want as compensation for letting you make a copy of that code. It's up to you to decide if you think it's worth it. Just because I ask for something that benefits others as well as myself, doesn't make it socialist. Or communist.

In fact, if you read http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ti emans.html you can see how asking for the things that the GPL asks for can give me a considerable competative advantage against my competitors. In the world of Free software, allowing others to make copies of code that I own the copyright to gives me advantages. The more people that use and modify the software, the stronger my position in the market becomes.

Ideally, I would like to make the software ubiquitous. The more people that use the software, the more work there is to do on the software. Generally I can't keep up with the demand for more features (if you've worked in a proprietary software shop you realize that you can *never* keep up with feature demand, no matter how big you are). So allowing (and even encouraging) others to fill in the gaps doesn't weaken me. It only strengthens me. As Tiemann's article states, all the benefits tend toward the maintainer.

Not only does Free software not encourage community ownership, any business that uses Free software as their core asset uses IP ownership heavily to protect their investment. In fact, in order to succeed, I *must* make sure that others who modify the software make their changes available (ultimately) to me. Otherwise I can't win business to support *their* changes. Not only that, but branding is unbelievably important (witness the "Firefox" spats -- with *very* good reason). You must control your trademark IP.

As it turns out, patents are counter productive to Free software. This is why Free software advocates want to abolish software patents.

So I hope in some way that helps you understand how Free software is not in the least socialist. It is as capitalist as they come. Every Free software author (and even user) can become an entrepeneur and build a business. It encourages the free market more than proprietary software does. Although, I suppose if we *really* wanted to encourage the free market we would abolish *all* IP laws since monopolies are inherently counter to supporting a free market.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[dan828]

Cuba's economy is remarkably healthy despite the USA's deliberate attempts to sabotage it.

What planet do you live on? Cuba's economy tanked in the late 80s (do to lack of freebies from the former Soviet Union) and it's GDP shrank every year until about 2000, at which time it began to grow again, based entirely on freebies from their socialist buddies in Venezuela. Living off of foreign aid (read charity) is hardly what anyone would call a healthy economy.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know the meaning of socialism?

Regardless of what the dictionary says, I was a socialist for many years. I lived in Brixton, London in the 1980s, I spent time in Highbury/Islington where we flew the red flag on top of the town hall. I've read nearly all of Marx and Ingles. I subscribed to radio Moscow at the time and ran fund raisers for Ken Livingston and the GLC. I grew up in England and was a member of the SWP.

The GPL is *not* socialism.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[LifesABeach]

I think the parent posting of "Flamebait" is harsh. If the parent post is lying, THEN it is flamebait, otherwise I would then question the Moderator that made this judgment as to why? Crazier things have gone on in command groups of government, and these are well documented. Having both Cuba's, and Venezuela's governments decide that another way to "stick it to the man" is to start trash talking one of the presidents friends businesses sounds normal.

But consider this; Apparently, open source questions are being raised in the third world's governments; I can not help but wonder why?

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Your obviously a troll, but I can't resist pointing out I spend much more time and money on my one windows box than I do on my three linux boxes combined.

Standard Windows experience. Buy a new piece of supported hardware, install the drivers, nothing works. If your lucky, a total reinstall will get your system working. Often, tech support will tell you to disconnect all your other hardware and uninstall all your other software. Then if you are lucky, you can reinstall everything and maybe your new device will continue to work for awhile. If you are not lucky, nothing will work.

On Linux, I can install unsupported hardware and usually it just works. If not, I can find out how to get it working on the net, maybe tweak the system a bit and then everything works. Once it starts working, it doesn't stop working at random times for no apparent reason.

Windows only works if you never touch your system after unpacking it from the box. Add one piece of hardware, one piece of software, or even a security update and your are SOL.

Linux is only free if your time is worthless. Windows only costs hundreds of dollars if your time is worthless.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[jcr]

I spend much more time and money on my one windows box

You certainly didn't hear me suggesting windows as the alternative.

-jcr

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Dun Malg]

maybe you haven't been paying attention the last twenty years, but despite a few oddities (lack of recent imported automobiles, thanks USA), Cuba's economy is remarkably healthy despite the USA's deliberate attempts to sabotage it. Y'know, that's kinda like saying "he's remarkably healthy for someone who's been eating out of garbage cans for 50 years". Cuba's economy is terrible. When the Soviets collapsed, Cuba's economy really went into the crapper. They're seeing good GDP growth now that they're diversifying away from sugar and into tourism and pharmaceuticals and allowing people to be self-employed; but the per capita GDP of Cuba is second lowest in the Caribbean basin--- Haiti is the lowest, but it's the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Dun Malg]

Do you even know the meaning of socialism? Here it is (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/socialism) :

"a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole."

This would fit the definition of linux and the GNU, except for the fact that the Free Software foundation is at the top (many people give all of their IP rights to the GNU..as described in the license), so, this fits more in this definition:
You're missing the critical point where the comparison breaks down. One of the central principles behind the GPL is the premise that information, being infinitely replicable without diminishing, shouldn't be considered "property". Free Software folks don't necessarily believe that all real property (e.g. land) should be held in common. It's more of an objection to the misapplication of property rights than an outright rejection of them, as is found in Communism.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Romberg]

Everyone else in the world is free to trade with Cuba, but it's the American's fault Cuba doesn't have imported vehicles. /sarcasm

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[jcr]

True. There are very few things that can only be purchased from US suppliers. The main effect of the embargo is just to provide Castro with an excuse for the crushing poverty he's inflicted on Cuba through his incompetence. That son of a bitch can't die soon enough, and it's a terrible injustice that he'll probably die of natural causes.

-jcr

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

There's this old canard about GNU-latry and a certain proletarian dictatorship that I'd rather not repeat.

I've never understood it. Since when is freedom communist?

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[chudnall]

Here is the difference: Copyright and patent laws represent a government interference in the free market. People voluntarily donating their intellectual property to a private organization in an attempt to mitigate that interference hardly fits the definitions of socialism and communism you've provided. If you're saying that the terms of the GPL are socialistic, bear in mind that the GPL's legal standing derives entirely from existing copyright law. If the GPL is communist, so are copyrights! In fact, there are probably many in the free software community that would welcome the day that the GPL became unenforcible - because the government would then not be able to tell you what software you could and couldn't write. That actually sounds like the opposite of communism to me :)

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[GnuAge]

...per capita GDP of Cuba is second lowest in the Caribbean basin.

Actually, according to the CIA World Fact Book Cuba's GDP per capita is substantially higher than that of Honduras & Nicaragua, the two Caribbean basin countries I checked, particularly when considering per capita PPP, purchasing power parity, the actual buying power that folks have rather than their income expressed in nominal exchange rates. Oh, and read growth of GDP per capita in Cuba was a very robust 7.5% in 2006. This, despite the fact that they are embargoed by their nearest industrialized neighbor and natural trading partner, while the client states I mentioned are the recipients of U.S. "aid" and support.

Also, remember, many things in Cuba are FREE that most people in the rest of the Carribean basin can not begin to afford, such as high quality universal medical care and higher education. Nominal income per capita is a rather poor index of standard of living. For instance, the U.S. spends roughly twice the Cuban GDP per capita on health care alone but Cuba has roughly similar life expectancy and infant mortality rates, oh, and Cuba excels all other Latin American countries by these measurements. Likewise, in 1998 UNESCO tested students from all over Latin America and Cuba blew away all other countries, both in reading and math, so much so, that they thought there might be a problem with the testing and retested the Cubans (same result).

Also, unlike Cuba, the rest of the countries in the Carribean basin have a very unequal income distribution, so the ruling classes luxuriate in splendor while much of the actual population is destitute. But as long as the local bourgeoisie can afford to take frequent shopping flights to Miami the economies are "healthy" according to your criteria, I suppose.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[dbIII]

The attitude of US adminstations to Cuba has been somewhat childish for a very long time. It was lost through a reaction to maladministration, organised crime and corruption and wasn't under US government control at the time anyway. It is another country now even if you had a war with Spain over it a long time ago - live with it and have cheaper cigars instead of smuggled ones that even end up in intimate places in the oval office.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[ChameleonDave]

Since always. It is a misconception that one must choose between freedom and equality. In reality, you get both or you get neither.

It is amusing to see all the foaming-at-the-mouth Americans debating about whether Open Source is (a) connected to social freedom/equality and therefore discredited by that, or (b) not connected to such high-minded ideals and therefore a good thing.

If you can't see how back-to-front that is, there's little hope for you.

In case it needs to be spelt out: Open Source software, despite its flaws, contributes to freedom/equality by giving everyone access to the code and the right to use it. It is therefore compatible with socialism. Fidel Castro flatters himself as a socialist and therefore his accepting Linux makes sense. You can make money from Linux in the same way you can make money from a nationalised healthcare system: by exploiting the fact that such a system must currently be embedded in a capitalist system, despite the anti-capitalist nature of it.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[squidinkcalligraphy]

It's more that they don't _want_ new cars - the old ones are just too damn classy to get rid of.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[jZnat]

Neither does anyone else on Slashdot.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Watson Ladd]

America is the poorest nation in the world if we exclude all the nations poorer then it.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[BrainInAJar]

Especially when they've read so much Engels, yet they still manage to misspell his name

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[BrainInAJar]

"Since when is freedom communist?"

Since mccarthy. It's also terroristic more recently.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[vux984]

Gosh, maybe Stallman is pitching GNU/Linux to Osama bin Laden in his cave right now, and we can bring the War on Terror into this.

It -would- demonstrate the 'power of opensource', or at least the power of Stallman.

After all, it would imply he at least could find Osama's cave. ;)

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[kz45]

"You're missing the critical point where the comparison breaks down. One of the central principles behind the GPL is the premise that information, being infinitely replicable without diminishing, shouldn't be considered "property"."

My point still stands. Getting rid of property by default makes creates a mass ownership. IE: Because noone owns it, everyone does.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[kz45]

"If you're saying that the terms of the GPL are socialistic, bear in mind that the GPL's legal standing derives entirely from existing copyright law. If the GPL is communist, so are copyrights!"

Does the copyright require a person to release their changes to a piece of software? No. This is why it is still socialistic. It puts everyone at the same level.

"In fact, there are probably many in the free software community that would welcome the day that the GPL became unenforcible - because the government would then not be able to tell you what software you could and couldn't write. That actually sounds like the opposite of communism to me :)"

Then there will have to be a law against closed-source, because when there are no IP laws, companies and businesses will keep their software even more protected (Software will either be really expensive or the industry will become stagnant).

What many people don't realize is that the existance of money drives innovation. IP laws are there to protect a businesses investment (which isn't free). If you notice, the largest open source projects are all backed by corporations (apache, mysql, php, and even linux).

I think they laws need to be changed, but not completly abolished.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[that this is not und]

Getting rid of property by default makes creates a mass ownership.

Actually, by default, it creates a huge 'King Of The Hill' game.

I dunno. Somehow I think a bunch of people won't make it very far up the hill.

I guess we can all rest easy in our armchairs, though.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[that this is not und]

The fact that this news about Cuba and Venezuela is bringing all sorts of muddled quasi-socialist discussion out of the woodwork is nearly enough to make the point that 'enemies of Open Source' are trying to make.

Seriously, reasonable people who actually write 'open source' code and contribute should be running scared from the pack of ninnies this issue brings out.

All Microsoft has to do is shine a flashlight in here. Various 'pundits' and 'armchair socialist' muddleheads are dancing just the tune Microsoft wants.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[ChameleonDave]

nearly enough to make the point that 'enemies of Open Source' are trying to make. I wasn't aware the enemies of free software actually had a point to make.

Seriously, reasonable people who actually write 'open source' code and contribute should be running scared from the pack of ninnies this issue brings out. Yes, the issue does bring out a lot of rabid anti-social commentary, but unfortunately some of it comes even from coders and nerds, because of the propaganda they are exposed to in their country.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[wellingj]

When anyone can do something (or in our case, download it), the value of it starts approaching 0.

Value is a relative term.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Hal_Porter]

How do you know all this stuff is true though? In the cold war the CIA believed that the GDR had a larger economy than France. Maybe they're overly concerned about not underestimating their enemies, like with WMD. Certainly, once the cold war ended, all Eastern Block countries turned out to be in a much weaker state than everyone expected. It's not too hard for a closed country to fool outsiders, just make sure you only invite people who are sympathetic, and only show them the best hospitals. Seriously ill people can be forceably locked up too, like they do with AIDS patients. Most importantly, if there are any problems with healthcare, ordinary people can't do anything about them.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[kz45]

"Value is a relative term"

that may be true, but you aren't going to make much money selling sand to someone that lives in the desert.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[wellingj]

Let's look at the value of using linux as a server or in a soft real-time
embedded system. Yea what was I thinking, there is no value to be had there.

I think you are missing the point that the value in linux isn't how you can
market it directly but in how it enables you to make a product.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[that this is not und]

There's nothing more rabidly anti-social than a group of cadre discussing 'the masses.'

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[kernelistic]

That was quite funny! Thanks for the morning humor! :)

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[ChameleonDave]

There's nothing more rabidly anti-social than a group of cadre discussing 'the masses.'

(Cadre=leader)

Well, it depends on what the leaders are discussing. Although as a libertarian I am suspicious of all leaders, I don't find it anti-social if a bunch of them discuss how to extend a successful literacy programme, for example.

Apologies in advance..

[solevita]

In communist Cuba, Stallman switches you!

Not surprising.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Given the extreme poverty of the country, such a switch is not a coup to me. I'm more surprised that Microsoft was allowed to sell Cuba copies of Windows in the first place.

Re:Not surprising.

[Teresita]

I'm more surprised that Microsoft was allowed to sell Cuba copies of Windows in the first place.

MicroSoft sells copies of Windows to OEMS, see, maybe in Hong Kong, and it's the OEMs who sell them to Cuba. Stallman probably got Castro to switch to Linux by pointing out the new "feature" in Vista that lets M$ revoke driver priveleges at their pleasure. Imagine if GM had a lever in Detroit that could make all those mint-condition classic '57 Chevys in Cuba stop working.

Re:Not surprising.

[c6gunner]

I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that 99.99% of Cuban software is pirated anyway. This switch is more of a big "fuck you" to capitalism and the US than it is about saving money.

Re:Not surprising.

[jacksonic]

Since many are running Soviet era diesels under the hood, Detroit might not be the one revoking privileges...

Re:Not surprising.

[alexandreracine]

Stallman probably got Castro to switch to Linux by pointing out the new "feature" in Vista that lets M$ revoke driver priveleges at their pleasure.

Or more likely, that the FBI can enter your Windows "like they want".

Re:Not surprising.

[yorugua]

yeah.I guess the common "Cuban Microsoft representatives where not available for comment" takes a whole new level there...

Re:Not surprising.

[dbIII]

After spending half a Saturday cleaning spyware from a single system I can see other reasons. After seeing the mail report that a small mail server I look for on an obscure domain had quarantined more than a thousand spam overnight and detected a few incoming virus emails I can see other reasons. After using MS word last week and seeing the same annoying behaviour with images embedded in documents moving all over that place that was in that application a decade ago I can see other reasons.

It's probably true that most of it is not purchased software (remember most machines in Iraq ran MS windows despite the sanctions) - in which case this is a win for everyone.

Re:Not surprising.

[c6gunner]

The security thing is a red herring. 99.9% of the time, system security breaches are due to user stupidity rather than system design. Everyone knows this. Keep in mind that the original "hackers" were breaking into Unix and VMS systems, not DOS and Windows. As soon as you introduce the human element, you've got a potential security breach. Even if you could switch every single user to Linux TODAY, tomorrow you'd have the exact same problems.

Yes, Linux is more secure if configured right, however, it's certainly not immune, and the current generation of Windows OS's has narrowed the gap nicely. Your argument might have made some sense back in '98, but today it's really a non-issue.

Re:Not surprising.

[ncc74656]

Given the extreme poverty of the country, such a switch is not a coup to me. I'm more surprised that Microsoft was allowed to sell Cuba copies of Windows in the first place.

Who said anything about selling Cuba software? It's more likely they said "fsck the capitalist running dogs in Redmond" and just ran warez copies of everything.

Re:Not surprising.

[rtb61]

That really reminds me of the typical M$ attitude. It is always the users fault, if only they never turned on their computer and just sent M$ the money for the new yearly software upgrade system. They put the least amount of effort into programming the code and the maximum amount of effort into B$ing about their code.

ActiveX and M$ push marketing, result, worms every where (of course the M$ B$ team are now trying to re-brand push marketing away from their original idea of being able to send advertising to every users machine running IE whether they wanted it or not and charging a licence fee for it).

Now DRM with system calls they can be activated by media downloaded from the net, how long before that media starts doing a lot more than just trying to force a new and totally worthless M$ licence fee upon a now well and truly suspicious public.

Windows narrows the gap, at whose expense and every time it removes a security hole it always stuffs it up by introducing some new crap feature that introduces more new security holes.

Re:Not surprising.

[c6gunner]

gah. just shut up and listen for a minute. every system is only as secure as the weakest link in that system. in the average users system, what is the weakest link? the OS? hardly. the weakest link for 99% of computers is the user. hackers have been making use of this fact for years. that's why social engineering is such a huge part of hacking. so what's the point of having an ultra-scure OS, when the god-damn user user is just going to click the button that says "yes, please rape me up the ass with 1,000 trojans and viruses" anyway? You can bitch about activex and DRM all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the majority of infections occur not due to OS problems, but simply because people are fucking stupid.

Re:Not surprising.

[rtb61]

You still really don't get it. You design your product to suit the use. If your creating an operating system that will be used by a lot of semi computer literate people, you design it to suit that use. You don't design it so that only the most experienced computer users can use it safely, conditional to them using other companies software to make M$ software safer, and other companies hardware with that other operating system acting as a barrier between the net, the M$ (P)OS and your data.

M$ knew full well what is and was required for computer security, it was just cheaper for them not to bother, and besides it is contrary to the whole idea of continually selling the same product over and over again, whilst tempting customers with the new 'more stable and secure version'. I'll give you a hint, read the M$ (P)OS warranty and you will see that M$ really doesn't believe the end users are the weakest link in their software, they know their software is bad as the warranty they wrote to protect themselves from it's failings.

Perhaps you should try ubuntu/kubuntu, a dose of their community spirit might lighten yours and get you to see people/end users in a different light, rather than the twisted M$ view of them as an inconvenient profit centre to be exploited.

Re:Not surprising.

[c6gunner]

1) Windows wasn't originaly designed with net access in mind. Because they kept building on the original framework instead of just starting fresh, it took them years to get it right. Thats not at all surprising.

2) This is the third time I'mr repeating this, so listen carefully: it doesn't matter HOW secure you make an OS, if the end-user is stupid, it's going to get compromised. Period. It doesn't matter whether you're running Unix, Vax, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Uberunto, or MacOS. Now, with that said, obviously the OS should meet a minimum level of security in order to protect it from automated attacks which don't even require user involvement. Windows XP meets that standard, as did Win2k. Vista doubtless will as well. But spending any time trying to secure the OS further is a waste.

and

3) The Kubuntu community has been largely useless to me. Their "spirit" is largely summed up with "helpful suggestions" like "compile from source" or "well, it works for me".

Since when was Cuba in 'North America'?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's a big victory for Richard Stallman in North America"

Oh really? and a pretty bad day for geography!

Re:Since when was Cuba in 'North America'?

[Bazman]

Probably since a few million years ago. Remember, its not *that* far from Florida.

Re:Since when was Cuba in 'North America'?

[jas79]

wikipedia seems to disagree with you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_America/

Re:Since when was Cuba in 'North America'?

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

It must be nice to be anonymous.

Re:Since when was Cuba in 'North America'?

[navyjeff]

wikipedia seems to disagree with you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_America/

Don't worry: we'll have it fixed in a jiffy!

The number of Cubas in North America have tripled in the past six months...

I will pay $1000 to

[thammoud]

get a photo of that cuban user switching from Windows. MSFT to $20.

Re:I will pay $1000 to

[kjart]

Yes, I'm sure the loss of the Cuban goverment will badly damage Microsoft's bottom line.

Communist Spectre

[seyyah]

Is there any chance that this sort of announcement will actually scare (I'm using the term loosely) some people away from OSS? Whatever the realities, things associated with Cuba and Venezuala are obviously not popular in certain circles in the US at least.

Re:Communist Spectre

[lixee]

Whatever the realities, things associated with Cuba and Venezuala are obviously not popular in certain circles in the US at least.

Circles? You mean McCarthy & co? I say, the hell with those circles!
Seriously though, Venezuela puts US democracy to shame. I don't agree with everything Chavez does, but when he -voluntarily- calls for referendums on government legitimacy, forgives the US-backed traitors involved in the 2003 coup and gives away heating petrol for poor families in the US, I can only bow to his achievements. Contrast with what Bush has done lately; e.g: Invaded Iraq and got more than half a million people killed, Fscked up on hurricane Katarina...

Re:Communist Spectre

[drooling-dog]

Is there any chance that this sort of announcement will actually scare (I'm using the term loosely) some people away from OSS? Oh, I dunno... Did it scare anyone away from Microsoft when the Cubans were using Windows?

Whatever the realities, things associated with Cuba and Venezuala are obviously not popular in certain circles in the US at least. Maybe you haven't noticed, but we (the U.S.) aren't at the pinnacle of our popularity around the world, either...

Re:Communist Spectre

[BecomingLumberg]

Yeah, but marketing class taught me that although perception may not be reality, it is good enough to move product.

Re:Communist Spectre

[xarak]

Like they were scared away from MS when Fidel bought licences?
I think not.

Re:Communist Spectre

[caseydk]

Seriously though, Venezuela puts US democracy to shame. I don't agree with everything Chavez does, but when he -voluntarily- calls for referendums on government legitimacy,

Except for the fact that he recently rescinded his own term limits and got power to enact any law he wants because of "the emergency". Add to this the fact that Citgo (aka the state-run oil monopoly) is having to buy oil from Russia in order to meet its own contracts and it's a recipe for disaster. Give Chavez 5 more years... and then wait to see what happens.

Is there a Venezulan equivalent to the Sudatenland?

Re:Communist Spectre

[lixee]

Give Chavez 5 more years... and then wait to see what happens.

The history of US interventionism in Latin America shows that in the last half century, Haiti, Panama, Bolivia, Grenada, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Panama and Cuba have all suffered from America's interventions. It'll be impressive if he made it past a couple of years given what he's up against. Anyway, whatever results from it, the resilience of the people of Venezuela is something that I find quite inspiring.

Re:Communist Spectre

[timeOday]

Besides, we don't feel strongly enough about it to stop importing over a million barrels per day of Venezeulan oil at 70 bucks a pop. That's $25 billion dollars annually. As much as I love OSS I think $25BN might even be a little more valuable to them. Then again if national values had anything to do with money we wouldn't be sending $250BN/year to China.

Re:Communist Spectre

[mike2R]

Oh, I dunno... Did it scare anyone away from Microsoft when the Cubans were using Windows?

Ah, but that was Microsoft gallantly educating the poor benighted communists in the joys of capitalist freedom. This shows that OSS is a communist fifth column inside the USA.

Can't you tell the difference?

Re:Communist Spectre

[Venik]

Chavez survived several elections and referendums. His popularity in the country is disputed perhaps only by the top point-something percent of Venezuela's rich. (But they would be crazy not to resist him.) Otherwise, it is self-evident that Chavez has the popular support to remain in power and in effective control of Venezuela, despite the best efforts of the country's financial elite and their handlers in Washington.

Chavez did not rescind his own term limits: he had no authority to do so. The changes to the Constitution of Venezuela were adopted by the Asamblea Nacional. The people of Venezuela through their duly-elected representative are _giving_ these powers to their President absolutely voluntarily. What comes of it is a different matter altogether. However, in principle, Venezuela is going through the same power-consolidation process as Russia and the US.

Re:Communist Spectre

[rlp]

> Give Chavez 5 more years... and then wait to see what happens.

No need to wait - take a look at Bob Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Government thuggery, hyperinflation, crumbling infrastructure, and starvation. Chavez is following the exact same path. Five years from now, OSS vs. Closed Source is going to be the least of Venezuela's problems.

Don't believe me - it's starting right now. Government seizures of private property has eliminated foreign investment and credit (who's going to invest in a country that'll steal your investment). Shortages are starting to occur. Government mandated price controls are making them much worse. And the entrepreneurs and technical people are voting with their feet. Expect Chavez to react by blaming the US, by seizing greater power, and by 'cracking down' on any and all opposition.

Re:Communist Spectre

[oatworm]

However, in principle, Venezuela is going through the same power-consolidation process as Russia and the US.
Would now be a good time to point out which party won both houses of Congress in the last US election? Doesn't seem to be much power consolidating here. Also, they're not exactly 'representing the people' when the opposition doesn't show up for the election and they voluntarily hand their powers to Chavez. Besides, it's not like dictators periodically rig elections or anything.

Re:Communist Spectre

[Bogtha]

Did it scare anyone away from Microsoft when the Cubans were using Windows?

No, but there's a double standard at work here. When people hear "Windows", they think "Oh yeah, that thing I have on my computer". When people hear "Linux", they think "Huh? What's that? Oh yeah, isn't that the thing those commies in Cuba use?" Windows and Linux play by different rules because one is ubiquitous and the other isn't. That means any media exposure Linux has is magnified, while any media exposure Windows has evokes familiarity.

Re:Communist Spectre

[Venik]

There is no need for Chavez to rig elections: his popularity ensured his victory. Out of desperation and due to the lack of alternatives the opposition chose to boycott the elections. The opposition represents the interests of the wealthy minority and, in a democratic system, they stand no chance against the poor majority. The rich in Venezuela have no interest in democracy: to them it is useless. For as long as Venezuela remains a democratic republic, Venezuelan rich will remain politically powerless. Even in the US the people give increasingly more powers to the federal center. Why do Americans feel that the feds need even more powers than they already have? Perhaps for the same reasons the Venezuelans feel Chavez and his government need more authority to implement their social program.

Re:Communist Spectre

[ClamIAm]

Cuba and Venezuela are just two more dominoes in a long line. Many governments are switching to Free Software, including ones in Germany, Spain, Brazil, India, and many other places. Two more joining the ranks is not a huge deal.

And only the most rabid wingnuts truly hate either of these countries, (and this is mostly from listening to Limbaugh, et al). Maybe if North Korea switched...but then they don't really have many computers, do they?

Re:Communist Spectre

[gfxguy]

No, we don't hate their countries, we hate their leaders.

On the other hand, much of the free world seems to hate America, and not just the leaders. I guess the difference is we elected our leaders in America. Oh, I know, someone's going to say Chavez was elected, but we all know there wasn't much choice.

Re:Communist Spectre

[ultranova]

Ah, but that was Microsoft gallantly educating the poor benighted communists in the joys of capitalist freedom.

I guess this explains why Cuba has been so hellbent on staying communistic. Windows being a fruit of capitalism is the best argument against capitalism I've ever heard.

Really a big win in North America?

[gilroy]

Or is it just one more bullet added to the ammunition of defenders of proprietary software? There's symbolism in this, but it isn't unmixedly positive: The two American nations listed are already bugaboos in the US culture wars. Won't this just be used to convince consumers in the US not to adopt Linux? "See, it's really just a plot by those big scary Reds..."

Re:Really a big win in North America?

[l0b0]

Set theory to the rescue:

(people who are stupid enough to think that open source is a communist plot) (people who are intelligent enough to use OSS)

QED

Re:Really a big win in North America?

[RAMMS EIN]

``Won't this just be used to convince consumers in the US not to adopt Linux? "See, it's really just a plot by those big scary Reds..."''

That will just cause people who make decisions for the wrong reasons to shoot themselves in the foot, giving a competitive advantage to others.

Re:Really a big win in North America?

[the_womble]

The two American nations listed are already bugaboos in the US culture wars. Won't this just be used to convince consumers in the US not to adopt Linux? "See, it's really just a plot by those big scary Reds..."

Yes, it could be spun that way. However, if it is, it could easily backfire on them.

Any "linux is commie" propaganda could not be isolated to the US. The message will be international and will be interpreted differently in other countries. This will range from "the Americans don't like it so it must be good" to the most anti-American places to "obviously they are scared of it getting us out from under their control" to "ha, ha, the Americans are paranoid enough to think a piece of software is a communist plot". Hopefully, even the last will lead some people to try Linux simply because it sounds that much more important if a fuss is made about it.

Re:Really a big win in North America?

[styrotech]

Where does the (people who can order their companies to switch software) set fit in?

OSS is communist?

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:OSS is communist?

[gerddie]

In fact, MS over the last 2 decades sold it into East Germany ...
Just in case it slipped your awareness, it is now nearly 2 decades that East Germany as a country vanishes from the world and became a part of what is now called Germany.

Re:OSS is communist?

[drooling-dog]

I've noticed a definite uptick in this sort of commentary (OSS == communism) lately myself, and I wonder whether there's something organized (e.g., an astroturfing PR firm) behind it. Perhaps, having failed to win the day on the merits of open vs. closed software, the money behind proprietary software is preparing to fight the battle in the political and legal arenas. For that, public opinion has to be conditioned, however gradually. Since political discourse in the U.S. is pretty much one bout of mindless hysteria after another, it's just possible that such an effort could succeed.

Re:OSS is communist?

[WindBourne]

They were in there selling it just before the fall.That some odd 2 decades ago. In addition, you will notice that I pointed out Noriega's panama and even the USSR, all of which are gone. MS was more than happy to sell to totalitarian states when they existed. After all, it is just good capitalism to sell, right?

Re:OSS is communist?

[dfghjk]

There is, of course, the simpler explanation that GNU-licensed software *is* analogous to communism. Saying that evokes outrage because of the emotional reaction to the word "communism" but that doesn't make it any less true. There's no need to suspect astroturfing when there's every reason to expect that a thinking man would naturally conclude such a thing.

Re:OSS is communist?

[fritsd]

OK, I'll bite. Why is GNU-licensed software analogous to communism?

Re:OSS is communist?

[flyingfsck]

Wow, so MS caused East Germany to vanish? What were they using - Windows ME?

Re:OSS is communist?

[gerddie]

They were in there selling it just before the fall.
Seems like that must have been completely slipped my awareness at that time. What we had was: U880 (Z80 rip-off) systems with CP/M, K1810WM86 systems (exact clone of the 8086 from Russia) with a "modified" MS-DOS (certainly not sold by MS), and later with DCP, a MS-DOS Clone. (See here (German, sorry) or here (also in German) for a history of computers in the GDR). And if we had this software like this then the USSR had it too and wouldn't spend precious convertible money on a product from Microsoft.
Of course you are right in that MS is selling where it can sell something, but that was not my point.

Re:OSS is communist?

[Citizen of Earth]

I am quite certain that we will see things saying how appropiate.

Yes, how appropriate that totalitarian states largely use Windows, the ultimate monopolistic totalitarian closed software regime that allows total control of the peasants by the central authority that vigorously crushes all opposition. OSS is the ultimate expression of democracy: open to all.

Re:OSS is communist?

[drooling-dog]

Well, it's been over an hour with no answer, so I'll bite too.

GNU-licensed software is analogous to communism in the same way that public streets, utilities, libraries, and schools are. To avoid effectively being a communist, you should (a) refuse to accept any benefit of civilization unless you're paying full monopoly prices for them, and (b) refuse to contribute anything to society or the public good for which you're not fully and directly compensated. There must be no motivation other than greed.

If you create something of potential value to others, it is wrong to allow them to benefit from it without compensation. If you can't sell it, perhaps because market channels have been monopolized or are inaccessible or inequitable, then the only proper course of action is to destroy it. Wipe your disks and forget about it. If you allow your neighbor to use it, you may be taking money out of the pockets of deserving corporations and their shareholders.

Only then can we stamp out communism and keep the rights to software out of the undeserving hands of those who create it.

Re:OSS is communist?

[WindBourne]

My German is minimal and Bablefish only goes so far. But these articles are describing what was MADE in GDR/East Germany, not what was sold. IIRC, MS products were not available to everybody, but still actively sold there. In fact, I seem to recall a stink in the papers over it.

Re:OSS is communist?

[Rudolf]

you will notice that I pointed out Noriega's panama

No you didn't. You said "Panama's Noriega".

Re:OSS is communist?

[dbIII]

and even into Syria

I find it a truly bizzare bit of misinformation that Syria is being held up by many as a place to rattle sabres about - they are an ally of the USA - where do you think those CIA planes have been landing to drop off prisoners for "extraordinary rendition"? Do you remember what happened when an opposition group attempted to attack the US embassy in Syria last year? They may be an unpleasant regime which doesn't follow the rule of law but they are working with the USA at the military, and intelligence levels and what would be the law enforcement level if the USA was arresting instead of abducting in these cases.

Re:OSS is communist?

[dangitman]

Yet, it will be overlooked that Windows is the dominant in totalitarian states.

It's overlooked that Windows is dominant everywhere, not just in totalitarian regimes. You see, because Windows is so commonplace, it's the default "standard." It's so dominant that it is actually invisible to people. It's kind of like a fnord. The elephant in the room that is so big that people don't even see it.

what rhetoric ..

[rs232]

'the eagerness with which the Cuban communists adopted the rhetoric of "proprietary software" is comical'

What rhetoric ?, where does it say that. Where did the Cubans adopt the 'rhetoric'?

was: An Old Canard . . . (Score:1)

Communists and Stallman

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

What is with this guy? First convinces the communist state government of Kerala to switch to Open Source. Then another Indian state that formed a coalition government with the communists. Now cuba. I have nothing against communists using Open Source. But I dont think it benefits the image of open source to be associated with communists so much. Others will spin and try to claim guilt by association.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[hey!]

Hitler was (supposedly) a vegetarian. So does that mean that vegetarianism is somehow tied up with facism?

Leaving aside Hitler's dubiously documented vegetarianism, it is quite well documented that Churchill was a drunk who drank a bottle of brandy before he got out of bed every day. Does this mean that being a drunk has anything to do with his political philosophy?

People with faulty philosophies do make correct decisions sometimes, and people with sound philosophies are not immune from error.

In fact, the biggest problems with any political philsophy are going to be the things it ignores or discounts. It may be the selfishness of human nature, or it may be the prevelance of preventable in the human condition. It follows that it is quite possible for a grossly faulty philosophy to recommend a worthwhile course of action that a better one would not even consider.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[marcello_dl]

I'd rather not start a debate on why communism is evil and corporations and banks having indirectly killed millions in africa are fine, so let's say al qaeda uses a linux infrastructure. Does that mean you would boycott linux for that? Why not boycott oil, arms, the CIA whom osama used to work for?

Re:Communists and Stallman

[lseltzer]

I'd say vegetarianism and fascism are less directly related than communism and property rights issues.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[apathy maybe]

I'm not a communist. BUT I'M ALSO NOT A COMPLETE AND UTTER STUPID FUCKWIT. Unlike say that ignorant person who I am replying to.

Communism is /not/ Cuba, China, the USSR or the DRPK. Communism is a classless stateless society where goods are held in common. The countries mentioned *never* claimed to be communist. The most they ever did was claim to be moving towards communism. The claimed (or still claim) to be in the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (or as I like to say, "dictatorship over the proletariat") stage.

Talking about "warped ideologies", what about the millions of starving children in Africa? They are not dying because of "communism" (or even "Communism"). No, it is capitalism that is doing them in.

Talking about violence, what is happening in Iraq just now? Oh, that's right, violence to defend an ideology ("democracy" in this case). Get a fucking life you loser. Or better still, learn to read and find out something about a topic before mouthing off about it.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[hey!]

Stallman's position on intellectual property is a moral one, not a legal one. Note that he does not recommend you treat claims of IP by others a void, he recommends you get your softwrae from somebody who doesn't make claims on controlling what you do with it. Thus the Free Software position is one that respects property.

Here's another way of thinking about it. Suppose you have a great program you've written. I know you've written that program. Are you morally obligated to give it to me? Most Free Software advocates would probably say no. Your unpublished program is your property.

When you publish the program, the issue changes. The question is can you claim all kind of superiority in the control over my use of that program by virtue of it having been your property?

The basic Free Software philosophy seems to be that software embodies ideas, and what goes on in your skull is nobody's business. So once you have been given software, the ideas are in your head, and you can't allow people to become private thought police.

It's a philosophy that I'm not altogether ready to endorse, but it makes consistent sense and is certainly consistent with the concept of property.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[hey!]

Sure, and Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Act. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves. FDR interned the Japanese.

Perhaps of all the great statemen, Thomas Jefferson was the one whose behavior was least consistent with his philosophy; John Adams the most.

But in any case, I'm sure that Churchill's political position was preferable to Hitler's.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[drooling-dog]

But I dont think it benefits the image of open source to be associated with communists so much. Others will spin and try to claim guilt by association. True, among idiots that idea may gain some traction. But is their any "guilt by association" if communists and dictators continue to patronize Microsoft? Why are vendors of proprietary software not tainted by this blood money?

Re:Communists and Stallman

[amliebsch]

Suppose you have a great program you've written. I know you've written that program. Are you morally obligated to give it to me? Most Free Software advocates would probably say no.

True, but most communists would say yes. I gather OP is concerned about RMS associating the FSF so much with the latter instead of the former.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[radarsat1]

Kerala is a democratic socialist state. This is _not_ the same thing as communism.
It's more like an elected leftist party. There's a big difference!

(It is, however, more left than a social democracy)
But the "democracy" part is what's important.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[beermad]

Hitler wasn't a vegetarian. His doctor had to prescribe laying off the meat to deal with some health problems he had.

He was however, a catholic. Something which led directly to the Holocaust. To quote from Mein Kampf, "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

Re:Communists and Stallman

[CosmeticLobotamy]

so let's say al qaeda uses a linux infrastructure. Does that mean you would boycott linux for that?

No. But you'd be a pretty big jackass to be claiming a victory for convincing Al Qaeda to use it.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[SiberiaSam]

Hitler was (supposedly) a vegetarian. So does that mean that vegetarianism is somehow tied up with facism?

Uh, gee lets see...ever spend five minutes talking to a member of PETA?

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Just Another Poster]

Communism is /not/ Cuba, China, the USSR or the DRPK.

So why did leftists support, lie for, and make excuses for those regimes if they didn't think they were wonderful representations of socialism?

Re:Communists and Stallman

[dfghjk]

I doubt that communist governments will be good citizens of the GNU community. To the extent that they may make meaningful contributions to OSS code, there's no reason to believe that they'll feel compelled to abide by the terms of the license either internally or externally. Furthermore, it's not the image of the community so much as the image of the person who knowlingly makes positive contributions to the infrastructure of states that are enemies of his own. Frankly, I don't understand why he would be motivated to evangelize OSS software in such countries though it's his choice (assuming what he does respects US law). I'm not sure why anyone considers it positive that Cuba uses OSS software at all. What will that mean to the strength of the OSS community?

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Tsagadai]

Alright I don't know who these leftists you are referring to are but as a socialist I haven't heard anyone defend China or Soviet Russia in the last 20 years. Cuba is a different story becasue not everything is bad. Some is good, some is bad, such is life. The good doesn't negate the bad and the bad doesn't negate the good. As for your original question who can honestly say why anyone believed anything in the past. Memory is biased, history is most certainly biased. You have absolutely no way of possibly ever knowing why people believed anything unless of course you were there and one of those people. Anything else is pure speculation and you should know it sir.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Blakey Rat]

That's not the point. The point is, why doesn't Stallman cart his hippy-ass off to some functioning democracies to sell his crummy software? India, in case you didn't notice, has tons of states that *aren't* communist. How come only commies are interested in Linux?

Re:Communists and Stallman

[multisync]

Funny how you guys all seem to be posting AC. Run out of troll accounts?

Re:Communists and Stallman

[alienmole]

Talking about "warped ideologies", what about the millions of starving children in Africa? They are not dying because of "communism" (or even "Communism"). No, it is capitalism that is doing them in.

The issue is much broader and deeper than "capitalism". Quite seriously, I think that the monkeysphere theory explains this better. Regardless of the ideologies at play, when people who don't know each other and don't belong to the same community exchange goods and services, it's common not to worry much about the needs of the other party: each party is considered responsible for themselves. This is human nature, not "capitalism". There may be some relatively wealthy people who have the luxury of worrying about whether people they don't know are or aren't being exploited, but the average person really doesn't have that luxury.

What capitalism does is allow this general indifference to strangers to scale up, if you will: so that by handing over $1.99 for a pack of tube socks at Walmart, I can efficiently exploit child labor (etc.) in a foreign country that I don't know anything about, and unless I have an unusually well-developed conscience, I don't even have to think about it. So the vaunted efficiency of capitalism is also a major flaw: it's efficient, and that efficiency cuts both ways, amplifying the human attitude to people outside their own group (family, town, country, religion...)

These issues are rooted in human nature, and no ideology will overcome that on a large scale. If you want to deal with it, you have to build realistic ways of handling it into whatever system you're using. Neither communism nor capitalism does that.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Der Reiseweltmeister]

Why not boycott oil, arms, the CIA whom osama used to work for?

Well, why not?

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Phormion]

Communism is /not/ Cuba, China, the USSR or the DRPK.

Wonder why nobody comes up and says that fascism wasn't Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany wasn't actually nazist in the proper sense. It's baffling how leftists have come up with nothing but excuses for failures like the former USSR (quite a few dozen million people killed, remember?) or the whole of Eastern Europe. Face it, people, when one doctrine constantly leads to poverty, lack of freedom and people getting killed, it's a bit embarrassing to hold on to it so fiercely.

Also, you only point out s terminology problem. However, these countries are on the way to communism, in a certain stage on that way, so what? Does it work? Is there any result in sight? What do you think?

I'm biased, but hey, I live in one of those countries that "were on the way to communism". Get a life people, it's time to look for something else. Communism has FAILED.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[rbarreira]

Or maybe it was just an excuse...

Re:Communists and Stallman

[anaesthetica]

He was however, a catholic.

This is a load of FUD and the logic falls apart pretty quickly. If Catholocism was the genesis of his desire for holocaust, why then would Catholic clergy be one of the groups selected for persecution in the concentration camps--along with Jews, homosexuals, and Roma?

Hitler was an opportunist. Using one sentence from Main Kampf--a long work of rambling drivel--is extremely misleading. While he was raised a Roman Catholic, Hitler invented his own version of Christianity in which Jesus was a fighter against the Jews, and was strongly influenced by Social Darwinism.

Goebbels wrote in a diary entry in 1939: "The Führer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay."

Please go troll elsewhere.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Darby]

This is a load of FUD and the logic falls apart pretty quickly. If Catholocism was the genesis of his desire for holocaust, why then would Catholic clergy be one of the groups selected for persecution in the concentration camps--along with Jews, homosexuals, and Roma?

Well, in part because Hitler was following a plan laid out by Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism. Kristalnacht was on Martin Luther's birthday.

Heck, here is Luther's 7 point plan:

First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly and I myself was unaware of it will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.

Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them that they are not masters in our country, as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God.

Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. (remainder omitted)

Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. For they have justly forfeited the right to such an office by holding the poor Jews captive with the saying of Moses (Deuteronomy 17 [:10 ff.]) in which he commands them to obey their teachers on penalty of death, although Moses clearly adds: "what they teach you in accord with the law of the Lord." Those villains ignore that. They wantonly employ the poor people's obedience contrary to the law of the Lord and infuse them with this poison, cursing, and blasphemy. In the same way the pope also held us captive with the declaration in Matthew 16 {:18], "You are Peter," etc, inducing us to believe all the lies and deceptions that issued from his devilish mind. He did not teach in accord with the word of God, and therefore he forfeited the right to teach.

Fifth, I advise that safeconduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let they stay at home. (...remainder omitted).

Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that, as said above, they have no other means of earning a livelihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they possess. Such money should now be used in no other way than the following: Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred florins, as personal circumstances may suggest. With this he could set himself up in some occupation for the support of his poor wife and children, and the maintenance of the old or feeble. For such evil gains are cursed if they are not put to use with God's blessing in a good and worthy cause.

Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread

Re:Communists and Stallman

[settrans]

I'm sorry, Osama worked for the CIA? As we know, Wikipedia contains all knowledge at this point, yet makes no mention of this fact in its Osama Bin Laden article.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[walter_f]

I have nothing against communists using Open Source. But I dont think it benefits the image of open source to be associated with communists so much.

Well, maybe.

As with T-shirts, table spoons and even cars (used by communists on a routine basis, I'm afraid), Open Source will certainly be able to offset these associations of a few people with some other properties associated to it by different people. ;-)

These associations regarding to communists are just a basis for FUD, nothing more. As such, they would of course be worth a look (and a thought) in commercial marketing. The proliferation (just to free this word from its usual "nuclear weapon" context here) of OSS/FOSS is _not_ a thing of mere commercial marketing, and fortunately so.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[anaesthetica]

A good book which discusses the extremism of early protestants (Luther, Calvin) is Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom.

Whether fascists were militantly Christian because they believed they were following Christianity or because it was a good mechanism with which to rouse the populace is still in dispute. It seems fairly clear that Hitler viewed religion opportunistically, and felt cursed to have to deal with Christianity as his country's tradition.

Albert Speer quotes Hitler thus:

You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?

Hitler's statements in private seem to contradict his public affirmations of the role of Catholicism and Protestantism in Germany's life. This leads one to the conclusion that he was far more opportunistic in his view toward religion than anything else.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Andrei D]

I'd rather not start a debate on why communism is evil and corporations and banks having indirectly killed millions in africa are fine, so let's say al qaeda uses a linux infrastructure. Does that mean you would boycott linux for that?
Well, if Linux can be used by mad scientists on sharks with lasers to take over the world, why wouldn't al qaida be allowed to do the same? All they have to do is conform with the license.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[robinjo]

You comfortably forget that people were defending the Soviet Union when it still existed. That same kind of cheer leading is now done to Cuba and Venezuela. Same mistake, different country.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Darby]

Whether fascists were militantly Christian because they believed they were following Christianity or because it was a good mechanism with which to rouse the populace is still in dispute.

Any dispute there might be on that seems pretty meaningless to me apart from mere academic curiosity.
The particular beliefs of a few people who used a particular religion as a tool of oppression at one particular point in time don't really shed much light on anything that I can see.
Religion always has and always will be used in this manner. It is uniquely designed (and Christianity moreso that any others I'm aware of) and suited for this purpose.

It's pretty irrelevant as to whether Hitler was or wasn't a Christian when it's the religion itself that has always been such a powerful tool for evil and rarely, if ever a tool for anything else.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[dangitman]

Churchill was a drunk who drank a bottle of brandy before he got out of bed every day. Does this mean that being a drunk has anything to do with his political philosophy?

Most probably. It is difficult for someone who is alcoholic not to have his thought processes and world outlook altered by the alcoholism.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Just Another Poster]

Alright I don't know who these leftists you are referring to are but as a socialist I haven't heard anyone defend China or Soviet Russia in the last 20 years.

Support from Western socialists wavered whenever socialist regimes backed off from widespread terror and mass-murder. Support for the USSR peaked in the 1930s, and support for China peaked under Mao in the 1960s.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Tomfrh]

Because they were in denial about what a fuck-up the whole thing was.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[anaesthetica]

Religion ... is uniquely designed (and Christianity moreso that any others I'm aware of) and suited for this purpose.

Hitler, arguably a more expert opinion on the subject of rousing populations, seems to disagree pretty strongly with your assessment of Christianity and its unique utility in stirring up militancy.

It seems rather arbitrary to single out religion from the pack of nationalism, ethnopolitics, political ideology, or any other various sets of agglomerated ideas that have been used historically to justify militarism.

Moreover, it's an unsupportable generalization to argue that religion has rarely been a tool for anything other than war. This kind of statement reveals more about your own personal opinions than it reflects about the historical role of religions--roles that have been extremely diverse and at a number of times mutually exclusive.

Pointing to a religious aspect in wars throughout history, it does not follow that religion in general, or even a specific religion is responsible for militarism. One would have to willfully ignore the highly varied differences between religions, within religions, and between interpretations of religions over time in order to justify such a reductionist and essentialist claim. One need go little further than to contrast the Crusaders and the Quakers to see the absurdity of such a position.

One might as well impugne any philosophical system of thought that attempts to make ontological or teleological claims about reality--from Plato to biology to Marxism to theoretical physics. All have the potential to be used to stir up militarism in one group of people against another. You'd probably enjoy Adorno, although I find reading him to be little better than a form of punishment for one's brain--anyway, give it a shot.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[Darby]

Hitler, arguably a more expert opinion on the subject of rousing populations, seems to disagree pretty strongly with your assessment of Christianity and its unique utility in stirring up militancy.

I didn't claim it was unique, just exceptionally well designed for that purpose. I think history bears that out pretty well, although it's length of existence could well be a major determining factor. The whole pursuing you beyond the grave thing is particularly effective in that respect, although likewise not unique.

It seems rather arbitrary to single out religion from the pack of nationalism, ethnopolitics, political ideology, or any other various sets of agglomerated ideas that have been used historically to justify militarism.

In almost all cases though, religion has been used alongside the rest of those. It's not exclusive in that respect. Even the cases where it was an ostensibly atheistic state (USSR, Cambodia etc.) that was simply replacing worship of god with worship of the state so no less a religion.

Moreover, it's an unsupportable generalization to argue that religion has rarely been a tool for anything other than war. This kind of statement reveals more about your own personal opinions than it reflects about the historical role of religions--roles that have been extremely diverse and at a number of times mutually exclusive.

I suppose it depends on whether you're just counting individual cases or looking at larger scale historical trends.
I think that the evidence of human history bears out my point quite well. Prior to the founding of the United States, when was there a time where religion wasn't intimately entwined in controlling people's lives either as part of or in place of government?

Pointing to a religious aspect in wars throughout history, it does not follow that religion in general, or even a specific religion is responsible for militarism.

I didn't say that it was *responsible* for militarism, just that it is a tool quite commonly used to get the common believers behind a policy whose best possible result from their perspective is to get out of it alive and uninjured and go back to what they were doing before their leaders started a war.

One need go little further than to contrast the Crusaders and the Quakers to see the absurdity of such a position.

The Catholic Church was one of the dominant powers over Europe at the time of the Crusades and for well over a millenium.
The Quakers, while many individuals have done things that earn my respect and admiration, and their ideals are for the most part likewise admirable, are pretty much meaningless from a big picture perspective. They are known for standing up for liberty, equality and many other great ideals, but they do not shape policy for our nation or any other.
That is the point I was making when I said that it has rarely been used otherwise.

One might as well impugne any philosophical system of thought that attempts to make ontological or teleological claims about reality--from Plato to biology to Marxism to theoretical physics. All have the potential to be used to stir up militarism in one group of people against another.

I'm not sure how theoretical physics fits in unless you're talking about animosity between Standard model and string theorists, although that's only militant in a metaphorical sense. Biology had its day with eugenics and the like although that largely came about through (probably) intentional misunderstanding and was largely refuted through reason. I'd argue that Marxism was never a problem (not that it isn't deeply flawed, mind you), rather a religious belief in it led to some pretty extreme horrors.

With other *philosophies*, I don't really see them as causing problems either. Again it's a religious belief in such philosophies when you're unable to accept the fact that you might be wrong. When you toss an entriely unsupportable belief in an invisible man in the sky who demands that everyone believ

Re:Communists and Stallman

[marcello_dl]

>I'm sorry, Osama worked for the CIA? As we know, Wikipedia contains all knowledge at this point...

I suggest you never assume that, anyway let's do it now: from wikipedia on the SAM stinger

"The CIA helped supply nearly 500 Stingers (some sources claim 1500-2000) to the mujahideen guerrillas fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s, where they have been used quite succesfully. Also, as part of its effort to overthrow Angola's government, the Reagan administration provided Stingers to UNITA anti-communist fighters in the late 1980s. In both cases, efforts to recover missiles after the end of hostilities proved incomplete. There has been speculation that the reason the Stinger has not been used in further attacks is because the batteries that are needed for the launcher to function have expired."

So, he might have not been in the paybook (and that WP is unable to tell) but he and the USA were on the same side, and he became dangerous because the USA exploited faith for geopolitical reasons. So i just can substitute CIA for USA in the original post if you prefer.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[that this is not und]

It's good to see your retraction, although it's disappointing to see you try to muddy the issue up to cover your mistruths.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[marcello_dl]

Right, so the CIA gave SAM only to good mujaheddins, while osama had links with the bad ones and had nothing to do with CIA. The world is so simple after all, sorry for having muddied it up.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[marcello_dl]

Well you can't say it's not suitable for mission critical environments either :P

Trading with the "enemy"

[Lars T.]

Does that mean RMS can be thrown into jail now? Or is it okay since it isn't exactly trade giving away Free things? Or is it even something like Radio "Free" Europe, and he gets paid by the CIA?

Re:Trading with the "enemy"

[sBox]

So now the exiles are going to riot in Miami and burn RMS in effigy. I think they can fill the Orange Bowl with a few spare XP users...

Re:Trading with the "enemy"

[WindBourne]

You can only throw him in, if you throw Bill Gates and Balmer in the same prison. It was back in the early 90's that MS sent teams into Cuba to sell them on Windows. And that was an internal decision.

Re:Trading with the "enemy"

[flyingfsck]

He may get into trouble for traveling to Cuba. As for trade with Cuba, I guess he now needs to get in line right behind Bill Gates.

Re:Trading with the "enemy"

[cpghost]

Was there any trade involved at all? Or does "selling an idea" already count as trade in the minds of American prosecutors?

Free Software

[latroM]

Stallman speaks about Free Software, the writer of the article has obviously no clue regarding the distinction between Open Source and Free Software.

Re:Free Software

[petermgreen]

the opensource initiatives open source definition and stallmans free software definition are pretty much the same.

Re:Free Software

[dbIII]

Obviously not - since they would have to rely on the english language and a dictionary. So long as they don't get things as wrong as stating that RMS is the co-founder of linux (APC October 2006) we should be happy that the main points are getting across and not care about the RMS "free" word redefinition rant which has been covered many times before.

Can we get another spokesman?

[Thorizdin]

Once again Stallman proves that brilliance as a programmer does not necessarily translate into brilliance, or even competence, in other fields. I'll bet that the MS PR team is practically salivating over this little tidbit. Thanks Richard, you've just made it harder to move people into OSS in most of the industrialized countries of the world and in exchange you were able to "win over" a nation that already has a small economy, limited technical personnel, and little encouragement for technical innovation at the state level. As an added bonus you grabbed the good will of another nation that is busily shrinking its economy and following the path of the first.

People wonder why the OSS movement struggles to attract more support....

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[xoundmind]

Like many others - including yourself - the whole Gates/"OSS is Communist" came to mind. But seriously, do you really think this is going to prevent you Aunt in Davenport, Iowa from switch to the Fedora Core? She was just about to, right?

The damn communists ruin everything.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[Dr. Spork]

You pretend anyone in the USA is going to care about this. They won't. But I'll tell you who will: Everybody else in Latin America. You might not realize it, but Cuba is the most literate country in Central America, and there is no small amount of admiration for Cuba in that part of the world. Add to that the economic muscle of Venezuela, as well as Chavez's almost dictatorial resolve to make things work, and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world will be watching carefully whether this succeeds. If it comes off well, it wouldn't surprise me that Linux would be the OS they would all use.

There are many smart and patriotic people in Cuba and Venezuela, and I suspect they will mess with Linux until it really works right for the purposes that the government has in mind. This is a far more honorable course than piracy of MS, which is what most other developing countries choose.

In summary, this is incredibly good for Linux, and only people who think the USA is the entire world could think otherwise.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[Thorizdin]

I'm not worried about switching family members, every time OSS solutions are proposed in the corporate world there is some degree of push back. Many decision makers and influencer's are didn't experience the growth of OSS themselves, they don't understand the distinction between OSS and FSF nor do they care to. When I get asked by the CEO of a company about this, and I will since I compete with MS driven solutions every week, I have to admit that RMS is indeed responsible for a large portion of the code that I use. The MS reseller justs nods quietly and mumbles communist under his breath. That has an impact on decision makers, most of whom are not technical themselves. If the choice for a company president is 800 Linux terminals or 800 Windows workstations more than just cost/performance comes into play and few (or none at all) American corporation wants to be associated with anything that Fidel Castro uses or supports.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[Thorizdin]

I don't have to pretend, as I noted above I compete with MS solutions every week. I _know_ people in the US will care because the MS spin machine will make it an issue, they already attempt to make the association between OSS and communism and this will make that link much easier to make. I'm glad that people in Cuba use and hopefully improve Linux and other OSS products. What I'm not happy about is that the father of FSF feels that he has to go make a sales pitch to the government of Cuba.

Lets reverse the situation, if RMS stood up with George Bush, or high ranking members of his administration, that would negatively impact the adoption of GNU and other OSS projects in countries where GWB or current American policy is unpopular.

In summary, people using Linux anywhere is good for Linux but having RMS stand with political leaders isn't. Do you really believe that PR machine in Cuba won't use this or that the propaganda they produce won't trickle back into the US?

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[mindstormpt]

Thanks Richard, you've just made it harder to move people into OSS in most of the industrialized countries of the world

And by that you mean the US right? I'm only saying this because most of the industrialized countries of the world don't think communists are sons of the devil.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[Thorizdin]

Did you bother to read my post?

I never suggested, nor do I believe, that the Cuban people or the government shouldn't be using Linux. The problem is simply having RMS go to Cuba and champion ideas that fit well with Castro's regime but few else in the world is harmful to the cause of OSS adoption.

To quote from the article,"Middle-aged communist bureaucrats and ponytailed young Cuban programmers applauded as the computer scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology insisted that copyright laws violate basic morality; he compared them to laws that would threaten people with jail for sharing or modifying kitchen recipes."

Having RMS decry the "evil" of copyright laws is a POLITICAL statement and that has an impact.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[swillden]

I _know_ people in the US will care because the MS spin machine will make it an issue, they already attempt to make the association between OSS and communism and this will make that link much easier to make.

Bah.

Just counter "Cuba is going OSS" with "IBM is pushing OSS". If there's one thing IBM is not associated with, it's communism.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[kripkenstein]

I'll bet that the MS PR team is practically salivating over this little tidbit.

Hmm, given the recent Microsoft-Novell deal, this doesn't seem too likely; perhaps some minor spin, but nothing major. After all, if Linux is a 'commie' OS, then why did Microsoft sign a major agreement with said 'commie' OS? (including distributing vouchers for it, even)

(There is certainly a lot wrong with the Microsoft-Novell deal, but we shouldn't ignore the upsides...)

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[tcopeland]

> Add to that the economic muscle of Venezuela, as well
> as Chavez's almost dictatorial resolve to make things work

With Chavez shutting down the opposition press, we certainly won't hear any criticism of him from within his country...

> This is a far more honorable course than piracy of MS,
> which is what most other developing countries choose.

Well said indeed.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[byolinux]

American corporation wants to be associated with anything that Fidel Castro uses or supports

So, you're saying if Cuba supports something, it makes it harder to sell the same idea to Capitilists?

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[Weezul]

It will be mentioned in the U.S. but no one who doesn't already object to Stallman's politics will care.

Are you sure people in South America will care? Castro are respected more like some crazy devout religious cousin. You don't want their lifestyle or worldview, even if you pay them lip service publicly. So yeah maybe this helps ratify that Linux is the moral choice. But I doubt people care much about morality when choosing an operating system.

I'd say the Venezuelian move is far far more important since people actually respect Venezuela's economic power, and filling Venezuela's economic needs will translate into more software.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[vadim_t]

So what's new about that? RMS has always been saying that. Cuba has very little to do with it, as RMS has always been anti-copyright. The GPL basically turns copyright against itself.

I don't think there's a better way to do it either. Release Linux under the BSD license and it'll immediately get "embraced and extended". The GPL and the political ideology you dislike so much is what made Linux gain such traction in the first place.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[udippel]

Not a single person walked out with a shred of respect for him.

There is one huge difference in character between RMS and you:
RMS says what he thinks, and says who he is. Whereas you are only an
Anonymous Coward on 18-02-07 0:26

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, I'm from Argentina, and although some groups dislike Cuba and Venezuela, they are also the same that like military rule, so, who cares about them? (other than the CIA.) I very much doubt Venezuela's economy is shrinking, for the simple fact that the CSN (South American Community of Nations) would encompass almost the totality of South America, a bloc that if properly organised has the resources to be a major player. We have much more stable governments (despite the CIA) than we used to, and getting better, as long as we manage to keep USA away from turning us into satellite countries, we'll be safe.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[fitten]

Don't forget all the "Castro" loving people in/near Miami. They love him so much they've already planned a huge party, in a stadium, including lining up bands/etc, for when he dies.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[byolinux]

So, when Cuba supported Windows, nobody bought Windows? I forgot about the Windows slump of 1983-2007, sorry.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[swillden]

My point exactly. If anything, IBM is associated with fascism. IBM Germany, at least.

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[16K Ram Pack]

I suggest Mark Shuttleworth. Here's a guy who's trying to make Ubuntu as good a "real-world" distro as he can. He understands that computing isn't a philosophy to most people, but a tool to get a job done.

Politically and PR tone-deaf

[schnell]

Hey, maybe this is just the irrelevant concern of somebody who works in PR and marketing. But if you're trying to be the ambassador of a broad-based movement, you generally avoid making public appearances with anyone who's a polarizing figure on either side politically. (i.e., if you're with a charity that wants people of all parties to donate, you don't make public appearances with either Dick Cheney or Michael Moore.)

RMS is Free(TM) of course to make public appearances wherever he wishes in support of Free(TM) software etc. I'm just saying that the image of Stallman getting snuggly with Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez - other than being kind of physically gross - is not likely to assuage any US government or business fears about the ideals or politics behind the F/OSS movements. Free software seemed to be gaining some wide acceptance ... but RMS has just given the Bill O'Reillys of the world a powerful tool to shill Microsoft et. al. with once more. Again, it's his right to go ... but I think it's an exceedingly poor idea from a PR perspective. Then again, if RMS cared about PR, he wouldn't be RMS...

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[Dr. Spork]

Wait, so you're saying you won't use any tool that Communists use and love? Well, you'll have to give up a lot of stuff, buddy.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[cpu_fusion]

> I think its an exceedingly poor idea from a PR perspective.

I completely disagree. The world is NOT the United States. The opinions of the citizens of the world about the fortunes of Cuba do not necessarily align with the opinions of the Republicans in America.

Many in the world believe that Cuba has been hurt more by the actions of the United States than by Castro. If you travel to Europe, you will likely hear a very different opinion of Castro and the history of Cuba.

And even in this country, many are changing their minds about who has caused the Cubans to suffer most.

So please don't confuse the PR perspective of the World from the PR perspective of the G.O.P.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[ivan256]

Ok, so you dislike the current US administration... But that doesn't mean that the US policy towards Cuba was created by the Republicans or is solely supported by the Republicans. There was a Democrat on watch when the policy was created, and there have been several democrats who could have changed that poilcy in the meantime.

Many in the world believe that Cuba has been hurt more by the actions of the United States than by Castro. If you travel to Europe, you will likely hear a very different opinion of Castro and the history of Cuba.

See that's the thing about the US policy towards Cuba. It's not about helping the people of Cuba, it's about helping the US. Europeans get similarly protective when you're talking about countries that are closer to them on the map that may or may not pose a perceived threat. We're not screwing the Cubans economically to help them get rid of Castro. We're screwing them because *we* want to be rid of Castro. Please stop confusing self interest with misguided altruism.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[Falesh]

As for using what europeans believe as a metric of anything, keep in mind there are euros who are so blinded by their hate for america that they thing Bush was responsible for the asian Tsunamis in 2004. So you think it is right to throw out the opinions of all europeans because of some foolish people? If you think that then I'll just throw out all US opinions due to your stupidity.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[jcr]

Many in the world believe that Cuba has been hurt more by the actions of the United States than by Castro.

Yeah, and many people have no idea that Mao killed more Chinese than all of the foreign invaders throughout history put together. What's your point?

-jcr

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[wass]

I've been to Cuba twice, and what is the biggest factor keeping Fidel Castro so popular and in charge is the embargo itself. The embargo prevents the people from getting access to certain necessities, such as light bulbs or medicine, and only helps further their support of Fidel. In spite of the trade embargo it's amazing just how advanced Cuba is for being a third world country, and one where they can't buy anything directly from their huge nearest neighbor. The streets of Havana are filled with old cars from the 50's, still working, with people using their ingenuity to find ways to use replacement parts, due to the embargo.

The embargo is utterly ridiculous, it's an obsolete relic from the days of the red scare. Somehow the Republicans in the USA say how important the embargo is to force the end of communistic regimes, but they don't mention that we have absolutely no qualms about trading with China or Viet Nam, especially exploiting those countries for cheap labor.

Republicans also like to claim that the many Cubans trying to get out of the country to the shores of the USA prove how bad it is there, so we must keep the trade embargo up. Yet the fact we have Mexicans illegally trying to cross the border for the same reasons means we can maintain full economic and diplomatic relations with Mexico.

It's also ridiculous how hypocritical the right wingers are regarding illegal immigration. They think Mexicans coming in illegally must be deported, illegals here should be deported, yet Cubans that make it to shore should be granted immediate citizenship! And finally, just to prove how ridiculous our double standard is regarding Cuba with other nations - If anyone reading this knows of an illegal immigrant who wants to become a citizen, just have them wander over to Miami and claim they're a Cuban who just came off the raft, and they'll be granted citizenship within a few days!

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[schnell]

So please don't confuse the PR perspective of the World from the PR perspective of the G.O.P.

Respectfully, I think you're really missing my point. What my original post says is not that the GOP == world; it says that if you are trying to appeal to everyone across the board, then you need to avoid associating yourself with polarizing figures of either extreme. If the FSF doesn't care - and it may be that this is the case - about ever getting the support of corporate/government American GOP types, then go right ahead. But if you're trying to evangelize your position to everyone, then it's a poor idea to identify yourself with the sworn enemies of those you're trying to attract.

I realize my original post - which has been mod-bombed a couple times now - was read by many somehow as some kind of "USA rules GWB OMG R0XX0R" post or something. It's not. It's about something you learn in PR 101 - unless you are only trying to address your message to one side of an issue, you stay away from extreme/polarizing figures on either wing. And that's what RMS is very much not doing.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[minus_273]

So you think it is right to throw out the opinions of all europeans because of some foolish people? If you think that then I'll just throw out all US opinions due to your stupidity. huh? I didn't realize what some random asian thought has anything to do with what americans thought. dumb ass.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[Falesh]

huh? I didn't realize what some random asian thought has anything to do with what americans thought. dumb ass. I see you missed my point, try reading the post again.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[jcr]

I'm not talking about Mao's war against the KMT to establish the Red Dynasty. I'm talking about the 70 million or so that he starved to death, who had no means to fight back.

-jcr

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[eggnoglatte]

We're not screwing the Cubans economically to help them get rid of Castro. We're screwing them because *we* want to be rid of Castro.

Do you find that this approach has worked for you?

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[OakLEE]

Please, you make it sound like the Republican bogeyman is responsible for everything that is wrong in Cuba. Here are some facts:

• The embargo as we know it was first enacted via executive order by John F. Kennedy
• The embargo was codified into US law in 1992 in a bill authored by Robert Torricelli, a democrat from New Jersey, and passed by a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate
• Bill Clinton is responsible for one of the larger increases in the scope of the embargo in the last ten years (in part to make for his botching of the Elian Gonzales fiasco)

Source.

While I agree with you that embargo is hypocritical and should be lifted, it's not an issue that cuts across party lines. As long as Florida is a key state in Presidential elections, and as long as Cuban voters in Florida vote as a block, neither party is going to touch the embargo.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[khallow]

If anyone reading this knows of an illegal immigrant who wants to become a citizen, just have them wander over to Miami and claim they're a Cuban who just came off the raft, and they'll be granted citizenship within a few days!

I wonder what risks the illegal would be taking from the Cuban American community however. I doubt they appreciate this dilution of their privileges.

Re:Politically and PR tone-deaf

[glesga_kiss]

There was a Democrat on watch when the policy was created, and there have been several democrats who could have changed that poilcy in the meantime.

It's not as simple as that. The Cuba exiles would make their life horrendous and the party could say goodbye to any Floridian congressional seats they had.

Re:Corrected Headline:

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, this should totally kill their economy.

Unlike, say, nearly fifty years of US trade embargos?

Missing from the article....

[sjs132]

He also donated 5 computers bringing their total to 10 and pointed a pringles cantenna from keywest in their direction... Castro hasn't been seen for weeks because he's now surfing myspace...

Seriously, I think Cuba has more to worry about than computers and OS's...

Re:Missing from the article....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Seriously, I think Cuba has more to worry about than computers and OS's..."

Indeed. It has to deal with being on the doorstep of a country populated by semi-literate jingoists governed by a warmongering, alcoholic religious crackpot.

And Just How Did They Acquire MS Software?

[xsbellx]

Unless I am mistaken, the United States has one of the most restrictive trade embargoes in place with regards to Cuba. It makes one wonder just how all of this software and the PC's it runs on actually made it into to Cuba. And before anyone jumps all over this and says it's other countries that sell to Cuba, you may want actually check the link above. Microsoft, Intel and a few others can easily be held accountable for the actions of wholly and/or partially owned subsidiaries.

Re:And Just How Did They Acquire MS Software?

[hey]

Guess what, there are other countries in the world. The Wintel products could have come from Europe.

Re:And Just How Did They Acquire MS Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Trade Embargoes are not worth the hot air they generate.
When Russia opend up and western companies were allowed to setup shop there the real scope of how inneffective so called trade embargoes became very apparent.
I was working for DEC in those days. We got lots of business servicing old PDP-11's and VAX 11/780's that were doing sterling duty in many Government and Educations establishments. They had all been imported from the west in violation of the Trade Embargo that had been in place on high tech stuff since the early 1950's.
Cuba is just the same. There is lots of pretty new kit in use there. I was there last October on Holiday and it was easy to see modern PC's in use all over the place. Most were generic beige boxes but the CPU's were often >2.0Ghz P4's. XP was in use everywhere.

Re:And Just How Did They Acquire MS Software?

[fritsd]

Ever heard of the Helms-Burton act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_burton)?
I'm european and even I've heard of it.

Re:And Just How Did They Acquire MS Software?

[Ernesto Alvarez]

I've got a probable answer for you:

They get it from other countries.

Before you start talking about Helms-Burton and all that nonsense, why don't you analyze the situation? Windows (and PCs) are sold over the counter to anyone with cash. Let's say the cuban government wants a new PC preloaded with vista (yes, they're masochists). The only thing they need to do, assuming they need it badly enough, is to send someone from one of their embassies to buy one in a computer store.

How would the US stop that?
The local government probably doesn't care, although there might be some pressure. Microsoft doesn't know. The local retailers don't care, and even if they did there's no way for them to know who they are dealing with. The US agencies probably care, but they cannot do anything at all (The reaction to an US agent going to a local store and saying "Don't sell a computer to this man, he's from the cuban government and we have the Helms-Burton act that prohibits all sales" is probably best described as "hahahaha!").

Maybe tracking one computer is hard enough, but what about 50?
They still won't have to tell anyone who they are, they can pick them themselves on site and they would probably get a discount for making a large purchase. It's a free market after all. Even considering there would be a problem selling computers to the local cuban embassy, which I doubt.

And that's assuming a typical latin american country, let alone if they do it in russia, or in a pirate haven like malaysia or thailand.

Face it. The only obtacle that prevents an entity from getting windows is they want to is lack of dollars, and there's The Pirate Bay for those cases too.

Re:A gentoo based distro?

[junglee_iitk]

They are not using Gentoo, but gentoo based distro. I bet they are implementing how to use binary installs of packages, which is right now not the official policy of Gentoo right now.

That basically means, that a full re-install takes about what? a week?

Gentoo since 2006.0 LiveCD, uses a binary install, and a fresh install takes no more than half an hour.

Cuba, communism and stupidity

[apathy maybe]

There are already a few comments about Cuba, communism and "Open Source" software. How this will discourage people from using Free Software, or how this will be a PR coup for Microsoft or whatever else.

I just have to say that anyone who thinks that Free Software is communistic because Cuba (and Venezuela) are using it are stupid. Firstly, Cuba is not communist. The USSR never claimed to be communist. Comments about Cuba being communist show the ignorance of the person saying them.

Secondly, if you refuse to use a superior (technologically, or because it's cheaper or whatever) option because "communists" are using it. Then you are stupid. Full stop.

Free Software is not about communism, if you read the FSF definition, you will notice that the software must not be restricted for *any* usage. That includes totalitarian regimes, or real communists living in a hippy commune somewhere. Free Software is about Freedom. And that means that Cuba is free to use it.

For a definition of "communism" or to find out more about "communism", see my "homepage".

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[apathy maybe]

Or even anarchists like Kropotkin. But it doesn't mean shit.

Free Software is not about people working on developing software together. It is about people being able to use and change the software they have. There is nothing that says if I develop a piece of software that I have to work with others. It is just that I enable others to share and use my software, to change it as they will.

Nice try, but no cigar.

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Spades aren't spades either. If you are one of those non-violent "true" communists, go quit your job (assuming you have or ever had one) and establish a commune somewhere and live peacefully and happily every after for as long as you can. It's a free country after all. But the only way you can mooch a "free" lunch off of someone else is by clever subterfuge.

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[drooling-dog]

As you well know, political discussion is all about word association; the realities behind the labels we use only matter to thinking people, and they represent only a wee minority.

What matters is that there is a clump of neurons in our brains that encode "evil", another that encodes "good", and a whole bunch of others that represent words/concepts just waiting to be connected to one or the other. We go through life making most of those connections in a completely unconscious and uncritical way; in fact, there are entire industries dedicated to helping us along with that. The concepts behind those trigger words don't matter; what's important is whether you can make a label stick, and that can be done simply through repetition.

The point is not whether "communism" or "terrorism" or "democracy" are really Good or Evil on their merits; it's that we can make things Good or Evil through indirection just by sticking those labels on them. And so only our enemies are terrorists or dictators, even when the formal definitions of those words often fit the actions of our friends - or ourselves - equally well.

Free Software is not about communism No it isn't, but there are people with a lot of money to spend (or lose) that would like to make it so, at least in the minds of enough of us to matter.

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[toddhisattva]

Firstly, Cuba is not communist. The USSR never claimed to be communist. Comments about Cuba being communist show the ignorance of the person saying them.

Neither country claimed to be totalitarian, either.

A political entity must be judged by its actions and not by its pronouncements.

And since Marx claimed that he was not Marxist, well that gives you a cute little get-out-of-losing-arguments-free card, doesn't it? When confronted with the facts concerning communism, you can always say "well that wasn't real communism."

Here is real communism:

Pol Pot. Buddhist nuns tortured by insertion of cattle prods. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. The environmental disaster of the Aral Sea. The Tiennanmen Square massacre. The Berlin Wall.

Yes, yes, we all know, that's not real communism. Real communism says that it is sunshine and freedom and delicious food. Therefore death by the millions and enslavement of billions cannot ever be the product of communism. Marx wasn't Marsixt. Communism isn't communist.

And to the expected laundry list of the failures of capitalism, well that's not real capitalism.

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[dfghjk]

There's nothing about communism that says that people have to work together either.

Nice try, but no cigar.

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[apathy maybe]

No ... You are a fuckwit.

Here is why. "A political entity must be judged by its actions and not by its pronouncements", yes this is true, so we can say that while the USA and the UK *claim* to be democracies, the facts show that they aren't.

"And since Marx claimed that he was not Marxist, well that gives you a cute little get-out-of-losing-arguments-free card, doesn't it? When confronted with the facts concerning communism, you can always say 'well that wasn't real communism.'" Marx said in response to certain groups at the time saying that they were Marxist, that if they were Marxists he wasn't. He would have said the same thing about Lenin. When confronted with the "facts concerning communism", I give a definition of communism that is correct. I don't say that what is claimed by people to be communistic (the USSR or Cuba) is good. Or bad for that matter (though being an anarchist I don't like either possibility). I simply try and educate ignorant people like yourself on what communism really is. That being a classless stateless society where resources (and/or the means of production) are held in common.

"Pol Pot. Buddhist nuns tortured by insertion of cattle prods. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. The environmental disaster of the Aral Sea. The Tiennanmen Square massacre. The Berlin Wall.

Yes, yes, we all know, that's not real communism. Real communism says that it is sunshine and freedom and delicious food. Therefore death by the millions and enslavement of billions cannot ever be the product of communism. Marx wasn't Marsixt. Communism isn't communist." Just because a group of people who have a lot to loose (the rich and powerful in the "West") spin examples as being "communistic" because they were put in place by people who claimed to be communists (but never that there countries were) doesn't make it so. Would you rather believe someone who obviously have a lot to lose from the implementation of another system (for example the aristocrats who claimed that free and universal elections (i.e. "democracy") would cause chaos) or someone who is presenting the facts of the matter and trying to argue rationally without resort to spin or similar?

"And to the expected laundry list of the failures of capitalism, well that's not real capitalism."
A lot of people don't think it is. However, going by what the people in power call it (capitalism) I'm more likely to believe them because if they had anything to loose, they would call it something different. And besides, even if you don't call it capitalism, even if you are an "anarcho-capitalist" wacko who wants true capitalism. We can still argue theoretically why thier ideas are completely fucked up and not anarchistic (or whatever). But communism in theory and what is called communism in reality are so different that there is no point.

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[apathy maybe]

I forgot to link to my university essay (which I published on a site called revolutionaryleft.com yes, just because it isn't posted on a scholarly site means it isn't scholarly) which explains why the USA is not a democracy. http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=24734&h l=

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[Kjella]

I just have to say that anyone who thinks that Free Software is communistic because Cuba (and Venezuela) are using it are stupid. Firstly, Cuba is not communist. The USSR never claimed to be communist. Comments about Cuba being communist show the ignorance of the person saying them.

In 1918 the ruling party of the Soviet Union changed their name to The Communist Party of the Soviet Union who also in a million other ways claimed to be communists. Maybe you're trying to say they weren't "true communists", but they most certainly claimed to be.

Free Software is not about communism, if you read the FSF definition, you will notice that the software must not be restricted for *any* usage. That includes totalitarian regimes, or real communists living in a hippy commune somewhere. Free Software is about Freedom. And that means that Cuba is free to use it.

It's one thing who can legally use it, another thing who you choose to associate yourself with. Al-Qaida has a right to use it too, but it'd be a completely different thing to promote them as your users.

In any case, Free Software does have certain properties which makes it very suitable for communist reasoning, in particular "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" (Karl Marx, not any of the pseduo-communist states). Free software is in infinite supply, as in you can have one or a million copies of Linux for free, and you contribute according to your ability through volunteer contributions. Even if you have never supplied a single line to Linux, you can have as many as you need. Also, because the supply is truly unlimited (copying of bits) instead of just sufficient, there's no way to create artifical scarcity by hoarding. If everything was like Free software, communism might actually work.

Communism has, in every defintion I've heard it relied on some method to balance supply and demand that doesn't work. How many people are there really who "contribute to ability" when they work flipping burgers at McDonalds? Society needs people in positions that people don't want to take - in capitalism we solve it through salaries, in state communism the state orders you around, in communes ???. Nobody has given me a concrete answer to that. The demand side is out of whack from the get-go, there are always more good causes than time and effort allows. You need to have someone come in and define "reasonable" needs, in captialism it's bound by your paycheck and maybe a few public services, in state communism you're typically given quotas and in communes ???. You will most certainly also have people that hoard more than they need in order to get services from other people, even in a propertyless commune there are many ways to gain services or hog common resources to your own benefit. Who are the watchers, and who watches the watchers? In capitalism scarcity is solved through increased production, in state communism the state was supposed to do that, in communes ???.

Everything that is wrong about communism you see with benefit fraud - it's not a fat paycheck, but they avoid doing any work. The same people would be utterly useless in a commune that relies on everybody working together and sharing the burdens. Why perform when you can slouch? There's a reason many of the communist states had to create forced labor camps, people don't work without compensation. Once you start doing that, it's no longer according to need but some form of state controlled salary system. And with state leaders awarding themselves benefits, you have massive corruption and the whole "Party vs people" separation every communist state has seen. Everything I've seen about communes basicly amount to "we handle the problem by not handling the problem", neglecting that the commune would collapse without finding a solution.

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[lbbros]

And the sole fact you managed to publish it proves you wrong. Try criticizing the Chinese governmenment in China.

Re:Cuba, communism and stupidity

[khallow]

The USSR never claimed to be communist.

If you're this wrong about a well-known fact, then what else have you gotten wrong? Having said that, I think it's merely good sense on Cuba's part to use open source.

Since the Triassic Period

[tverbeek]

Cuba is part of the North American continental plate, in much the same way that Great Britain and Ireland are in Europe, Japan is in Asia, Madagascar is in Africa, and the Falklinds are in South America. (In case you're wondering, the Caribbean plate lies immediately south of Cuba.)

Re:Since the Triassic Period

[Rakshasa Taisab]

That's just plain wrong...

'North America' is the two countries north of America; Canada and Alaska. Cuba is _south_ of America, so obviously it is in 'South America'.

Re:Since the Triassic Period

[0racle]

You're wrong on 2 counts. First, even if you wanted to define North America along political lines, there are more then 2 countries included in North America. Hint: NAFTA includes 3 countries. Second, South America starts south of Panama. In the area called the western hemisphere, there are 3 (major) tectonic plates, South American, North American and Caribbean and 4 descriptive areas, North America, South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Cuba is on the North American plate and in the Caribbean ocean. It would ether be described as North American or Caribbean, usually the latter. South American however is just plain wrong.

Re:Since the Triassic Period

[HUADPE]

-------- Joke o o \/ ---- Your head /--\

Re:Since the Triassic Period

[Dun Malg]

you'll have to forgive him for not seeing whatever joke may have been intended, for it was neither funny, nor rooted in any basic truth, which are basic requirements for effective humor.

New Distro

[j0e_average]

Hammer and Sickle Linux (TM) -- Now with improved worker thread support and Cooperative multitasking.

Download it today, comrade!

Re:New Distro

[faaaz]

That's Hammer and Sickle GNU/Linux!

Re:New Distro

[eli pabst]

Frankly I would not at all be surprised. As we all know, lunix is an illegal operating system created by a communist hacker from Finland by the name of Linyos Torovoltos. It hid behind the thinly veiled name *RED* hat in order to creep into the basements of millions of americans homes and corrupt the minds of children with communist propaganda. At least we can know see the beast for what it truly is! http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.4 2056.2147.html

Re:New Distro

[GnuAge]

Its been tried, tovarich, Red Flag Linux. But if you do package your own distro, I can suggest a great default wallpaper: Linux: Because Micro$oft is for Capitalists Running DOS. Or maybe one of these.

For those of you who would rather be hatin' on my man RMS, here is a nice MS-approved wanted poster.

Re:New Distro

[Tablizer]

Hammer and Sickle Linux (TM)

Hey, it might catch on. The newer generation has no concept of the cold war and it has kind of a Che-like counter-culture feel.

'almost dictatorial' ?

[ScentCone]

almost dictatorial

Is that like being sort of pregnant? The guy just talked his pets in the legislature to allow him to rule by fiat. He's busy nationalizing industries that other people invested in and paid for. He controls the media, beats up and jails his political opponents, and is an all around jackass. It's bad enough that people like Joe Kennedy like to portray him as some sort of saint, but using him (and Castro) as some sort of victorious case study for Stallman's crusading is not, I think, all that helpful. Unless you like the way Chavez is going. Because in his country, companies like Red Hat would shortly wind up being The Ministry Of Software, and the "evil capitalists" that took the risks to found it, paid the people who got it up and running, and made it a viable enterprise would simply be shoved out the door. It's happening right now in that country, and it's going to get worse.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hum, it seems you don't know anything about Venezuela at all...

Only one of your assumptions about Chavez is right. That he is an all around jackass. He didn't nationalize any industry, he, along with other latin-american leaders, are nationalizing resources, as my country did with oil in the 50s. He doesn't control the media at all, he has control of the state tv, but all other major private television and media groups are a strong opposition, and makes an open campaign against Chavez. He didn't arrest any political opponents, not even those that couped him in 2002 (with the help of the media), they are free and still plotting against Chavez instead of trying to beat him through elections.

Anyway, it's interesting to see Free Software and OSS supporters being averse at Socialist countries, one democratic, other not so (still more democratic than mine), when the concept of OSS and Free Software are very close to the Socialist ideology after all.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[BBPursell]

Have you even read the news in the last few months? Maybe you missed the articles about Chavez revoking broadcast licenses of the private media, or the articles about nationalizing "strategic" sectors of Venezuela's economy, including such crucial things as supermarkets (in other words, almost everything that he can get his hands on). Or you just happened to miss him kicking private media out of the election process last year.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[stephanruby]

I like the way Chavez is going. At least, he's more of a democratic leader than the unelected man George Bush was trying to replace him with. Furthermore, the only violent person here is our US Ambassador to Venezuela. It's a documented fact that our current Ambassador was a low ranking death squad leader during the Iran Contra scandal. That man shouldn't even be allowed to walk the streets freely, let alone be given an ambassadorship anywhere.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of like how the sitting US president attaches "signing statements" to every new law. If you want to play games about how much or how little a country is a dictatorship, it can apply well to the United States.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[ScentCone]

The "sitting US president?" You mean, sort of like Clinton before him? Or Carter? Or Kennedy? Or do mean that you don't like the fact that anyone on that office feels like they should write down, for the record and for history, the context in which they are signing a piece of legislation? Because whether they jot down a signing statement or not, you still get to vote for someone else. The court system and the legislature can still change the viability of any such signed legislation. Or are you just hoping that by not mentioning the long history of signing statements, that you'll get a few more conspiracy theorists signed up on your team?

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[pjabardo]

Obviously you don't have a clue of what you are talking about. He is not revoking anything he is just not extending a PUBLIC CONCESSION to a group that supported a coup against a democratically elected government. And even if he were nationalizing industries and other things, what is wrong with that? You might not like it but hey, I didn't like the privatization carried out in several countries in the world. On the other hand he did approve one law, that you do not mention, that helps him rule without the congress. Why did this happen? The opposition chose to boycott the elections betting that people would vote. The stakes were too high and they lost. So if things are getting out of hand is the result of too much bigotry by the opposition. Maybe they expect that the US will invade Venezuela, who knows. To sum it up, don't impose your views on everyone else on this planet.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[Enigma2175]

The "sitting US president?" You mean, sort of like Clinton before him? Or Carter? Or Kennedy?

Carter? Kennedy? Until Ronald Reagan became President, only 75 statements had been issued and very few were of a constitutional nature. While Clinton did issue a large number of signing statements, again very few were a direct challenge to the law. President Bush has issued 147 signing statements since taking office, directly challenging an estimated 750 statutes. It amounts to a line-item veto, which the Supreme Court has previously ruled is unconstitutional.

If the President does not like the provisions of the law, the Constitution has provided a way for him to prevent the enactment - it's called a veto. To sign the bill into law and attach a statement that says "oh BTW, this law is bullshit and shouldn't be enforced" is not the way the system is designed to work.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[dbIII]

Be serious. He has less to answer for than Condi Rice (extraordinary redition in her previous job - the CIA is making it clear they had orders and are not a rogue agency), Dick Cheney and others. There are a lot of nasty people at the top of a lot of regimes but you still have to deal with them.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[ScentCone]

None of them are of a "constitutional nature." They are executive in nature, since it's the executive that's signing the bill. It doesn't change the bill, it simply states the executive's comments on the bill. The C-in-C can't really function with out a budget (congress steps in, there), can if he's found to be actually operating outside of the law or a constitutional interpretation of a new law wind up in court, or the legislature can refine the law to cut down on ambiguity. Just because Clinton, or Bush, or any future president makes a point of stating their position/opinion on a new law as it is signed doesn't change the law, or remove any of the remedies or checks for an administration that acts outside that law. A signing statement is more less just like the nonsensical "non-binding resolution" that Pelosi was stamping her feet about. She says it's the "will of the people," but of course it's just an empty, media-grabbing, opinion-stating bit of politicized blather that doesn't in any way actually change anything. Just like a signing statement.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[stephanruby]

Stephan .. there will always be idiots around and there is nothing that can be done about it. I just hope you are not one of them and are simply playing devil's advocate.

Think of me as an idiot then. I'm a libertarian, so my views don't mesh with Chavez's policies in the least -- but I still think the interest of the people in Venezuela are far better served by him than by a foreign power such as the United States. Ironically, one of the reasons the United States is so against him is because Chavez won't increase the supply of oil to keep the prices low during times of shortage (see the online archive of Forbes magazine for examples). In my book, this makes him profoundly pro-Venezuelan and pro-capitalist. Right now, there is a pattern of leaders in South America selling out their countries to the United States for pennies on the dollars, and then retiring to the United States once they bled their country dry: that's not capitalism -- that's not democracy -- that has got to stop. Finally in Venezuela, that has stopped, thanks in large part to Hugo Chavez.

Pinkies

[noz]

Clearly anyone who has ever had any contact with open source is a card carrying pinkie!

I'm sure

[saibot834]

I'm sure arguments about freedom convinced them :P

Re:I'm sure

[flyingfsck]

Cubans are much more free today, than they were under colonial rule. Now they have their own dictator - previously they had a foreign dictator. In general, countries have the government they deserve.

Oh goody...

[stubear]

...another "Linux is planned to be adopted at some future date by {insert government here}" story. Until there's a "Linux successfully adopted by {insert government here} and significant improvement in user acceptance, cost savings, and citizens benefot greatly by increased resources being available to them" stories this is just virtual masterbation (perhaps even actual masterbation, but I digross...er...digress) by Linux fanbois who hang on every word of every news story with the words Linux in it.

Re:Oh goody...

[westlake]

...another "Linux is planned to be adopted at some future date by {insert government here}" story.

I am less interested in government mandates than in what is happening on the street, in small business, agriculture, industry, etc. Choices made from the ground up, rather than dictated from the top down.

Too often in these conversion stories it is Linux that looks like the Cathedral, and Windows the open marketplace, the thieves' Bazaar.

Stallman shouldn't be dealing with thugs

[Jim Buzbee]

Stallman shouldn't even be dealing with these thugs. There are much better places to push for free software. Forget computers, Cuba's a place where you can be thrown in jail for promoting reading.

"Our goal is not revolution, or even the civil toppling of any political forces. All we seek is for the people to be allowed to choose what they want to read, and to be allowed to draw their own conclusions from that reading"

Re:Stallman shouldn't be dealing with thugs

[miletus]

Oh, I didn't know the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba uses Linux.

Re:Stallman shouldn't be dealing with thugs

[Kohath]

Congrats. You are the master of anti-Americanism.

Also, congrats on defending Cuban government torture of political opponents. And super-congrats on using the "everybody does it" defense.

What a wise, principled, avatar of righteousness you are!

Re:Stallman shouldn't be dealing with thugs

[brucifer]

Haha, awesome. I think we might see a shift in Godwins Law to replace Nazis with Guantanamo.

Re:Stallman shouldn't be dealing with thugs

[FridayBob]

Stallman shouldn't even be dealing with these thugs. ...

Cuba isn't the worst non-democratic regime out there: I'd rather live in Cuba than in North Korea or Zimbabwe. However, the important thing is that there are governments out there that are serious about making the switch to Open Source; no matter their political orientation, it will demonstrate to the rest of the world that life without M$ is possible.

Yes, it's kind of depressing that a non-democratic, repressive government like Cuba's will likely be using Open Source before ours will. I suppose I'm guessing, but I expect that this may be partly because the Cuban government is not as heavily influenced by Microsoft and other lobby groups as are western democracies.

Re:Stallman shouldn't be dealing with thugs

[Apotsy]

Or check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_books and search for US (probably all historical, but...)

But what? You have nothing to back up your argument, but you like the idea anyway? A person in the US can read every book on that list if they want.

Funny you bring up DeCSS -- some people in the US have it on t-shirts. Do you think a person in Cuba could get away with wearing an anti-Castro slogan on a shirt?

Re:Stallman shouldn't be dealing with thugs

[xigxag]

The US government deals with non-democratic states all the time. Not to mention that it might itself get accused of thuggish behavior for invading other nations on thin pretexts and for imprisoning hundreds of thousands of its own citizens for growing and selling...plants. From what I hear, the EU isn't innocent either, you can get imprisoned for simply expressing certain abhorrent political beliefs. Despite all the tyranny that takes place at the hands of the state everywhere, trade amongst powers still goes on -- the world still must try to get along. In Cuba's case, it is no worse than many other autocratic states that we support, thus the US embargo is not based on mere high principles, but additionally on calculated political concerns. That's the way things work, fine. But I don't see any reason why Stallman should be condemned because his personal principles aren't lockstep in total accord with the official party line of the US of A.

Re:Stallman shouldn't be dealing with thugs

[Anonymous Coward]

DeCSS might be acceptable, but I'd avoid writing "Country and western music sucks" on your car.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hKz4QgVQBHI

Viva la revolucion! (NT)

[kanweg]

Viva la revolucion!

Re:Viva la revolucion! (NT)

[dangitman]

The "wow" starts now.

Re:Ooh ah

[WED Fan]

Man, I wish I had my earlier mod point, I'd have given you an "atta-boy" for that. Too bad you posted anonymous.

Seriously, this is separate from the Linux discussion, but, from a human rights point of view, Cuba has to be one of the worst. Next stop, Burma, err, Myanmar.

From a PR perspective, RMS in Cuba is not fantastic. I think the move is not motivated by any love for Cuba on his part, but I could be wrong. I think he's still trying to tweak people and Cuba is a convenient way to do the tweaking.

My sister-in-law, living in Oakland, CA, all of 59 years old still thinks like a teen-ager and she likes coming to Thanksgiving dinner talking (tweaking) about the countries she's visited that are not friendly to the U.S. and tells us how their systems are better than the U.S. model, and how she works with those communities of their expats that are here in the U.S. (? There's a reason those people are expat from their glorious countries.) She doesn't understand, she says, why some of them don't say much to her when she says she visited their home country and loves it and thinks its better than her U.S.A.

The fun thing, she loves those countries where one isn't allowed to own property or businesses, and she owns her house, and owns her own side-business (while working for the City of Oakland) and is crowing about how much she is going to make when she turns around and sells her house.

I think Stallman might be her neighbor.

Communism

[biscon]

Can someone please point out whats so bad about communism?

From wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism)
Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownership of the means of production.

whats so terrible wrong about that?

Re:Communism

[apathy maybe]

Nothing for most people. For the rich and powerful, they loose their riches and power.

To stop people from thinking about what communism really is, they point to places which have never claimed to be communistic (the USSR, China, PDRK and of course Cuba)and claim that they are communistic.

Only ignorant people, and people who have something to lose (or who think that they might have something to lose, like the opportunity to oppress others) claim that there is something inherently wrong with communism.

Re:Communism

[amliebsch]

whats so terrible wrong about that?

I think you're trolling, because the very Wikipedia article you pasted links you directly to the practical and theroetcial horrors of communism.

Re:Communism

[Bertie]

The main problem with it is that it's a lovely idea, but completely contrary to human nature. Man is greedy and competitive and mistrustful of his neighbours. Sharing and co-operating and acting in the common interest just aren't practicable for us. On an intellectual level we can all easily accept that it's the most sensible course of action, but when it comes down to it, we all want wealth and power and we're prepared to screw our fellow man to get them, and in the end there's nothing anybody can do about that.

Re:Communism

[acvh]

There is something inherently wrong with communism.

It completely ignores human nature. The reason "real" communism has never appeared anywhere is that it CAN'T. People are inherently selfish, they always seek to differentiate themselves, form groups that make them feel superior to other groups, and will take advantage of any possibility of gaming a system.

Re:Communism

[dfghjk]

Communism fails to tap into a great human motivator--greed. Capitalism uses greed to drive economic growth.

Re:Communism

[Teresita]

(Communism)

whats so terrible wrong about that?

Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the complete reverse.

Re:Communism

[unix_core]

Yes, the earth can, and it's doing it right now. As most of humaninty hardly even wanted to try restraining it's greed

Re:Communism

[Viceroy Potatohead]

Sure, we are greedy, competitive and mistrustful. We are also giving, co-operative, and trustful. Both pure capitalism and pure socialism suffer from the same weakness: not fully taking into account the actual variability of Man. (I don't know if a communist system could do this or not.) For most of our history sharing, co-operating, and acting in the common interest (in some areas) have not only been practicable, but necessary for survival. And sure we all want power and wealth, but many don't want more and more of it, or screw each other to get it.

So, basically, I'd dispute that it is contrary to our natures, more accurately: it doesn't take our natures fully into account.

Re:Communism

[fritsd]

I hear what you're saying (although I think it's a bit pessimistic -- just a bit), but I shudder to think of how we're going to solve global problems of the type of "tragedy of the commons". If you're right, we're never going to stop global warming, for example, because its solutions might run counter to "... complying with those mandates would have a negative economic impact, with layoffs of workers and price increases for consumers." (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/06/2 0010611-2.html).

Re:Communism

[James McGuigan]

Actually the premise of free software, from the point of view of freedom, is the common ownership of the means of production (if you consider software to be a tool), by having access to the source code, and the right to study, modify and distribute the code, without having to get someone else's permission, this is true decentralized and non-exclusive ownership.

The biggest difference in the information world is the lack of scarcity, there is no potential for a tragedy of the commons where too many people take and not enough people give back. Anyway, the free software movement has already shown, that is is possible to provide a positive feedback loop to encourage people to work on software without directly relating it to monetary feedback.

For communism to work, it requires a perceived lack of scarcity.
For capitalism to work, it requires a perceived lack of abundance.

Re:Communism

[biscon]

Sorry at least it wasn't my attention to troll.
I know that all implementations of communism so far have failed and turned into dictatorships.
Thats probably why the term communism is so hated in the western world.

What I basically can't get my head around is why its perceived as bad to have a society where every one is equal
and the wealth is distributed equally.

Re:Communism

[yzquxnet]

If you level the playing field out why should anyone give anymore effort than the bare minimum?

Re:Communism

[amliebsch]

What I basically can't get my head around is why its perceived as bad to have a society where every one is equal and the wealth is distributed equally.

Perhaps you ought to ask Harrison Bergeron.

Re:Communism

[flyingfsck]

Nothing really, it was the implementation that sucked. The USSR had a great constitution, very similar to that of West Germany and Canada, but they did not practice what they preached. A big problem was that the USSR carried on running a war-time command economy for decades after the war was over. That was probably the main thing that ruined the place.

Re:Communism

[Darby]

Add to that that the other leg, religion, is kicked away, too, because noone needs religion anymore because they aren't hopelessly locked in in a lower class, then it's quite obvious why they are opposed to the idea of communism (they probably should read the new testament some time).

Except replacing blind faith in "God" with blind faith in "The State" does nothing to remove religion from the equation. All it does is further centralize power in the state by removing church leaders from their positions of power which can be used to take power from the state and invest it in the church(es). The people get fucked all the same any way whether it's theocracy, a government mandated godless state or Church/State conspiring against the people as in fascism and feudalism. It's just a question as to which entity does what part of the fucking.

Re:Communism

[unigolyn]

Let's rephrase that definition:

Communism is an ideology that hopes to establish a classless, stateless social organization, based on the batshit insane idea that if you pay everyone the same wage, they somehow will spontaneously all fill every needed occupation in society.

Why the hell would anyone want to spend 12 years in medical school if they can get the exact same quality of life by being a bad poet or a taxi driver? Okay, so you have a few people who are actually driven not at all by material concerns, but they want to be doctors out of the goodness of their heart. But why go through 12 years of school? Surely I can just read a book about homeopathy and still get the ego boost from helping people, even if it is less effective than modern medical science. But okay, let's set that aside and think that people will actually go through medical school and become honest-to-god medical doctors. A medical doctor by himself is not worth much. He needs equipment and the people who manufacture them, he needs drugs and the people who create them, he needs nurses, hospital beds, the people who wash the sheets and the bed pans. He needs a physical hospital and ambulances to drive patients there. He needs lab techs to analyze blood work and the people who make the chemicals that allow these analyses.

And he needs just the right amount of these people. There's no material incentive to pick one job over another, so people would naturally pick either the nobler or the cushier jobs. But what if you're late to the game? What if you end up having to be the guy who empties the bed pans and scrubs them down with disinfectant? Remember, in a "stateless" society, there's no one to actually force you to do this, and in a "classless" society, you must by definition be given the same wage and standard of living as everyone else. Now extrapolate from the very limited, microscopic sliver of the interconnected network of occupations that make up modern society. A lot of jobs are neither noble nor cushy. What would possess you to work in an iron mine to supply the steel scalpel for the doctor? Why would you be a sanitation worker at the sewage treatment plant?

That's communism as defined by you, and the reason it doesn't work isn't so much "people are selfish and greedy" but "why would you work with feces when that guy there stacks cans onto shelves?". It's pure infantile fantasy that doesn't look at "what's the best kind of society for human beings as they are" but "what's the best kind of human being for a society that is superficially egalitarian". Superficially because some jobs just are harder, more tiring, more disgusting than others. There can never be true egalitarianism between a doctor and the guy that empties bed pans, let alone a sewage worker and a journalist, unless you turn human beings into automatons who neither mind tedious work nor notice other people having less taxing jobs.

There's two solutions to this problem, and the first one is the de facto communism we've had the misfortune of experiencing from the early 20th century onwards. In fact, they called themselves not communist, but socialists on the way to communism sometime in the future when, presumably, we'd succeeded in turning people into automatons. Their solution to "Why do I have to root in shit for a living when that guy bakes cakes" is "Because we'll shoot you if you don't, and oh, by the way, you can't leave either because we'll shoot you then, too". You're legally required to work, doing whatever the state (socialism is communism without the "stateless" part) tells you to do. So how does the state know what to make you do, anyway? Ah, the miracle of central planning. Instead of supply and demand of goods dictated by market forces, socialist states (which lack market forces as everyone must have the same wages and living conditions and therefore nothing should ever be either scarce or overabundant) have planning committees that decide how much of everything everything needs. Imagine an accounting office that doesn't just have to d

Re:Communism

[Cederic]

To better everybody?

Not everybody is egocentric. Just Americans.

Re:Communism

[larpon]

There's nothing bad about communism... not as an ideology... All known classes in the social ladder are equal? sounds fucking great to me! If we were all equal we wouldn't fight over as many things as we are today... Property, food (just like animals, yes), religion... Mankind just aren't ready for 100% communism... We're pumped with fluids of -how we need to be better than our neighbour- all day long. Commercials telling us how pretty little things we are. A society telling us that some people are better than others. Success makes you feel better... It's on TV every day god damnit! Democracy can be just as rotten as Stalin's U.S.S.R was...

Re:Communism

[biscon]

thank you for your lengthy and insightful comment.

Anyway I know why communism doesn't work in practice, what is annoying me is that communism has become a negative word like dictatorship which I think is unwarranted.

I agree with most of your post but not all it. For instance in many countries not everyone can be become a doctor. First of all people who are not good with books will almost always end up with the shitty jobs. Another problem are the poor people who can't afford becoming a doctor.
My problem is with the "fatcats on the top". I think they're a much larger problem that you seem to believe. Besides my rant is more on a philosophical level. I know that commmunism isn't the perfect solution for all the world, it isn't even a solution as of right now. BUT capitalism sure as hell isn't "the right way" either. I mean what is just and right about a world where you have people as rich as say, Bill Gates and several thousand children dying of hunger each day?. I don't know the answers and I can offer no solution. My gripe was with the fact that from a moral and ethical standpoint, there is nothing wrong with the basis off thought on which communism is founded. Actually I think its one of the more noble thoughts we as a race have ever come up with.

Bill Gates has it wrong

[gilesjuk]

Bill said "some new modern-day sort of communists" to describe people who want to do away with commercial software.

But Bill doesn't seem to realise that Open Source is empowering, you can avoid all the DRM and government imposed restrictions present in Vista. Open Source is about freedom, so how can that be anything like communism?

There are many Linux based distributions, all different. surely having everyone running Windows more like communism?

Re:Bill Gates has it wrong

[apathy maybe]

Because communism is not about government or restrictions? Communism is about classless stateless society where resources are held in common. It is about empowerment. It is about freedom. Personally I am an anarchist, communism to me is a type of anarchism. I would be happy with it, so long as I had the choice. And under true communism, I would.

That said, I don't think that Free Software is about communism or is communistic. But it is still more so then Microsoft software.

Re:Bill Gates has it wrong

[DaMattster]

Well, anarchism will never work. In social experiments that have been conducted by renowned sociologists like Robert Merton, it has been found that anarchism (or the lack of government and laws) is impractical. If people are left to their own devices, there is great potential for society to unravel. Look at the dark ages in ancient Greece where journals were discovered that described life in an anarchy. I think some government is a good idea but right now, there are WAY TOO MANY LAWS. We may agree on that. A government with less laws is better.

About time

[miletus]

It's about time socialist countries start doing this. Whether the libertarians like it or not, free software is basically communist, because it's created from each according to their ability, and distributed to each according to their need. It is no longer fully a commodity, as it is easier to give it away than it is to sell it. Free software is a harbinger of the obsolence of money. Ironically many of those who help to make it can't imagine a world without money; but then, the medieval burghers and merchants and runaway serfs who eventually overthrew feudalism rarely imagined a world with aristocrats, either.

Re:Corrected Headline:

[WED Fan]

Commie Convinces Other Commies to Go With Commie Software D U H!!!! Well, this should totally kill their economy. One bad idea for another. But, I bet you the medical equipment hooked up to ol' Fidel is still run by Closed Sourced Commericial God Bless America Money Making Software.

You're going to Hell

Wait, that's a religious concept and we know all religious people are conservatives and therefor wrong. Thus, God does not exist because He is a Republican concept, and George Bush is a Republican, so since the nation has voted the Republican's out of power in the congress, God no longer rules, and Hell has been repealed. So, when Fidel dies (hoping that we have some sort of software switch the CIA can throw on the Closed-Sourced-Commericial-God-Bless-America-Money -Making-Software controlling his life-support equipment) he will not go to Hell, he'll go to Berkely, which has their own version of Hell, People's Park which is worse than Hell, even Satan wouldn't hang out there. But, Berkley is liberal, and have a version Hell, that must mean Religion exists, and God is back. Whew, and for a second there, I thought the Universe was going to wink out of existance.

Now, why the Hell is this discussion on Slashdot?

Oh, right! Commies!

Run, everyone, the Commies are coming, God help us, the Commies are coming!

Re:A gentoo based distro?

[HateBreeder]

I know. I've been using gentoo for several years now. They can just do a "ghost" or... "dd" from a working machine... no problems there. But then again, what will gentoo's advantage be? for an enterprise.. users aren't really supposed to install and recompile new packages... so the whole portage thing which is in my opinion, the crown jewls of gentoo (that and the community forums...).. what is there left to justify gentoo?

Just great...

[lbbros]

Well, yeah... it's good that they adopted open source at a national level... and how is that supposed to be good? I mean, Cuba is not a democracy, and someone interested in "freedom" should battle for it first, rather than open source...
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for FOSS use in governments, but here the priorities are messed up.

A dictatorship gets Open Source for its government and so they are good? I don't see the point.

Depressing obsession with "communist"

[Flying pig]

I think more than a few people need to get a little perspective on this. Other than to the less well educated fraction of the United States and a few idiotic British camp followers, fortunately now exported, the word "communism" doesn't cause people to rush off screaming. Just because Rupert insists that Fox News treats guilt by association as dogma because it is lazier and cheaper than facts and debate(just like Islamic fundamentalists do...) doesn't mean that the rest of the world does, or at least not with the same knee jerk reaction to a few key words. And no, I am happily aware that many Americans are not that stupid.

The people who stand to gain most in the short to medium term from FOSS are those in poor countries with good educational systems, i.e. where the intellectual resources are there but not the cash. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but most of those countries are of the left wing statist persuasion (except, I think, for Botswana and Iran.) That means that Kerala State, Cuba, the former Soviet Union, parts of China and some other parts of India are all prime candidates to hear the FOSS message.

Russia is rising again, China and India are growing, Cuba and Venezuela are starting to change. Stallman may irritate the hell out of me at times, but his approach is spot on. When the grown ups are locked into the monopoly, preach to the kids.

The "C" word may frighten - oh, maybe 50 million Americans - but not two billion people in BRIC. What they and their governments want to know is how they can get better lives in future. One key to that is not having to pay rich people in developed countries a tax on what is essentially a commodity. Computer technology is not neutral. Spread widely, it benefits ordinary people regardless of political persuasion. Stallmann is right to spread that message.

Re:Depressing obsession with "communist"

[wellingj]

Flying Pig deserves a +1 integrity

What victory?

[briancnorton]

You pitch a product as being in-line with the ideological tenets of two dictatorships and you think you have a victory? This has probably set back the perception of linux in the enterprise just a bit. He'll probably play it down as much as possible.

Re:What victory?

[crimson30]

You pitch a product as being in-line with the ideological tenets of two dictatorships and you think you have a victory?

My thoughts exactly. I mean, just how hard could it be to get communist countries to switch from the American, proprietary, capitalist operating system to the public, owned by nobody, people's effort operating system??

Re:What victory?

[Overly Critical Guy]

No kidding; communism is clearly superior. Pardon me while I type this on a computer produced from CAPITALISM.

Re:What victory?

[Overly Critical Guy]

What's amusing is that some folks are calling this a victory because Open Source is in the people's hands and is a people's effort, but the brand of communism that these third-world dictatorships like Cuba employ is one where the government controls and regulates everything.

In other words, it won't be the people in control of the Open Source code; it will be the government, who just wants to wrest power away from non-government companies. If it was in control of the people, that would be, well, capitalism, because companies are made up of regular citizens selling their wares.

Re:What victory?

[thedbp]

You missed the point entirely.

I don't care if your government is democratic, communist, fascist, socialist, or a monarchy - running a modern government requires an assload of elements, systems, and processes to be in sync and dependable.

The ideology has nothing to do with it - the issue is that a complete government switch is taking place, and just because you disagree with the politics has nothing to do with the fact that if linux is suited to run these governments, chances are its well-suited to run many other governments.

Of course, the anarchists would have to do something like switch to an abacus or whatever.

Re:What victory?

[that this is not und]

I used to work with an Electrical Engineer who was an emigre from Russia. He told stories about buying precision resistors on the black market out of the trunks of cars under bridges.

There was a Soviet clone of the PDP-11. I would love to have one for my collection. I wouldn't run any critical software on it.

Re:What victory?

[that this is not und]

the issue is that a complete government switch is taking place,

Yes. Cuba is replacing the one IBM 650 in the government ministry with a cast-off Dell Optiplex GX1 (but only with a Pentium II in it).

Cuban citizens will no longer have to worry about 'folding, spindling or mutlilating' their government papers, which will no longer exist of a punched card.

It is a giant leap forward.

Re:What victory?

[ShieldW0lf]

The government of a communist country has an obligation towards "the people", at least in principle.

A set of capitalist monopolies, on the other hand, have no obligation to society whatsoever.

There are over 20 countries in 'North America'

[NotQuiteReal]

Look it up, count them.

Re:A gentoo based distro?

[ericrost]

They run their own local rsync server containing only binary builds targeted for their architectures, and set up scripts on the target machines under vixie-cron or whatever they prefer to get updates from that rsync server every so often. Also, they don't particularly HAVE to update that often (the big misunderstanding about Gentoo in a production environment), the just CAN update often. Using that model you have a few machines that are your prototyping and building environment before you roll to your production machines, you set up a reasonable schedule to update, and roll it in when its working. Pretty simple and gives the admin control over exactly what environment he wants to run on his network.... People don't seem to get that the choices in Gentoo are just that, they let the admin of a system run the system however he sees fit, and tends to make a very lean mean system that is well suited for large homogenous networks. Just use binary packages that you build yourself. :)

Considering that they WERE using MS products...

[Svartalf]

Making that conflation will backfire because you could make the SAME statement about Windows and MS Office.

They're going to probably avoid drawing attention to this- China going this way didn't make for the FUD
people were afraid of (Well, I didn't see much of it...) because of the aforementioned problem with using
it in this case.

Comical Indeed, Bill Gates Inspired Them!

[Erris]

I wonder how RMS is going to spin this victory to his States-side detractors?

Look no further than the fine AP article for an explanation:

Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes, [imagined non free software might contain bugs and backdoors and ] also noted that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once described copyright reformers - including people who want to do away with proprietary software - as "some new modern-day sort of communists" - which is a badge of honor from the Cuban perspective.

So, thank you Bill Gates for inspiring Cuba and many other countries. The disturbing part of this story is that citizens of the free world willingly give Bill Gates the authority that Fidel Castro will impose by force, and that's the real inspiration provided. I don't have any illusions that Fidel Castro will allow real software freedom anymore than he allows a free press, free association, free worship, so on and so forth. Fidel Castro and his party will be the owners of whatever Linux distribution he makes, just as Bill Gates is the owner of Windoze.

Whatever their motives, software freedom will be better for them. The government will own it's systems but their people using free software may also get a taste for real freedom and have better tools to persue it. Unless they use further M$ tricks like DRM, Cuban computers will work better with really free sotware.

So, how's a dose of reality for a spin? When you use non free software, someone else owns your computer. The non free way of "be so grateful for what my software does for you that you do as I say." When you look behind the rhetoric and lables, what you find is minds that think alike. You would never move to Cuba or China because they would strip you of many of your freedoms. Why willingly surrender your software freedom, with all of the dire implications for other freedom of speech, press, and what those freedoms safeguard?

Re:Comical Indeed, Bill Gates Inspired Them!

[Znork]

"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)).

Re:Comical Indeed, Bill Gates Inspired Them!

[jdp816]

Communist and Socialist CPEs have a major failing: they can't predict all problems, and they can't react as fast to them as a free market. Thus, when problems arise: drought, natural disaster, etc. The govt has to get it's big stupid bureaucracy in motion to get changes in place. It also allows people to hide behind that bureaucracy and let problems develop that shouldn't, Chernobyl, Aral Sea, waste and pollution of cosmodromes. Also, theft of technology, like the 8080 clone called the KP580. The PDP11 clones. The Shuttle clone Buran... The Soviets needed a lot of Western tech to be productive in the modern world, so it couldn't be simple luck and mismanagement that caused their downfall. ;)

Re:Comical Indeed, Bill Gates Inspired Them!

[Znork]

"they can't predict all problems, and they can't react as fast to them as a free market."

Exactly. And here you see the exact same problems in the non-free-market sectors of western economies. You see it in the copyright industries, ranging from RIAA/MPAA, you see it in failures like Microsoft wasting billions doing their own five-year-plan command economy with LongHorn (while the free market OSS segment kept happily and rapidly evolving in the meantime, spending a fraction of the resources), you see it in the patent covered pharmaceutical industries, etc.

"and let problems develop that shouldn't"

Eh, well, um... I'm not that sure we're such shining examples when it comes to pollution and problems. Shit companies like Monsanto, a posterboy for corporate death penalty that should have been dischartered thirty years ago, and their cronies in various government agencies, with coverups, decades of knowingly poisoning land and people, and to quote wikipedia, 'Monsanto was found guilty of "negligence, wantonness, suppression of truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage" Under Alabama law the rare claim of outrage requires "conduct so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and intolerable in civilized society"' (found guilty, thirty years after the lawsuit started, note) are certainly on par with the worst of the communists on the 'problem' scale.

"so it couldn't be simple luck and mismanagement that caused their downfall."

Dont underestimate the level of mismanagement in the SU. :) Look up Lysenkoism to see approximately how disasterously political management could screw a complete field of science and the whole agricultural sector for several decades. And wonder at how we could fail to comprehensively beat these guys and outcompete them fifty years ago.

Investigate before posting

[vbraca]

If you have tried to investigate the copyrighted AP story you've rewritten at Slashdot you would discover many more interesting facts on the subject. First of all beside proclaiming it's intention to switch to FOSS (since MS and other proprietry sw vendors are blocking their access to security patches based on IP addresses they use) Cuban government sites are mostly optimized for IE6 and 800x600 resolution and government agencies and ministries are still using MS as their OS of preference. In 2002. Castro himself founded "la Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas" (University of Information Sciences) or UCI - a very secretive facility that still doesn't have a properly functioning website (sic!). It is UCI, with it's "claimed" 10,000 students and 5,000 teaching staff, which stands behind Cuban efforts to build their own Linux distro (Novalinx) based on Gentoo as well as behind Castro's vision of Cuba as free software player on a global scale. Furthermore, Stallman's lecture, titled "El movimiento del Software Libre y el sistema operativo GNU/Linux", was part of an 3rd International Workshop on Open Source Software held as part of an Havana expo called "Informatica 2007." as well as 14 other International conferences. First hand experience from Marc Eisenstadt's who was present at the lecture. As you can see there is much more behind "Stallman's win" than just extracting parts of the original AP story, in light of the fact that even FOSS oriented UCI students are mostly using pirated copies of MS Windows his win in Cuba is even more questionable. Not to mention that for ordinary Cuban's owning a computer is illegal as well as any form of internet usage outside "official" channels.

Re:Investigate before posting

[Count_Froggy]

Thank you.

Re:Investigate before posting

[StevenBedrick]

I was actually at this conference, and saw Stallman's talk (as well as Marc Eisenstadt's- great talk, Marc!). I also spent a great deal of time chatting with UCI students. A couple of points:

First, Stallman didn't have to "convince" anybody of anything, in spite of the OP's title. The Cuban government has been using Linux--- sorry, Richard, GNU/Linux--- in various aspects of its IT infrastructure for quite some time. That said, nearly all workstations are running some variety of Windows. For a lot of reasons (including the embargo, but as with everything in Cuba, it's more complicated than that...), most of the computers in actual use by government employees are on the older side, and as is common in the developing world large monitors are rare. Hence the 800x600 standard.

Everybody I talked to, including relatively highly-placed government officials, was quite open about the fact that essentially every single copy of Windows in Cuba is pirated. I saw an awful lot of copies of Windows Vista UE being used, which I found very interesting given how little time it's been "in the wild". All the Linux machines that I saw--- and I saw quite a few--- were running some variant of Ubuntu.

The national health IT infrastructure (Infomed, for those familiar with the topic) is built with Plone running on, I believe, Debian. All of the students I met from the UCI were big-time Linux proponents.

I don't know how accurate the UCI's claim of having 10,000 students is, but there were an awful lot of them running around, and the campus is huge. The ones I talked to were pretty adamant about that 10,000 number, but as an outsider I really can't say one way or another whether they were correct or just feeding me the party line. From what I was able to tell (by talking to a ton of different people in different roles in the system), the UCI students have some approximation of full, open internet access, but only at the university- not in their homes or dorm rooms. It's still generally illegal for Cubans to have computers in their homes, much less internet access. Certain professionals and government employees are granted the privilege, but it is very tightly regulated. The students, however, seemed to be taking full advantage of their open university access. They all had Gmail accounts, and were using Google Talk. From what I saw, their IM conversations were just as inane as any college students' IM conversations would be- mostly discussion about weekend plans and attractive members of the relevant sex.

This leads me to another general observation I made--- the gender balance in IT in Cuba is far closer to being 50/50 than it is here in the states. For all of its (many) faults, I have to give Cuba credit on this one- they've done a bang-up job of removing gender-related obstacles in the professional classes. I was there for the medical informatics subconference, which meant that I spent a lot of time talking to doctors as well as to programmers, and in both cases there were just as many women as men. At equivalent tech conferences in the States, there are usually far fewer women running around than men.

I actually just flew back tonight, and it's really late, so I'll leave it off here. If anybody wants more info about this conference, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to ramble on some more after I've gotten some sleep. :-)

Re:Investigate before posting

[AlexGr]

It seems to me that much of the commentary on Slashdot is around a well-chosen summary of an article instead of the actual news. The paragraph used made it sound like RMS was there to convince the Cuban government rather than speaking at a legitimate conference.

It's "collective property", so in a sense, *YES*

[Anonymous Coward]

The digital arena is probably the only place where it works, too. (Because communism has certainly been an utter failure wherever it's been imposed - don't think so? Then why the hell did Fidel Castro have to get medical treatment from outside Cuba?)

Why would a form of communism work in the digital world but fail utterly everywhere else?

Because in the digital OSS world, you can "take" anything (modify it, change it, copy it, use it) without having to appropriate the original. Source code can be "collectivized" without taking it from the authors. Farms can't be collectivized without taking them from the farmers.

Gee, communism only works where it doesn't involve forced resource redistribution, or society (actually the *government*) appropriating private property.

Imagine that.

Silly recipe-sharers, jail is for dissenters!

[Americano]

Middle-aged communist bureaucrats and ponytailed young Cuban programmers applauded as the computer scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology insisted that copyright laws violate basic morality; he compared them to laws that would threaten people with jail for sharing or modifying kitchen recipes.

Is there anybody else who finds this deliciously ironic, considering that he's preaching this particular line of rhetoric to the government of Cuba, which regularly and freely represses dissent, jails opponents, and maintains a completely monopoly on the media? Perhaps a better comparison would be Stallman saying that laws on copyright violate basic morality, because it would be like threatening people with jail for sharing unapproved thoughts & news.

Stallman also warned that proprietary software is a security threat because without being able to examine the code, users can't know what it's doing or what "backdoor" holes developers might have left open for future entry. "A private program is never trustworthy," he said.

Again, very funny. Because the governments of Cuba & Venezuela are both ALL ABOUT freedom of information for their citizens. Oh, except Venezuela is also cracking down on the freedom of the press, firing judges who dare to challenge its authority, and let's not forget prison conditions... but other than that? Yays Open Sources!!!!

Not sure I entirely understand how Stallman isn't getting slagged for this, after Google got so roundly derided about its decisions to filter results in the China market... after all, Google is a company, interested in profits. Stallman professes to be all about idealism, and freedom, doesn't he?

Re:Silly recipe-sharers, jail is for dissenters!

[jcr]

Perhaps he could add a clause to the GPL prohibiting the use of the software under such license from being used in the administration of gulags.

-jcr

Re:Silly recipe-sharers, jail is for dissenters!

[petrus4]

Not sure I entirely understand how Stallman isn't getting slagged for this

Stallman gets criticised by some people, but the majority of those who dislike him are generally too scared of his followers (with good reason, to a degree) to really speak their minds. His congregation here on Slashdot (and on other sites) not only refrain entirely from engaging in critical thought themselves, but also serve quite willingly as human shields in that regard, and they seem to have mod points on a routine basis. Thus, anyone who makes any serious effort to find fault with him usually simply gets modded down to the point where there is little danger of what they write being read.

Re:Silly recipe-sharers, jail is for dissenters!

[steve_bedrick]

FWIW, I was at the conference and talked to Stallman about this very subject after his talk. He is entirely aware of the irony, but seemed hopeful that, in the long run, exposing more people in Cuba to the ideas behind free software (and the unfettered internet access needed to fully utilize it) would have positive effects on the openness of Cuban society. I'd certainly like to believe that... it's a nice idea, and it might even be true.

BTW, I'm not sure who the "ponytailed young Cuban programmers" that the article refers to were- there were very, very few guys with long hair. I think mine was the longest, and there might have been three or four others that I saw. For the most part, Cuban fashion tends towards shorter hair for guys- this is possibly a holdover from earlier decades when guys with long hair were routinely hauled into police stations to have their heads shaved.

Re:Silly recipe-sharers, jail is for dissenters!

[GaryPatterson]

I don't know enough about Cuba to comment on it, but couldn't Stallman be pushing Linux because it undermines control of media? A Linux OS is as open as possible, with source code available to anyone who wants to see it. That means that attempting to control media through Linux can be undone by rewriting parts of the OS.

A proprietry OS can implement DRM directly in the OS, where it's extremely difficult to get rid of.

Given the above, open source is the best software for the people of governments who want to control them.

Re:Silly recipe-sharers, jail is for dissenters!

[tm2b]

Don't be silly. That sort of thing is reserved for true war crimes, like DRM.

Don't know but sib post is perferct example!

[HornWumpus]

Lying for and making excuses.

Basically socialism works in theory. It's just the practice they never can defend.

BTW Africa isn't exactly capitalist. Feudalism or socialism are the common modes of government on that continent.

Re:Don't know but sib post is perferct example!

[Temsi]

Socialism does not exist in Africa. You're confusing Socialism and Fascism, of which there is plenty, in many forms, in many nations in Africa. Fascism does not have a social ideology other than centralized, dictatorial control over people. It can take hold in nations governed by socialism and capitalism alike. However, to be fair, the so-called Socialism which has been practiced in the world, has an easier path for Fascism to follow, as the centralized control mechanism is already in place.

Capitalism IN Africa is not what is killing its people, but rather the disposition at which capitalism places African nations with little in the form of natural resources to exploit and export.

We, as a wealthy nation, don't bother ourselves with an African nation unless it produces something we want. In fact, we have no problem buying from them, as long as it's cheap and profitable for us (e.g. the monstrous diamond industry). Conversely, if it has nothing to offer us, we couldn't care less even if their illegal government is committing genocide against its own people (e.g. Darfur).
No, that doesn't bother us. What does bother us however, is a crime we didn't care about when happened 30 years ago because at the time ignoring it suited our business interests, but now we do because the dictator who did it wasn't co-operating any more, and was harming our business relationships in the region. I speak of course of Iraq's Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds 30 years ago. We not only "forgave" him, we propped him up, because he was co-operative and good for our business interests. When he changed his mind, we killed him and took over his country. But I digress...

Now, to bring this tangent back to the original discussion, I think what Stallman is doing is admirable.
He's bringing free software into nations where the average annual income is less than the average monthly income for a minimum wage earner in the United States, sometimes even far less. Does that mean those people should simply be left behind on the technological ladder? If you're a giant corporation, your answer would be yes, because it would keep you at the top. If you're a giant corporation like Microsoft, they're an opportunity. A "gift" of say, 3000 Microsoft Office licenses, looks good on paper, can even be tax deductable, and yet at the same time, in order for the recipient to actually use them, they have to shell out for those Windows licenses. That means, your gift was actually a trojan horse designed to fatten your bottom line.
Stallman however, doesn't have a bottom line, although I'm sure he gets paid for his time. He doesn't make money off software licenses, and he doesn't make money as the shareholder of a major software company. That means he's actually doing this because he believes in it, which is admirable.

While I understand that communism has a bad name, on paper it is a beautiful thing. But only on paper, as it doesn't work when humans are added to the equation. If only we could somehow hold on to the "equal opportunity" part and the "you deserve to get what you need" part of socialism, while throwing away the "you can't have more than that - we will decide what you need" part that has always been added to it where it's been practiced, while at the same time holding on to the "excel if you can" part of capitalism, we'd have a much better world. Of course, I also know that I will never see that world, as it would actually require us to stop being so damn selfish all the time.

Re:Don't know but sib post is perferct example!

[Temsi]

Update... should have used that preview button...

When I said "Socialism does not exist in Africa", I was of course referring to real "theoretical" socialism, which has never been successfully practiced anywhere. I'm sure there are countries in Africa that practice some form of it.

Re:Don't know but sib post is perferct example!

[khallow]

We, as a wealthy nation, don't bother ourselves with an African nation unless it produces something we want. In fact, we have no problem buying from them, as long as it's cheap and profitable for us (e.g. the monstrous diamond industry). Conversely, if it has nothing to offer us, we couldn't care less even if their illegal government is committing genocide against its own people (e.g. Darfur). No, that doesn't bother us. What does bother us however, is a crime we didn't care about when happened 30 years ago because at the time ignoring it suited our business interests, but now we do because the dictator who did it wasn't co-operating any more, and was harming our business relationships in the region. I speak of course of Iraq's Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds 30 years ago. We not only "forgave" him, we propped him up, because he was co-operative and good for our business interests. When he changed his mind, we killed him and took over his country. But I digress...

When he invaded Kuwait and threatened the rest of the Arabian peninsula. That's a rather huge "changed his mind" there.

Re:Don't know but sib post is perferct example!

[Temsi]

Well, invading Kuwait wasn't any worse than killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's, but, as George H. W. Bush said in his national address on the matter: "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security."
So, as before, it was still all about OUR interests. If Kuwait didn't have oil, we wouldn't have cared one way or the other, so my original point still stands.

Sudatenland

[daninaustin]

With Chavez's arms buildup I think something may be coming. Maybe it's just his paranoia over being invaded by the US, but I would not be surprised to have his troops moving in to liberate his socialist brothers in neighboring countries. By that time most of the middle and upper class citizens will have fled Venezuala to the US or other countries, so the country will be even more dependent on oil to fund his plans. Venezuela doesn't have the industrial base to be as big a threat as Hitler but that doesn't mean that a lot of people wont' die as Chavez builds his socialist paradise.

Re:Sudatenland

[caseydk]

so the country will be even more dependent on oil to fund his plans

As an interesting aside to this one, what's going to happen to the prices of corn and oil as more economies try to make the switch? We're already seeing (on a small scale) what happens when a food staple becomes fuel: http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/worl d/16594512.htm

If more countries/industries make a significant switch, the price of oil - which is keeping Venezuela afloat - will drop while their food prices are skyrocketing... sounds like a *bad* time to be in charge.

Re:Sudatenland

[MicktheMech]

Corn is a horrible fuel source. Ethanol from corn is just a novelty. If ethanol based biofuels ever become economically significant it will be after cellulosic ethanol production becomes mainstream.

Cuba is not the only one...

[nite_warrior]

President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, also met with Stallman a few months before getting on power, and had announce also a switch to open source platform for all government agencies in Ecuador. Along with Peru who was the first to begin a switch to OSS, seems like Latin America could be a region that will be moving to OSS in the next few years

Somewhat

[WindBourne]

USSR, Cuba, and even "communist" China were never good examples of communism. They are all totalitarian states. Yet in America, we call them communism.

The truth is that only decent example of pure communism would be Israeli collectives. You can certainly argue that Linux is good communism, but I believe that it is really pure capitalism (without any gov intervention). The truth is that coders offer up ideas and code. They are rewarded with fame (name and code on-line) and if good, they will almost certainly pick up salaried positions. If they decide to become one of the huge number of OSS start-ups, they run a better than average chance (which is still not that high) of making money at it. In particular, most seem to ignore how Linus, Alan Cox, Larry Wall, etc have profited off OSS. As long as somebody remains at the top of their game, then they will be just fine. But if they do not stay on top, well they will be finished.

Re:Somewhat

[Dun Malg]

USSR, Cuba, and even "communist" China were never good examples of communism. They are all totalitarian states. Yet in America, we call them communism.

The truth is that only decent example of pure communism would be Israeli collectives.

The simple and obvious conclusion is that communism simply doesn't work beyond small, dedicated, voluntary groups. The Marxist ideal of communism supplanting capitalism on any scale larger than "small village" is a crock of shit. I once had a very illuminating conversation with a former hippy commune dweller, who really laid out the folly of universal collectivism. His observation was essentially this:

In the 60's the idea of communes was popular. At a new collective you'd have a fairly representative cross section of work ethics found in general society. At one end of the Bell curve you have the ringleaders, the Competent Idealists. These were the people who truly believed in the commune and usually were the ones who set it up and ran it, despite the supposed pure egalitarianism of the collective. They were the ones working 16-20 hours a day to keep the water running, the food cooking, and generally contributing effort wherever it was needed. Sometimes they'd be bossy dictatorial types, but mostly they were just skilled, energetic idealists who really wanted it to work. The classic "good" hippies who believed in self sufficiency and made their own clothes.

At the other end of the Bell curve you have the Leeches. These were the folks who thought communism meant you didn't have to work hard and that somehow food, clothing, shelter, and drugs would show up of their own accord. These were the "bad hippies", like the ones you used to find following the Dead around the country, living off the handouts of others, the kind of people who could say out loud at a party, without shame, "I've got papers if anyone's got weed".
In between you have the Vast Majority. Most of them were there because it was fashionable and sounded like it might be better than the status quo. They worked reasonably well, even if they weren't terribly skilled, and took direction fairly well from the Competent Idealists.

In the beginning, it worked. The Vast Majority and the Idealists were productive enough to make the inevitable Leeches not be a problem. As time went on, however, members of the Majority began to realize that commune life was not actually easier than life "outside". It was, in fact, more work for somewhat measurably less gain. The Majority, not being as thoroughly dedicated as the Idealists, just didn't get that same sense of satisfaction from living "outside the system". As time went on, the Majority began to shrink as disenchanted members left to get regular jobs that paid decent money and let you live in homes with running water. Eventually, as the Majority dwindled, they were left with a small core of hard working Idealists busting their asses even harder to support a small group of lazy slacker Leeches, while their standard of living continued to decline. At some point, the competent Idealists said "fuck this", and went to work for the EPA, or Greenpeace, or some idealistic org or another that needed competent folks and actually paid money. This left the commune unworkable and the Leeches went off to sell plastic beads to middle class concert goers and cajole others into letting them live in the closet under their stairs.

Now imagine what would happen if there were guards at the edge of the commune, telling the Majority folks "No, you don't leave. You get back to work." Any idealism they may have had is long gone. Clearly their motivation will drop to the lowest common denominator, that of the Leeches. Now, the Leeches work a little harder because of the guards with the guns, but not a whole lot. As a result you have a commune that's 10% hard workers, and 90% clock-punchers doing the bare minimum. This is why communism is doomed to fail (or at least doomed to stagnate) at larger scales. You can't enforce

Re:Somewhat

[SQL Error]

The simple and obvious conclusion is that communism simply doesn't work beyond small, dedicated, voluntary groups. The Marxist ideal of communism supplanting capitalism on any scale larger than "small village" is a crock of shit.

Indeed. J. B. S. Haldane - himself a communist - pointed this out in the early 20th century in his famous essay On Being the Right Size (which mostly about scaling in biology, but also discussed other examples of scaling problems). He speculated that a particularly brilliant group of leaders might make communism a success in a country the size of Liechtenstein (population about 30,000).

Re:Somewhat

[NMerriam]

You can't enforce mass participation without using force. Compulsory participation will invariably result in little more than the minimum output required to keep from getting shot.

But how is that any different than Capitalism, or any other system of economic distribution of scarce resources (including "might makes right")? Ultimately you get the majority of people to agree on a system and punish anyone who goes outside it. In a capitalist society, anyone who goes outside the market is called a thief/trespasser and jailed or shot.

There's certainly no inherent reason other than tradition and law that a person should "own" a plot of land, other than the fact that the owner can defend the land with force. Yet the ownership of capital is the most fundamental economic principle we have, based on nothing more than us all agreeing to let each other use force.

In any society, everyone will do the bare minimum that they have to in order to reach whatever level of happiness they consider acceptable. Perhaps capitalism is more efficient at meeting the needs of more people, or perhaps communism leads to fewer material desires in general. International happiness surveys certainly don't show that people in successful market economies are happier than those in successful socialist societies, even though they have dramatically more material wealth. Indeed, the USA has some of the least happy people on Earth precisely because we all feel like we don't have "enough", while most South Americans and Western Europeans, who own less, work less, produce less, and depend more on collective provisioning of services, are all much happier.

Perhaps the real lesson is that you can't make people happy living in a system that doesn't fulfill their needs. If you want material goods, then capitalism will be important to you, but that doesn't mean socialism is ineffective at providing happiness to people with different priorities.

Re:Somewhat

[gfxguy]

Ultimately you get the majority of people to agree on a system and punish anyone who goes outside it. In a capitalist society, anyone who goes outside the market is called a thief/trespasser and jailed or shot.

I like the GP poster's use of the word "leech."

But I'd like to know what you mean by "punish" someone who goes outside the "system."

If you mean that people who won't pull their own weight get to live on welfare are being punished somehow... I'm not really sure I follow.

Of course, you might mean a truly capitalistic society with no socialist restraints, but then I don't think you're going to find such a country. Still, those people who don't fit in are free to leave, unlike most communist countries.

Re:Somewhat

[NMerriam]

But I'd like to know what you mean by "punish" someone who goes outside the "system."

If you mean that people who won't pull their own weight get to live on welfare are being punished somehow... I'm not really sure I follow.

I offered the example of thieves and trespassers, both of which rely on the notion of private ownership without any inherent basis. Why should one person be allowed to say "this river is mine" or "this field is mine"? They didn't build it. It was there a thousand years before they were born, and will continue to be there a thousand years from their death. Why does a child inherit from parents? The child didn't make the money, the child didn't labor to build the company. If I go to a field and take corn, I am a thief -- but what option do I have if I am not participating in the capitalist agreement? All the land capable of growing corn has been fenced off by others as private property, even though the land and the corn existed before them.

All the places I could sleep, or hunt, or live are either private property or public property where you aren't allowed to do those things. If you try to do them, you'll be arrested. So even if I take naturally occurring food from a naturally occurring plant or animal, and sleep in an empty space, I'll still be breaking laws left and right.

We're ALL forced into participating in our economic system, regardless of whether it is capitalism or communism or something else. If we break the rules of the system we're in, we'll be punished.

Of course, you might mean a truly capitalistic society with no socialist restraints, but then I don't think you're going to find such a country. Still, those people who don't fit in are free to leave, unlike most communist countries.

I think you'll find it's just as easy to leave the socialistic democracies as it is to leave capitalistic democracies. Of course there aren't any truly capitalist countries, or truly socialist countries. That's why i think it's so funny that someone from a 60% capitalist/ 40% socialist country will come on here and talk about how evil socialism is, while someone from a 60% socialist/40% capitalist country argues just as strongly against capitalism.

Re:Somewhat

[nidarus]

Uh-huh, the problem is that you don't decide what's "Communism" and what's not. Israeli Kibbutzim never collectively describe themselves as being Communist - they were, like MAPAI, merely "Socialist" (just like many socialist parties in Europe, for example). Those who did describe themselves as being "Communist" were all poor (in many cases, starving), oppressive dictatorships.

Btw, the Israeli Kibbutzim failed. AFAIK, all of them are undergoing privatization of some sort, and those who aren't are held alive purely due to huge government subsidies. Aside from the financial failure, it was a social failure as well: tearing children away from their families and growing them in "children's homes", forcing them to conform, etc. caused deep emotional traumas. Many people that were raised in the Kibbutzim describe themselves as Kibbutz Survivors.

Re:Somewhat

[khallow]

I offered the example of thieves and trespassers, both of which rely on the notion of private ownership without any inherent basis. Why should one person be allowed to say "this river is mine" or "this field is mine"? They didn't build it. It was there a thousand years before they were born, and will continue to be there a thousand years from their death. Why does a child inherit from parents? The child didn't make the money, the child didn't labor to build the company. If I go to a field and take corn, I am a thief -- but what option do I have if I am not participating in the capitalist agreement? All the land capable of growing corn has been fenced off by others as private property, even though the land and the corn existed before them.

You can work and use your wages to buy corn. You don't have to steal.

One point is that capitalist and communist societies have the same problem with theft. It's just that with clearly delineated ownership, someone has direct incentive to catch thieves. I really think there's a lot more nuance here since there's no obvious reason that communist societies can't have a form of ownership and capitalist societies need not assign ownership to everything.

I think you'll find it's just as easy to leave the socialistic democracies as it is to leave capitalistic democracies. Of course there aren't any truly capitalist countries, or truly socialist countries. That's why i think it's so funny that someone from a 60% capitalist/ 40% socialist country will come on here and talk about how evil socialism is, while someone from a 60% socialist/40% capitalist country argues just as strongly against capitalism.

The society doesn't determine a person's beliefs.

Re:Somewhat

[NMerriam]

You can work and use your wages to buy corn. You don't have to steal.

Yes, you can, but then you're participating in the capitalist economy. You're agreeing with the notion that somebody owns food they didn't make on land they didn't make, and that you should have to buy it from them simply because they stood next to it first and claimed ownership.

I really think there's a lot more nuance here...

Well, of course. There are no 100% capitalist societies or 100% socialist societies. I can't imagine any human group could function in either, they're abstract philosophies when reality demands a compromise of the two. That's why the 60/40, 40/60 societies believing one extreme or the other is right is so silly.

The society doesn't determine a person's beliefs.

Of course not, but it plays a role. It also determines which advantages, disadvantages, and nuances you see most clearly -- the ones you actually live with. Depending on what makes you happy, that will make you very strongly agree or disagree with your local system, or have an unrealistically rosy or negative view of the system you don't live in. I was only offering one example of a disagreement (the one I see most commonly here), obviously there are pro-socialists living in pro-capitalist societies and vice-versa. But they are all forced to participate or be branded as outlaws. That's the nature of societies on a populated planet, not an attribute of capitalism or socialism.

Re:Somewhat

[WindBourne]

Show me another example of communism? there are none. USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuala, etc are NOT examples of communism. They are countries with totalitarian rulers and socialists policies. None of it has anything to do with communism. In fact, there has never been a communistic country (well not in the last 100 years).

Re:Somewhat

[khallow]

Yes, you can, but then you're participating in the capitalist economy. You're agreeing with the notion that somebody owns food they didn't make on land they didn't make, and that you should have to buy it from them simply because they stood next to it first and claimed ownership.

Societies have rules. You can chose to obey the rules and get the benefits of whatever that society has to offer or you can break the rules and get whatever punishments that society has to offer for that. It sounds to me like you're really complaining that we don't have enough varieties of society to chose from. I'm all for expanding the numbers of different societies so you can live in whatever suits your fancy.

Re:Somewhat

[NMerriam]

I'm not complaining about anything, the original poster said socialism always fails because people are *forced* to participate in it. I was explaining that people are forced to live in *whatever* economy they are surrounded by, there's nothing unique about socialism that requires you to follow the rules or be punished.

Re:Somewhat

[Tassach]

I offered the example of thieves and trespassers, both of which rely on the notion of private ownership without any inherent basis.

The basis of modern (and medieval, and ancient) property ownership is based on three things:

1. I Got Here First
2. I Have Worked, Used, or Improved It
3. I Have Defended It

Why should one person be allowed to say "this river is mine" or "this field is mine"? They didn't build it.

Because they got there first, worked it, and defended their claim to it. They can keep their claim as long as they are willing and able to fight to defend it. In days gone by this was done with weapons. Nowadays, we use lawyers. It's debatable which one is more brutal.

It was there a thousand years before they were born, and will continue to be there a thousand years from their death.

The longevity of a piece of property, whether it is a chattel or real estate, is immaterial to it's ability to be owned and transferred.

Why does a child inherit from parents? The child didn't make the money, the child didn't labor to build the company.

So a person does not have the right to dispose of their property as they see fit? Why shouldn't a person be allowed to transfer his property to another under any terms that he feels are equitable -- regardless of whether those terms are "you can have it when I die, son" or "I'll sell it to you now for cash in hand"?

If I go to a field and take corn, I am a thief

Yes, you are. Someone expended their money and labor to plow and fertilize the field, acquire and plant the seed, tend and weed the crop. What makes you think you have any right to take the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them?

but what option do I have if I am not participating in the capitalist agreement? All the land capable of growing corn has been fenced off by others as private property, even though the land and the corn existed before them.

You squat. Either the rightful owner chases you off, in which case you find another place to squat, or he doesn't and you have a place to live. Note that if you squat on a piece of unused and unworked land, and the owner does not assert his rights, it is possible (at least in some states) to take adverse possession of the land. This goes back to the whole "working the land" requirement property ownership. Do some research on squatter's rights and adverse possession. Also note that you can legally camp in National Forests for (IIRC) up to 28 consecutive days. Find another nearby camp site (state park, perhaps) and shuttle between the two. In reality, the rangers generally won't kick you out after your time is up unless you're being a dick or someone complains that you're hogging a prime spot. It's not a great life, but you can live off the land providing you know how to do it and are respectful of your environment and the powers that be. Oh and while the land itself existed, it didn't plow itself. That corn didn't spring up in nice neat rows because a flock of crows flew over it in formation, shitting out seeds like a machine gun. Someone else worked to make that happen.

Re:Somewhat

[NMerriam]

Yes, we as a society agree on all those principles of private property. Anyone who contradicts those agreements in their actions will be punished. That is true in whatever economic system you live under -- if you do not conform your actions to the agreed-upon structure, you will be punished. It is not unique to socialism.

Re:Somewhat

[khallow]

Hrmmm, I wish I had figured that out a few posts back.

Re:Somewhat

[gfxguy]

I thought it was communism that always fails, and the difference was that in other societies, you are free to leave if you don't like it. In communism, this is usually not the case (because they almost always ultimately become totalitarian states because, at the beginning, people - the productive ones - DO leave).

Re:Somewhat

[NMerriam]

the difference was that in other societies, you are free to leave if you don't like it.

And as I replied several messages upwards, there's no difference in being able to leave a modern democratic socialist state and a modern democratic capitalist state. Whether socialism inevitably leads to totalitarianism is obviously a good question, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence of it. All the major UNdemocratic communist states started out fairly authoritarian/totalitarian, they weren't democracies that were corrupted by socialism. The major corrupted democracy of the 20th century was a capitalist democracy -- Nazi Germany.

Re:Somewhat

[gfxguy]

But the Nazis were a socialist party, and like modern day socialist politicians, they used social issues to buy votes.

Re:Somewhat

[NMerriam]

They called themselves socialist (because it was the cool thing at the time, much like China now call themselves a republic), but were fascist in their policies. The only "social" policies they advanced were ramping up industrial production, militarism, and trading on nationalist xenophobia to explain economic failures. There's nothing about workers owning the means of production, universal equality, elimination of the ruling class, or social services in any of the Nazi party's policies or actions.

They replaced democracy with totalitarianism, and it wasn't to provide universal health care or uniform wages.

communist?

[oohshiny]

Interesting that people would call this "communist". Does this mean that every company that exports a product to Cuba is also "communist"? Does this mean that Microsoft was "communist" as long as Cuba was using Microsoft software?

Free software is a product, and a darned good and cost-effective one at that. That means that, like all products, all sorts of people, institutions, companies, and governments are going to use it.

Re:Stallman is not a friend of USA

[Creepy Crawler]

---Well, as much as I hate M$, I do not understand why a US citizen wants to help a country, who is one of the biggest enemies of the US.

Whats an enemy? Back in the early 80's, we helped Saddam in power, along with weapons and training to overthrow the previous government. And look what we did last month: We Hanged him. Cuba once was with the USSR, but the USSR is no more. Cuba is its own entity, with little external support. And we STILL dont do business with them.

What are they going to do? Launch their cigars at us?

---If they are using M$ windows, let them use it and let them pay US in licensing costs and what not. Why liberate them them from another US stronghold.

They, like most third world countries, cannot and will not pay license fees on software. It's better to get them off the habit so other countries can make dealings with them proper... and hopefully the US will turn around. My god, The Wall Fell, USSR is no more, China is becoming more capitalist. Why do we hate Cuba still? The old mans about dead anyways.

---Oh I know why: Because Stallman does not care what happens to US. Given the chance, I am sure he had no problem helping the terrorist countries like Libya, Iran and Syria.

Troll alert. Troll alert.

Keyboard has been disabled due to stupid allegory to puppet governments to Cuba.

What a coup.

[kwiqsilver]

The government of one of the three poorest countries in the western hemisphere.
And what a PR coup, to be the exclusive software of one of the worlds most murderous, repressive regimes.

Have to Admit

[viewtouch]

Anyone has to admit that RMS is an achiever. Countless men and women have died and will always die wondering whether they actually made a difference with the time that they were given. RMS will never have to wonder if he has made a difference. He has. And he's done something that makes him one of history's most influential people. History will be very kind to RMS. His legacy, and the legacy of the Free Software Foundation is, I'll offer, richer and longer-lasting than that of Bill Gates and any other 50 people who have ever toiled at Microsoft.

Maybe FOSS will help Cuba on its road to democracy

[carolsim]

Cuba is in the midst of change now and hopefully on its way to a more open more democratic society. I was in Cuba in 1974 as a member of the Venceramos Brigade. I didn't cut sugar cane, I dug foundations for houses. I was impressed by Cuba's schools, healthcare and relatively safe city streets. I was less impressed with the system of government. Too many rules. Too much repression.

Of course Yanqui imperialism in the form of the trade embargo and our CIA's addiction to terrorist attacks didn't help the cause of democracy in Cuba.

Cuba now is a much different place. The economy isn't doing as well as it did in the 1970's, but there seems to be an opening for a more democratic form of socialism. I would love to see that, but that should be up to the Cuban people, not a Yanqui like me...and especially not a Yanqui like George W. Bush.

Free Software encourages open collaboration and communication--- things that could only benefit the political changes now happening in Cuba. The Cuban Revolution is stuck in the past and its time to move forward

I can't wait until the companeros y companeras en Cuba discover the wonders of a software project like CivicSpace/Drupal. If projects like that can help revive our own moribund American Revolution, just think what a tool it could be to revive the ideals of the Cuban Revolution.

Re:Concentration of power!

[biscon]

I agree but since when have communism been about one or a few people being in power? (oligarchy)
besides I live in a country (Denmark) which by many people is defined as a variant of socialism so I am a bit curious
as to why you think socialism can't work?.

The two movements don't have the same message.

[jbn-o]

Quite right; as RMS says in his updated version of an underrated essay on gnu.org:

We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being misidentified as open source supporters.

The notion that people would want to get credit for their work and not be identified with a movement that conveys a different message is apparently difficult for some people to understand and act upon. Witness the number of people who will refuse to give GNU a share of the credit and instead refer to a "Linux operating system" when that system features GNU software. The GNU/Linux naming FAQ responds to every rebuttal I've seen.

Lots of people don't understand the differences between the movements, even when those differences explain the vastly different results we see on the ground (such as explaining why free software movement proponents say proprietary software is anti-social and open source movement proponents endorse installing and running proprietary software). For years, the OSI told people the differences were "ideological tub-thumping" and that was about the most insightful explanation they had to offer. Meanwhile, the FSF was publishing a different and far more respectful explanation which was recently updated.

The OSI's president, Michael Tiemann, said the OSI is changing; distancing themselves from the views of Eric Raymond ("Eric does speak for himself but less and less for the OSI."). I hope that the OSI will be able to bring its audience around to understand why ethical understanding is important. Businesses greatest achievement has been to get people to believe they can separate what they do from ethics, and it's important we challenge that perception; in many cases this is a life or death matter. But there is much for the OSI to do because of the wedge they created; for example, convincing people that approving of similar sets of licenses is all there is to say on the subject (another followup to your post illustrates this point). RMS discussed the differences between the movements and Tiemann president responded.

Re:The two movements don't have the same message.

[linvir]

The GNU/Linux naming FAQ responds to every rebuttal I've seen.

Here's one you might not have heard then: It's really annoying and nobody but the FSF and their fans actually cares

LNS = Linux is Not a Stallman (or sozi, or nazi)

[DandyRandy]

Anything associated with socialism, Nazism or communisms is foe to FREEDOM. If Open Source Society wants to be associated with Fidel, Chavez, Putin, Lukashenko etc. - their choice. But please - don't speak about the freedom anymore! We, the People, don't need such a freedom as in soviet union or nazi Germany. If some old crackpot like Stallman wants free beer - he can drink it with Fidel, who really cares!

A match made in heaven

[TrebleJunkie]

Wow. Stallman and Cuba. I can't think of a more perfect match.

Cuban boycott?

[flyingfsck]

Uhhh, isn't there supposed to be a US trade embargo against Cuba? So how does Cuba obtain its MS software? I think the FBI should ask Bill a few questions...

Re:Stallman is not a friend of USA

[Stormx2]

If cuba uses free software, the terrorists have won.

"I hate patriotism. I can't stand it, man -- makes me fuckin' sick. It's a round world last time I checked."

Take some advice from our good friend Bill Hicks

Re:Concentration of power!

[HornWumpus]

Someone has to run it.

Those people have way too much power. When a crisis happens they will always fix it by grabbing more power (that's just human nature and arrogance of leadership).

It's a simple question of how much of your GDP you put in the hands of a small group of people.

So how do you think Denmark will do when their baby boom hits retirement in a big way? Your unfunded social programs make American Social Security look competently run in comparison. Hope you've kept your guns in private hands so you can at least throw the bastards out.

Re:Concentration of power!

[vidarh]

Since when did communism become about concentration of power? In fact, the opposite is true - particularly Marxist ideas about communism is about the dispersal of power to larger groups, and ultimately about taking all power away from the state and devolve it to communes with near direct rule. The entire point is that centralized power is only needed if your purpose is to oppress - that's a central thesis of Marxist political theory: the state is there to let one class exercise power over another. Remove class struggle by organizing society in a way where economical power is devolved to those affected by it the same way we have democratized control over many other areas of life, and according to Marxism the foundation for the state as a concentration of power disappears.

Your argument is in any case specious as best - your exact same statement could be applied to any form of government. I could use the exact same statement to argue why the system used in the US "can't" work, for example. Concentration of power is bad, but it very obviously can co-exist with significant levels of democracy.

So exactly how would subjecting larger part of society to democratic oversight suddenly make a difference?

And where do you draw the line? In Norway, for example, medicine is socialized, and large companies are required to have a certain representation of employees on the board as voting members. If anything, Norway has a more democratic system than the US (proportional representation, for starters). How would extending the level of influence of employees and citizens on those boards reduce democracy?

Arguing about whether that would be wise, or "fair", or economically advantageous is one thing, but claiming that there is some inherent inability for such a society to be democratic on a larger scale just involves a lot of preconceived notions about how a communist society would be structured - presumably colored by countries like China, the former Soviet Union etc., that never claimed to be communist in the first place (the Soviet leaders over time claimed to be anything from a thousand years to decades away from establishing a communist system for example - they used it as a propaganda tool the same way religious fanatics use the promise of heaven)

Every case it's been attempted.

[HornWumpus]

Democratic oversight? Where? Name one 'Communist' state that kept democracy. I realize there are no 'true' commie states (according to commies). I've got a dozen real world examples and all you've got is a theory that fails real world testing.

Communism/Socialism is contrary to human nature.

To counter that you need police, later secret police. (e.g. Nazi Germany, the USSR, Red china, Cuba, Cambodia, Venezuela etc etc etc). Until you can come up with ONE counter example my point stands. Even the nordic states with their mixed (but heavy socialism) route are restrictive. Try and buy yourself some health care above the amount you are rationed in most of those countries and see what happens. (If you are over 60 and smart you will take a vacation to get you hip replacement, so you don't get your doctor arrested.)

A democratic communist state would vote the reds out with the first bread shortage. Funny how bread shortages always follow nationalized farms and price controls. It's almost as if Adam Smith was right all along.

Re:It's "collective property", so in a sense, *YES

[Dun Malg]

Because in the digital OSS world, you can "take" anything (modify it, change it, copy it, use it) without having to appropriate the original. Source code can be "collectivized" without taking it from the authors. Farms can't be collectivized without taking them from the farmers. Personally, I think comparisons of OSS to communism are bogus because they miss a critical facet of the philosophy behind the GPL. Communism is premised upon the idea that all property is held in common. OSS is premised upon the idea that information isn't property, and that current law erroneously treats it as such. The former is a rejection of the idea of private property, while the latter is merely the objection to the misapplication of property rights. OSS is indeed compatible with communism, but communists are merely a subset of the larger group, most of which still believe in private property rights for real property.

They're Current Microsoft Customers

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

If you wish to fire back, note that they're just starting a transition -- everything they've done to date has been backed by Windows. Now that Castro is about to kick the bucket, Cuba faces potential for renewal, and that can start with FLOSS.

Chavez is, unfortunately, on the other course. But while we've got former US Congressmen doing PR work for him Linux is the least of our problems. When they return the bribe oil and start lobbying for nuclear power plants or windmills off the coast of Massachusetts to actually solve the heating cost problem then we can can worry about computer software.

Re:They're Current Microsoft Customers

[that this is not und]

everything they've done to date has been backed by Windows.

How much 'everything' have they done? Isn't it possible nearly everything they've been doing is 'backed by' index cards?

how come?

[ryanw]

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.

I think GNU projects are great and linux has become a huge success in the server market especially on a corporate level. I would venture to say that linux is doing BETTER in the commercial environments then it is in the free world. While Linux claims to be "free" I think it's fascinating at how much money goes into Linux development and commercial support. I recall IBM investing millions into Linux, let alone the cost of commercials promoting the brand at the super bowl a few years ago.

Sure, the Richard Stallman's of the world might neglect IBM's contributions (and other funding) but think about this. Without IBM doing commercials trying to show how great Linux is, how could they pitch using Linux to their fortune 500 companies if they just thought it was a bunch of free stuff thrown together?

I have always loved GNU Linux and everything around it. But it is anything but "free". The only thing "free" in regaurds to Linux is the license states that nobody can sell a product containing code or compilations of the code and derivatives of the code have to be available to the public. I believe all the major Linux developers are all hired by some sort of corporation being paid to work on the GNU project. Such as Red Hat or IBM or Novell. Honestly, how many "free" developers are actually out there doing things for "free" for Linux?

About 10 years ago I felt that linux was 5 years away from taking over commercial offerings from Microsoft. Ironically, instead of Linux being ready around 2002 it was Mac OSX which derived from the BSD family. And at that time I thought Linux was still about 5 years away from taking over commercial offereings, but I believe that Linux has now found it's place and will stay where it is.

Commercial vendors love Linux servers. This is where the money is, this is where the focus will be and will stay. I have and will always love Linux as a server, but please don't claim it's free. RedHat Linux SERVER platforms are one of the most expensive operating systems available. Support contracts are expensive and the initial licenses are way expensive. Much much much more expensive than Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. Especially since when you buy the hardware from most vendors it includes an included software license of either Solaris, AIX, or HP-UX.

Re:Communism = 100 million dead

[bky1701]

btw, i just laugh when people claim the birthplace of communism isn't really communist. what useful idiots.

I just laugh when people claim the USSR invented "Communism". The idea has been around for a very long time, just not politically or ideologically.

Religious communism has been around in places like India since before recorded history. Probably the first real description of communism is from More's Utopia, from 1535 AD. France played a major part in the creation of communism and socialism as a political party. Karl Marx was German and probably had never been to Russia.

vi vs. emacs

[bill_mcgonigle]

On an intellectual level we can all easily accept that it's the most sensible course of action, but when it comes down to it, we all want wealth and power and we're prepared to screw our fellow man to get them, and in the end there's nothing anybody can do about that.

Fusion power, robots, and AI's will bring us unlimited energy and labor. So, we'll just be left to war over natural resources (if we don't let the AI's do that too).

Many people will be able to put a cap on their resource consumption and just live happily arguing about vi vs. emacs.

Re:vi vs. emacs

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Many people will be able to put a cap on their resource consumption and just live happily arguing about vi vs. emacs.

Not so. Unless they choose Emacs, they won't be truly happy.

now they'll do nothing there..

[XO]

..as they'll all spend 4-6 hours per piece of hardware getting it to work.

*spent 4 hours last night getting my cd-rom to work right in linux*
*spent 4 hours last week getting my video card to work in linux*
*spent 2 hours last night getting my video card to work again after the fix to the cd-rom broke it*
*spent another 2 hours last night getting my sound hardware to work in linux*
*going to spend a couple hours tonight getting my NDAS hardware to work in linux*

*still don't have 3d accel working 100%, or sound*

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[smash]

*spent 4 hours last night getting my cd-rom to work right in linux* *spent 4 hours last week getting my video card to work in linux* *spent 2 hours last night getting my video card to work again after the fix to the cd-rom broke it* *spent another 2 hours last night getting my sound hardware to work in linux* *going to spend a couple hours tonight getting my NDAS hardware to work in linux*

Hey there mr stuck in 1996! In an office environment presuming the government was to purchase teh standard "cheap" intel type box (as most larger corps/governments i have worked for seem to), they'll have no issues - open source 3d video, common as shit sound driver, etc. CDROMs have not been a problem on any machine I have seen since 1996 when i started using Linux. I had more problems with CDROM drives in Windows 95/98 to be honest (some would only work if MSCDEX was loaded, in 16 bit slow as shit compatibility mode).

Or, if required, the government will spend a minuscule portion of it's prior licensing fees to pay a programmer to write a driver if required.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[RiffRafff]

Do you still have the box your computer came in?

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[jdp816]

Wait, so that $20 P3 box I bought didn't really work when I loaded Ubuntu on it? Oh, you see, I thought the sound card was detected even on the LiveCD, along with the video functioning (though no 3D accel on the CD) and the CD burner. Oh, and the network worked great, and FireFox asked nicely if I wanted to install the Flash plugin when I went to Google Video, and you know, that Just Worked too. When I installed it the *only* drivers I had to install were for accelerated 3D on the nVidia video card and the mobo sensors for fans and temp. The machine came with a Win98 COA on it, so I dropped it on so I could run a few games on it. It had *N*O* driver for the network card. Ooops. I had to burn off a CDs withe the drivers because Win98 doesn't support USB flash drives... And when that was working I had to find all the drivers for everything else in the machine. Don't forget that it has a sticker that says "Designed for Windows 98" on the front. Linux works better and more reliably on it than the OS it was designed to run.

Grow up, get a life, and stop making stupid unfounded accusations.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[petrus4]

*spent 4 hours last night getting my cd-rom to work right in linux*

This is extremely odd. Of all the hardware problems I've had/heard of with Linux, cd-rom drives aren't normally among them. Which distribution are you using?

Granted though, sound and 3d can be tricky at times. What hardware have you got?

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[finkployd]

Sounds to me like he is trying to get Slackware 2 running on a 386 with one of those "CDROM connected to the sound card" setups that were so popular then.

Finkployd

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[XO]

It's using Debian Etch. For some reason, it is turning on the "Lock Door" every time the door is closed, wether there's a disc in or not, wether it's mounted or not. When I have Linux running, I have to use the manual physical eject switch to open the door.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[XO]

"It works for me, so you must be a dumbass."

  And I'm supposed to be the one growing up?

  I've been using Linux off and on since 1992-ish, and the last computer that I had it working flawlessly on was an AMD 486dx4/100, after I hacked the kernel net driver to stop crashing several minutes into every session.

  Oops, last year, I had it running on a 486sx/33 where it was able to drive all the hardware properly, but since it was being used exclusively as a router, mail, web, ftp server, it really didn't need to.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[XO]

Using pretty standard parts, most of which are a few years old, and should be well supported.

The days of having to hack the kernel just to get booted aren't over, they've just redefined "hack the kernel".

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[jdp816]

When someone makes a point of having spent about 14 hours of configuration for simple things, but fails to point out WHAT particular brand/model that those things are that have the problems, then yes I feel they need to clarify. What CD-ROM on earth takes 4 hours of configuration? What video card? What sound card? *I* didn't call you a dumbass, I said grow up and get a life. Most people would have figured out something was terribly wrong with either the hardware or their troubleshooting long before the 14th hour rolled around.

If you've been around Linux for *15 years* your skills should be much better.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[XO]

I wasn't asking Slashdot for help, I know that the problem is because the whole Linux kernel/support software situation is exceptionally grim.

The only hardware that works right in Linux is stuff from years ago. And a lot of that doesn't, either.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[petrus4]

I would recommend Slackware, but I'd probably also get flamed for doing so. Other people here might recommend Ubuntu.

Personally I'd never use pure Debian, myself.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[XO]

Slackware, last I knew, had an installation system that wasn't much improved from it's humble beginnings as the original Linux distro, SLS. The one thing that I was sure I was able to do with Debian was install it via the Internet, and get it installed without actually starting X. I needed to not start X, because every live cd and distribution I'd tried to start, would crash the system instantly upon starting X.

(Geforce 6200)

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[petrus4]

Slackware, last I knew, had an installation system that wasn't much improved from it's humble beginnings as the original Linux distro, SLS.

Yeah, but one benefit is it doesn't need to go into X. ;-)

As far as X crashing goes...you'd need to know which server it's running. The generic first guess I think is normally fbdev (framebuffer) if the system can't work out what type of card you've got. Some of the live cds you've tried to use might be thinking that because you've got a GeForce 6200, the nv server that comes with X would work...and from memory at least once version of nv was known to have problems with the newer GeForce cards. I had issues myself trying to get X working with Slackware a bit back...I should have remembered that.

If you haven't already, try Ubuntu Edgy Eft...Ubuntu has the best hardware detection/setup I've seen for Linux. If that doesn't work, and if you still want to get something going, if you've got an onboard video card on your motherboard I'd suggest taking your seperate video card out of the system temporarily and seeing if the onboard video card has the same problems. That will either tell you if there's something potentially wrong with the card itself, or at the very least it will give you something that you can at least use when you want to use Linux.

You however do seem to have deeply strange hardware...I've honestly never heard of anyone else having problems as severe as what you're describing.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[XO]

It's really all pretty common stuff. VIA motherboard, commodity CD-RW, ... The NV server is automatically loaded by every distro that I tried to boot, and that doesn't work with the GF6200, as far as I can tell.

Framebuffer also doesn't work on it about 90% of the time.

Re:now they'll do nothing there..

[jdp816]

Like I posted originally, you make unfounded accusations. Just after Christmas I built a computer to use as a Linux workstation. P4 HT CPU, nVidia graphics, etc. Everything in it just works. Audio works with no help from me, CD/DVD burning works. If you can't get your stuff to work you have to question what you are using. I think you won't post what you are having trouble with because I'm sure you don't want to admit that what I'm assuming is true, and you're trolling. That said, I'm dropping this thread as it won't anywhere useful unless you really wanted to fix your problems and not just bitch about them.

BTW: your reply to my first comment is easily turned back at you: You couldn't get Linux running (so you claim) so anyone else who does must be liars because Linux hardware support is shitty. It's an empty argument either way you point it.

Correction

[wass]

A correction regarding citizenship granted to Cuban refugees. On another forum someone mentioned that they're actually granted a green card immediately, not citizenship, and still have to do some other residency requirements before full citizenship. However - the hoops to jump through and time requirements for a Cuban refugee to become citizen are much easier than someone from Mexico, for example. And that immediate green card offering of course is a huge benefit, lets Cubans work freely without being exploited, unlike other immigrants.

Re:Stallman is not a friend of USA

[flyingfsck]

Good gawd man, 'Cuba a big enemy' of the US? I think you have lost your sense of scale. Cuba is a bankrupt little island in the middle of shark infested waters. The only threat it poses to the US is that of a handful of unwanted bedraggled immigrants washing up on US shores every year.

Double Standard

[RexRhino]

When Microsoft does buisness with the Chinese government, it is "corporation is evil for selling OS to repressive government. When OSS does does the same thing, "oh, this is great, more countries using OSS".

Now, don't get me wrong, I think any person in any country should be free to use whatever software they want, and any company or organization should be free to give or sell anything they want to whoever they want.

But it is funny, that software that will be cheaper (and therefore leave the government with more resources for repressive activities), and better (to help them carry out their repressive activities with greater effectivness), is hailed as being "good"... while expensive, crappy software that can only hinder the repressive activities of a government is considered "bad".

Re:Double Standard

[petrus4]

When Microsoft does buisness with the Chinese government, it is "corporation is evil for selling OS to repressive government. When OSS does does the same thing, "oh, this is great, more countries using OSS".

Shhhhh. We're not supposed to point out logical inconsistencies like that. It makes Stallman's worshippers get very upset. You don't want that, do you?

So Are the Cubans?

[Stormy Dragon]

Oppressed as in speech or oppressed as in beer?

Hmm there goes the license

[nokarmahere]

So -- when/if the license is violated -- what forum does RMS litigate in? Just as a thought experiment -- suppose Hitler adopted FOSS to run the trains to Auschwitz and Dachau on time. Think RMS would be happy more Jews were being killed with FOSS that was more capable with proprietary software. Since Cuba and Venezuela are repressive countries -- anything that makes their governments more efficient makes it capable of oppressing more efficiently. What a win for RMS. What an asshole.

What a load of crap

[Overly Critical Guy]

So, how you liking the computer you typed that post on, huh? Is it pretty nice? THANKS, CAPITALISM.

How about the house or apartment you're in? Pretty nice, how it's all well-built with construction materials and designed by some house manufacturing company. THANKS, CAPITALISM.

And the car you drive to work or school? That thing has an advanced combustion engine built by friggin' robots! THANKS, CAPITALISM.

You like the clothes you're wearing? I bet they're pretty nice clothes. THANKS, CAPITALISM.

So, it appears that supposed "blind luck" and those "craptacular market failures" are doing pretty well, at least to better your life. There's always something really odd to me when someone uses a bunch of products produced from capitalism to criticize capitalism. The real reason lefties love communism is because it puts all the power into the government's hands. Instead of the people regulating their market as consumers, the government controls and regulates everything in your life as a gigantic, expensive nanny state.

Re:What a load of crap

[Phrogman]

Or perhaps, the Large Corporations pay for the election of the Politicians they prefer, suggest policy to them via various lobby groups, and thus get the laws that tend to favour them enacted much of the time. Then they control your opinions via the media which is entirely corporate controlled, and thus shape your preferences in ways you are undoubtedly unaware of since so much effective marketing is extremely subtle. We as tiny worker bees in the huge Capitalist system go about our days mostly working for one of those corporations or at least as part of the overall system and spend our money like good consumers so that those companies can make their profits and benefit those rich enough to invest in them or own them. The economic disparities continue to evolve and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Because its possible for a small percentage of the poor to claw their way to the rich side of society, we consider this a "good thing". We ignore the thousands of extremely poor people living on the street because they don't fit societies norms and we don't care to pay for their treatment or help. We ignore the fact that much fo the stuff we buy is made by effectively slave labour in third world countries.

As a result many westerners spend a substantial portion of our lives working off debts for items that while no doubt enjoyable to have, were not strictly necessary and are often more in the line of luxuries that we might not have chosen to purchase if we had been aware of the longterm cost when we did so.

For instance, I currently pay around $975 a month in rent. Thats a substantial part of the income my wife and I earn at the moment. When I visited Russia in 1980, I met a couple of women who shared an apartment in Leningrad. Sure, the apartment was not great, but it was actually comparable to the one I live in at the moment, minus the balcony. Their rent? 6 Roubles a month, which was about 1.6% of their income if I recall correctly.

Now, I am not arguing that Soviet Communism was a better system, but blindly supporting Consumerist Capitalism, and worse yet, associating that Capitalism closely with your concepts concerning Democracy is utterly rediculous. Freedom of speech, freedom to elect your officials, freedom to move and act in any way you want inside of your country's laws, etc does not automatically imply that THE ONE TRUE ONLY WAY IS CAPITALISM(tm). Its possible to have a bit of Socialism mixed in their quite effectively. Blindly supporting Captialism in all its glory (sarcasm in case you didn't get it) without questioning it, is just as pathetically mindless as supporting Communism without questioning it in any way.

Re:What a load of crap

[superiority]

I don't think he's actually criticising capitalism. Seems more like he's saying that the Western implementation of free markets and capitalism is less than ideal. You know, corporatism, intellectual property and the like. The "blind luck" of the western bloc during the cold war is that communist countries managed to get authoritarian incompetents into power.

Re:What a load of crap

[Znork]

"So, it appears that supposed "blind luck" and those "craptacular market failures" are doing pretty well, at least to better your life."

So, approximately how much better computers, how much cheaper and better clothes, how many more and better medicines, how much more art do you think we'd have if we actually had a more extensive real functional free market capitalism, eh?

Outcompeting a communist economy isnt a huge feat. The fact that it took the west the better part of a century to actually accomplish it, frequently even lagging behind, is a sad comment on the state of affairs in the western market.

"to criticize capitalism."

Mmm, I think you need to reread my comment. I'm not criticizing capitalism, I'm criticizing the large parts of western economy where we dont have anything like free market capitalism. When they both have the power of state granted monopolies, a five year plan from the Party representatives aint that different from the five year plan from the PharmaceuticalCorp board. Or a five year plan from Steve Ballmer.

Now, try to envision someone attempting to impose a five year plan on an opensource collection like GNU/Linux, say, GnuHorn to be released in five years with a database filesystem, etc, etc, marketingspeak, etc... and note the difference between 'rigid command economy' and 'free market evolution' within a very small slice of a sector in our economy.

Re:What a load of crap

[loqi]

So, how you liking the computer you typed that post on, huh? Is it pretty nice? THANKS, CAPITALISM.
How about the house or apartment you're in? Pretty nice, how it's all well-built with construction materials and designed by some house manufacturing company. THANKS, CAPITALISM.
And the car you drive to work or school? That thing has an advanced combustion engine built by friggin' robots! THANKS, CAPITALISM.

Just checking... is there any argument lurking in here, or are you just pretending that capitalism is wholly responsible for anything and everything inside a capitalist state?

You like the clothes you're wearing? I bet they're pretty nice clothes. THANKS, CAPITALISM.

"It's your great nation that makes our happy meals possible."

So, it appears that supposed "blind luck" and those "craptacular market failures" are doing pretty well, at least to better your life.

Some of them, yes. I guess that means... nothing really whatsoever?

The real reason lefties love communism is because it puts all the power into the government's hands.

Oh, here it is. The classic "pardon me while I assign arbitrary preferences and motives to my opponents" style of argument. So let's get ridiculous. I'm sure you're right, the reason "lefties" want to regulate the market is solely to consolidate power in the hands of corruptable/incompetent government, in the barely whispered hope that some power-mongering dictator will abuse/misuse that power and make everyone's life worse. Yup, you've really hit the nail on the head. I'm sure none of them advocate it as a lesser of two evils, or see fundamental problems with the tendency of capital to get extremely lumpy if left untended, or care about the difference between partially transparent and nearly opaque organizations, or think that it's unethical to trade with rampant human rights violators, or think that a truly free market can act as a Petri dish for evolving new, effective ways to dump your costs on others. No, my fellow lefties and I love government regulation of the market because the market is the One True Enemy, Responsible for All Evils. Only by indulging in our basest fantasy (a giant flowchart that plans out the entire economy, perfectly, all the time) do we see the true path to freedom: slavery.

So we advocate public spending on research on the hopes that the government will research enough Big Brother tech to finally live our lives for us, not because we think the market (especially in some countries) is often myopic. We want universal health care to drive up costs and drive down quality, so we can gum up the extraordinarily successful private system we've got right now. We want better minimum wage to make it harder to own a small business, because it obviously doesn't benefit the workers anyway.

Instead of the people regulating their market as consumers

Oh yeah, us consumers are really sharp when it comes to that. We buy brand-name, chemically-identical-at-a-higher-price aspirin, because we saw a picture of it on television (which, of course, cost money to produce). We're all smart enough to know that getting the best deal is enough to regulate a free market (unless we saw an ad, but... cut us some slack, it was on TV!), and don't have to worry about corporate ethics. The modern, savvy consumer: a model of informed, responsible participation in a free market.

Re:It's "collective property", so in a sense, *YES

[Overly Critical Guy]

This won't even be "collective property." The people won't be contributing to this. The government just wants to wrest power away from non-government entities and have even more control, and they will be controlling this as well, so even in that sense, it fails to capture the spirit of Open Source.

As for resource redistribution in the digital arena, that gets you into an argument of intellectual property rights. A skilled programmer who comes up with a kick-ass algorithm but then has it "appropriated" by a communist government would probably be just as pissed as a farmer. Either case is an example of someone's hard work being "taken" from them.

Re:Corrected Headline:

[Phrogman]

Yeah people keep pointing out how poor Cuba is - poorest country in the Western Hemisphere etc, etc. Its worth pointing out that Cuba *is* so poor because the US continues to enforce its trade embargos over Cuba, simply because the US has abbrogated to itself the right to interfere in neighbouring country's politics.

Is it worth pointing out to those policy makers in the US, that if they lifted the trade embargos against Cuba, the influx of new trade, exchange of information, and monetary flow that would inevitably occur would not only result in great improvements in the Cuban economy, but probably a much greater push towards democratic rights for the citizens of Cuba? Look at China, while of course its still under the heal of the most repressive government on earth, capitalism is flourishing there because its essential for the country's growth, and some small freedoms are worming their way into the people's lives. Not much mind you, but some. The exact same thing could be happening in Cuba, if only the US could get its head out of its arse, and realize that while it may wish to actively promote democracy, the way to do so is by encouraging other countries and by example, not by punitively punishing countries because they are different.

I think the whole corn ethenol thing is going to..

[daninaustin]

I think the whole corn ethanol craze will crash in the not so distant future. It's surviving because of the subsidies and mandates, but if left alone it would not survive. At some point the cost of the subsidies and the cost of other goods will force the government to stop wasting money.

Re:Corrected Headline:

[Romberg]

It's also worth pointing out that the rest of the world is free to invest in Cuba. US != rest of world.

No, I don't.

[jd]

He preaches the same rhetoric to everyone, equally, without bias or prejudice. I find it deliciously refreshing to find that a person who claims to believe in freedom and distribution is willing to advocate it to all peoples, rather than restricting the distribution of that freedom. To not have gone would have violated every ethical principle laid out in the GPL. THAT would have been ironic. Merely honoring his own beliefs, regardless of his opinion of the audience, is IMHO an extremely noble thing and deserves respect.

(This is not to say he dislines - or likes - communism, capitalism or any other ism. My point is that it doesn't matter. What matters is whether he honors the very standards he sets, and this shows that he does so. What's wrong with that?)

Re:No, I don't.

[petrus4]

I find it deliciously refreshing to find that a person who claims to believe in freedom and distribution is willing to advocate it to all peoples, rather than restricting the distribution of that freedom.

What...you mean like the way he wants to restrict it to Novell?

If he was really the being of light you're making him out to be, I'd be singing his praises too. Too bad he isn't, though.

Re:No, I don't.

[Americano]

He preaches the same rhetoric to everyone, equally, without bias or prejudice.

Where I come from, if you simply change the context of that statement a little, we call those people "whores" or "sluts", depending on whether or not they get paid.

I find it deliciously refreshing to find that a person who claims to believe in freedom and distribution is willing to advocate it to all peoples, rather than restricting the distribution of that freedom.

I find it jarringly dissonant to hear someone who preaches that restricting "freedoms" is evil and unethical also engage in congratulating a group of people for loving freedom, when they clearly do not love freedom. They like the "free as in beer" aspect of Open Source. It will help them run their government with less money, which will either enrich the ruling parties, or pay for more crackdowns & repressive strategies.

Praising people who regularly jail dissidents for loving freedom just makes my stomach turn. And I think Stallman has done himself, and OSS, a huge disservice by being seen as an enabler for these sorts of people. No, he can't restrict them from using the software, you're right. But he could have made a very public, very deliberate statement to the people inviting him, and published an open letter saying, "I value freedom, and so I cannot ethically bring myself to speak at your event, since it's clear to me that your governments do not value freedom." What a coup, both for OSS PR ("the software with a conscience." Allowing them to paint Microsoft as the enabler of oppressive regimes), and for the general cause of freedom. And all he would have had to do was write a polite, firm letter for release to major news outlets, and then sit on his ass at home and not go spout off to a bunch of goons & thugs about what great guys they are for loving freedom.

Re:No, I don't.

[Risen888]

Praising people who regularly jail dissidents for loving freedom just makes my stomach turn.

Yeah, mine too.

Re:No, I don't.

[Americano]

Your point would be well-made, except I wasn't talking about the Attorney General, President, Vice President, or anybody else. But you know, feel free to attack more straw men.

Re:No, I don't.

[Risen888]

Like hell you weren't. You were talking about "people who jail dissidents." No straw in those men.

Re:No, I don't.

[Americano]

Yes, I was talking, quite specifically, about how Stallman praising the governments of Venezuela & Cuba for loving freedom, and how I thought it was a crock of shit. If you can point me to a place where Stallman praises the US government for loving freedom, I'll gladly express my reservations about THAT statement there.

In the meantime, grind your axe elsewhere, troll.

Re:No, I don't.

[10101001 10101001]

He preaches the same rhetoric to everyone, equally, without bias or prejudice.

Where I come from, if you simply change the context of that statement a little, we call those people "whores" or "sluts", depending on whether or not they get paid.

Another word is Jesus. Another is capitalists. It's funny how they all can be put into the same group because of a lack of bias and prejudice.

Re:No, I don't.

[Americano]

Oh, so you have nothing else to offer? Well, thanks for participating!

Re:Ooh ah

[dbIII]

about the countries she's visited that are not friendly to the U.S. and tells us how their systems are better than the U.S. model,

The reality is they are in some ways and are not in others. We can learn things from other places if if they are not ideal places to live - paticularly about how to deal with government corruption and uncontrolled secret police. Whoever comes after Bush from either party has some cleaning up to do and can learn from other places - basket cases can show us what to avoid.

A Free Country Needs Free Software

[owidder]

See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/02 /free_as_in_cuba.html Bye, Oliver

Remember folks..

[d_jedi]

when you're programming open source, you're programming communism.

Capitalism didn't create squat

[Travoltus]

Necessity did. Capitalism is just the midwife. This world turned long before Capitalism came along, and will turn long after it is gone.

The fact that you have electricity and drinkable water is because of Government nanny state interference in capitalism.

Here's a news flash - you will never, as long as you live in your mother's basement, see real capitalism. Nor will you see it when you're kicked out. America is a mix of capitalism, socialism and communism, and if you don't like that, I suggest you move to Somalia and live out your dream life there. Nothing you say or do will ever, ever, ever bring real capitalism to America. It ain't gonna happen, son. No, really, it ain't gonna happen. Move, or drink the purple kool-aid. Those are your choices.

Re:Only one side of the argument

[jdp816]

"On the other hand, you couldn't care less about the actual employees who would have been paid pennies an hour to do all the hard work while the fat cat owners reaped virtually all the profits and benefits. By all means, let's cry for the wealthy and powerful land and business owners who had their property unfairly confiscated from them by communist governments, but never mind the people who actually worked did all the hard work for them while barely eking out enough pay to support their poverty level standard of living."
Why does everyone make it out that capitalists who runs companies make huge profits while those who work under them work for pennies? How many American companies pay above the minimum wage? If capitalism was all about being on top and making money while stamping on those below you and giving them a pittance then every American company would have a single millionaire at it's top and a bunch of peasants on the bottom. It must be too bad for those who draw the fat cat conclusion that the poor of the US are the most well off poor on the planet, and even have better quality of life than the middle or upper class of other nations. The comes our huge middle class who work for much higher wages than minimum. The fat cat capitalist theory is grounded in nothing but rhetoric.

Could we get him to...

[Brandybuck]

As long as he's there convincing people of stuff, do you think we could get him to convince them to renounce communism as well? Free Software is largely meaningless without a Free Society to use it in.

Re:It's "collective property", so in a sense, *YES

[WindBourne]

A skilled programmer who comes up with a kick-ass algorithm but then has it "appropriated" by a communist government would probably be just as pissed as a farmer.

Hmmmm. Please explain to me how having a gov. across the ocean "stealing" my work is worse than having a company such as MS stealing it and then having my gov. protect their right to do so? In fact, MS can then sue me and claim that they own the tech again backed up by our courts and govs?

It's not the poorest country, by far

[Nicolas MONNET]

Cuba went through rough times after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but recovered after having made changes to their food production. In any case, it's much better than those countries where the US spread "democracy" (ah aha ah good ones) in terms of security, education and health. In fact, in those areas, it's comparable to what the US middle clas. (Sure, the top 1% in the US can afford top of the line medical service, send their kids to expensive universities, and live in gated communities)

Thank you

[petrus4]

I've often observed that the archetypical Slashbot is a brighter shade of red than the average radish; unfortunately, they are also normally extremely reluctant to admit such.

I have no real problem with people being Commies if that's what turns them on, but get out of the closet, guys. If you are demonstrably and visibly Communist, have the courage to admit it.

I probably have a few socialist tendencies left myself, but I've moved a lot further towards the right in recent years, and ironically it's been the behaviour of groups like the FSF that has caused most of that. They've made me realise that in reality, leftist collectivism of the type that FOSS is generally associated with is just another form of centralised authoritarianism...the FSF have set themselves up as the controllers of a mountain of code, and they expect to be able to grant or deny access to that code to people based on whether or not you're doing something that they don't like. Hence, I might as well be right wing...because at least the right are direct about their tyranny. Stallman is a tyrant who constantly tries to make out that he is the opposite...and I'm very, very sick of that.

Stallman isn't an anarchist...he isn't anything remotely close, and while a lot of other people might have been fooled on that score, I never have been. The FSF is a centralised heirarchy with leaders and formalised philosophies and all the other usual monolithic crap, and it issues decrees and in other ways tries to behave as much like a sovereign government as it can. That is not anarchy...it's the exact type of system that real anarchists throughout history have wanted to abolish.

If anyone here is truly dumb enough to believe that FOSS has anything to do with genuine anarchism, go to debian.org and study the beurecratic nightmare that is their "policy" sometime...then come back and try telling me that that is decentralised. Ditto for Ubuntu...you don't need to look very far through their site to start finding references to the word "governance" at all.

Re:It's "collective property", so in a sense, *YES

[gfxguy]

Interesting take. Thanks.

Cuba's switching to open source?

[argStyopa]

Sweet, now BOTH computers will run linux!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Mod Parent Down

[10101001 10101001]

Not sure I entirely understand how Stallman isn't getting slagged for this, after Google got so roundly derided about its decisions to filter results in the China market...

Aren't you answering your own question? Google decided to *filter results in the China market*. Stallman didn't change the GPL to comply with Cuba's laws. Stallman is continuing to expound the same sorts of beliefs he's always expressed. The fact that Stallman isn't going out of his way to be champion to fight *all* the bad things that happens in the world is mainly a choice by him, realizing that one can't find everything bad in the world at the same time as pointing out the evil of copyright and be seen as a serious pusher of the evil of copyright--you become too deluted. One might as well complain that the NRA doesn't take up free speech cases enough or that the ALCU doesn't do enough when it comes to the environment. Stallman is consistently pushing his message about the need for free software. The problem with Google was their inconsistent of "do no evil" while *actively helping* China to block free speech.

Re:Mod Parent Down

[Americano]

Aren't you answering your own question? Google decided to *filter results in the China market*.

No, I'm not answering my own question. Google was seen as complicit in censoring free speech in the China market by agreeing to expand into China, and then agreeing to filter search results. I think that *is* a bad thing, for the record. What I don't understand is why Stallman is being given a "Yay Open Source!" free pass on publicly congratulating & praising these repressive, often-times brutal regimes, who are looking for cheaper and more robust ways to run their prisons and track dissidents -- remember, read the article, it talks about the GOVERNMENTS of Cuba & Venezuela. This is not some great public-spirited gesture by Castro to put a PC in every home. So what I fail to see is how enabling repression ("Better, faster, more robust systems to run your prisons! Beowulf Clusters to track your dissidents' every move!") results in MORE freedom for the citizens of Cuba & Venezuela.

The fact that Stallman isn't going out of his way to be champion to fight *all* the bad things that happens in the world is mainly a choice by him, realizing that one can't find everything bad in the world at the same time.

I'm not asking him to cure the sick, give money to the poor, clothe the naked, and feed the hungry. I'm simply asking him to be consistent on his message that freedom is good, and I invite him to say so to the government of Cuba & Venezuela. Not congratulate them for valuing freedom, which they clearly do not.

This is not "Yays! Linuxes for the Peoples!" This is "Oh nos! Linuxes for your gulags, re-education centers, and government ministries!" The money the government saved will only be plowed right back into the pockets of the governors, or into finding new & creative ways to persecute dissidents & clamp down on "dangerous" freedoms. Or did you really think that the students at the state-run, state-controlled universities will be allowed complete freedom to set up a Cuban version of MySpace where dissidents can meet, plan, and disseminate their ideas?

And, also for the record, is there a single person here on Slashdot who really believes that the governments of Cuba & Venezuela would bat an eyelash about violating the spirit, letter, sanctity, and pure white virginity of the GPL if they thought it would somehow benefit them and give them greater control?

Re:Mod Parent Down

[10101001 10101001]

Google was seen as complicit in censoring free speech in the China market by

• agreeing to expand into China

No.

• and then agreeing to filter search results.

Yes. Google, had it simply expanded into China, would indeed be a means to allow the Chinese government to further its ends of oppressing people. At the same time, Google, had it simply expanded into China, would have provided a constant battleground upon which Google would inherently, even if constantly being firewalled by China, provide a means of increase the freedoms of the people. In the end, Google would have been an unbias tool that could have been for good or evil, but the mere fact that it existed in China would have been a net good because it was a clear avenue of increasing freedom for those on the inside and outside willing to proxy content. The reason Google received so much flak is because by going along with China's censorship, they've greatly squashed those enhanced freedoms and are instead merely a tool of the Chinese government to oppress. In only the minimal way is that an improvement (in that the internet is so flexible that google's/china's blacklist will never keep up fully, so google might still do some good).

Having said all that, I have to say I'm a bit annoyed with the rest of your post. Stallman isn't the champion of "open software". He's the champion of "free software". He doesn't support the existance of free software because it's "more robust" (hell, look at him repeatedly pushing to use outdated 3D cards or questionable quality free software (in comparison to commercial softwware available)). He supports it because of the increased freedom. And really, you're right, Cuba could fully ignore the GPL.

If they were never going to contribute back to the free software community anyways, then nothing Stallman said really matters. Ironically enough, it's precisely the collaboration and "freedom" that's the reason that "open software" is supposed to be "more robust", so if Cuba isn't willing to collaborate, then logically going "open software" would be *equally or less* robust than commercial software (before you try to argue that open source means "more eyes", that theory holds true when there's "more eyes" of the field; truthfully, I don't think there's an international gulag and dissenter tracking collaboration network; why help other evil regimes when you think your evil regime does it best?).

And no, using free software doesn't mean everyone gets a PC (just like how the US hasn't given everyone PCs, for that matter). Nor is free software some code word for "freedom of speech", so Cuba using free software won't magically change whatever firewall rules they have. But supporting free software is itself a good, at least as far as Stallman is concerned. The only really bad thing to say about Stallman in this instance is that, given the people involved, it might have been wise to hold off commenting for a while that they actually follow through with what free software means. But then again, Stallman hasn't been one to hold off commenting on anything of the sort. If he did so, then the free software movement would certainly be nowhere where it is today.

Stallman is trying to be optimistic about someone saying they support free software. That' pretty consistent.

Re:Hitler was NOT a vegetarian or an "animal lover

[khallow]

Glancing around, it looks like myths that Hitler built up around himself.

Things are far worse than they were in 1998

[dbIII]

Your argument might have made some sense back in '98,

Great - another MS Windows would be great if everyone used the fantastic hidden features post.

The reality is most MS Windows systems are a liablity on a network - Vista or Longhorn (the upcoming professional version) may change this - but for now things are far far worse than they were in 1998.

How did he go to Cuba?

[Tracy Reed]

How did Stallman go to Cuba without running afoul of the embargo? Did he get some sort of special permission from the State Department or is he just running the risk of being thrown in jail?

Re:Concentration of power!

[biscon]

Sorry to disappoint you, but guns are illegal like in most of Europe and we already have way to many rich senior citizens.
Don't worry our social program is very well funded, thats why I pay half of what I earn in
taxes (and rich people pay even more, although they usually find a way to dodge it).
Anyway im not saying our way is the right, but it has "worked" for many years and we are not exactly
a poor country. (oh and we have no natural resources btw).

It's not about socialism, it's about sanity

[Giorgio Maone]

While I agree that free software fits well with marxism (but they're not the same and the former doesn't imply the latter), the most important alleged reason for the switch is something that every government (other than U.S.?) and every business/individual (U.S. citizens included) should focus:

Cuban officials, ever focused on U.S. threats, also see it as a matter of national security.

We're not talking about Linux being less prone to viruses than Windows, here. It's a deeper flaw:

Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes raised suspicions about Microsoft's cooperation with U.S. military

Suspicions?

Stallman also warned that proprietary software is a security threat because without being able to examine the code, users can't know what it's doing or what "backdoor" holes developers might have left open for future entry. "A private program is never trustworthy," he said.

And he's damn right. It scares the hell out of me how many people, and even governments, are blindly putting their lives in the hands of one single corporation which even boasts its ties with an espionage agency.

Socialism works though.

[master_p]

Communism may not work, but socialism, in the form of socio-democracy applied in countries like Sweden or Germany, works fine.

I do not understand why we have to go from one extreme to the other (from extreme capitalism to communism). The middle ground is usually the best way.

Re:Socialism works though.

[that this is not und]

socialism, in the form of socio-democracy applied in countries like Sweden or Germany

Does it work, or should I say, is it working? How will it work as the world's economy continues to globalize? If I walked up to and interviewed 100 non-white citizens in Sweden or Germany, would they say 'everything is working fine'?

Re:Socialism works though.

[slysithesuperspy]

I dunno how you define "works". And, middle ground fallacy.

Re:Socialism works though.

[rho]

but socialism, in the form of socio-democracy applied in countries like Sweden or Germany, works fine.

It works non-badly. Neither of them have much in the way of economic growth on average. Not that they're doing poorly, but they're no great shakes when compared to a more capitalistic society such as the US.

But it's important to point out that these countries are not operating on a level playing field. They spend a tiny fraction of their GDP on defense, while the US spends somewhere around 5%. Considering the US has a GDP that is larger, and spends more as a percentage, and the fact that the US expends a lot of those defense dollars in support of foreign nations, Sweden and Germany are getting a free ride. They have enough of a military to send to various peace-keeping operations, and could probably mount a minor defense of their own countries, but for the most part they rely on US military might, either explicitly or implicitly.

Were the US to pull out of all foreign bases and reduce our forces to only that which is required to defend our borders and territories, not only would incidents like Bosnia be significantly more catastrophic, there would be quite an economic pinch felt by nations that formerly hosted our military.

"Socialism" is a good personal trait, but as a political scheme it leaves something to be desired.

Re:Socialism works though.

[An Onerous Coward]

How about the "appeal to authority" fallacy? You're damning an entire approach to government, and all you have to offer is one liberterian economist's say-so.

Mises' main premise is that socialism cannot work because it is impossible for a socialist government to get all the information needed to make correct economic decisions. That's an important consideration, but hardly an ironclad law. First, socialism doesn't necessarily require a top-down, command-and-control approach to decision making. Second, there are a litany of examples of markets coming to obviously wrongheaded decisions. Finally, is socialism really any worse than the bastardized capitalism we have in the U.S., where corporations go running for government handouts and legislation to protect themselves from their own mistakes?

I'll make you a deal. I'll pay more attention to people like Mises, Hayek, and Friedman, if you'll brush up on Stiglitz, Keynes, and Krugman. But if your entire argument is "I've got a highly influential economist who says all of socialism is broken," then I leave you to your pseudointellectual name-dropping.

Re:Socialism works though.

[An Onerous Coward]

If the U.S. were to do as you suggest, I'm sure that the "freeloading" countries would have to increase their military expenditures somewhat. But I'm doubtful that they'd be sorry to see us do it. For one thing, the military actions of the United States often make the world more dangerous, not less. For example, I don't see any action on our parts to get rid of our ten-thousand warhead nuclear arsenal, despite our promise to do so when we ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This calls into question the very premise of the treaty, and the questions grow louder when we provide technical support to countries like India, which possess the bomb in violation of the treaty.

More examples: in the eighties, the U.S. government decided that the Sandinistas of Nicaragua were puppets of the Soviets, and sought to overthrow them by funding the Contras. Tens of thousands dead because of Reagan and the domino theory. But at least we kept a foreign nation from choosing Communism-lite.

Then we come to our interdictions in the Middle East. Make no mistake, our actions there have primarily been targeted at ensuring access to oil for ourselves and (to a lesser extent) our allies. Have they made the world a safer place? Certainly more people have died in Iraq because of our meddling (from the first Gulf War, to the disastrous embargo, to our ill-conceived invasion in 2003) than Saddam could have possibly killed directly. Our invasion of Iraq on a flimsy pretense of WMDs has done nothing but provide encouragement to countries like Iran and North Korea in their pursuit of nuclear weapons. The message is loud and clear: If you don't have nukes, we'll pretend you do and invade. If you do have nukes, we'll negotiate. So get them while we're distracted with this Iraqi quagmire.

How much of these supposedly necessary military expenditures, which you see as properly shouldered by foreign governments, are actually necessary only as a result of our own extreme militarization? We spend as much on our military as the rest of the world combined, which forces other nations to spend more to protect their own interests, and our ham-handed, self-interested interventions have made the world less stable and less safe, requiring still more expenditures.

Nothing is perfect in this world, but as far as I can tell, socialist democracies do a better job of giving their people what they want. Capitalistic democracies seem to do better at giving the business elite what they want.

Re:Socialism works though.

[rho]

For one thing, the military actions of the United States often make the world more dangerous, not less. For example, I don't see any action on our parts to get rid of our ten-thousand warhead nuclear arsenal, despite our promise to do so when we ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This calls into question the very premise of the treaty, and the questions grow louder when we provide technical support to countries like India, which possess the bomb in violation of the treaty.

That's a question of practicality, not safety. Unilateral disarmament is not in the U.S.'s interests. As for whether we make the world more dangerous rather than less, the last time we left Europe more or less alone they started two World Wars. Your argument is not compelling.

More examples: in the eighties, the U.S. government decided that the Sandinistas of Nicaragua were puppets of the Soviets, and sought to overthrow them by funding the Contras. Tens of thousands dead because of Reagan and the domino theory. But at least we kept a foreign nation from choosing Communism-lite.

You're assuming that Communism would not have killed as many or more. The history of the Soviet Union tells us that they certainly could have. But why you blame this solely on the U.S. and not on the Soviets, who were also meddling, tells me a lot about your motivations.

Then we come to our interdictions in the Middle East. Make no mistake, our actions there have primarily been targeted at ensuring access to oil for ourselves and (to a lesser extent) our allies.

You say that as if it's a big surprise. NOBODY would care about the Middle East except for its resources. This is not brain surgery. Until we can harness the energy of the stupid, oil is a major component in ensuring that the free world has copious time to dither about foreign policy instead of grubbing in the dirt for their next meal.

Certainly more people have died in Iraq because of our meddling (from the first Gulf War, to the disastrous embargo, to our ill-conceived invasion in 2003) than Saddam could have possibly killed directly.

You've marked yourself as an uncritical thinker, and have slandered Saddam with a lack of imagination. That guy had an industrial people-shredder--I think he could have managed to trump our (unintentional) civilian death toll with an (intentional) civilian death toll. I stopped reading your post right about here.

Look, I know what you're doing. You don't like capitalism, and you don't like America. At least you don't like the America we have now, nor the America we had 20 years ago, nor the America of 50 years ago. I'm sure you tell yourself that you love the America that could be, but usually when I press people like yourself it turns out that the America that could be is an awful lot like the Canada or Sweden of today. I say if that's what you're looking for, emigrate. You're free to do that in America, unlike the Soviet society of not-that-long-ago. We can do this dance for days--you say something one-sided and naive, and I point it out--but let's cut to the chase. You will not be happy until America is subservient to the "international community", and we endure some kind of pain and/or punishment to atone for past sins, real or imagined. That's fine. I suggest that if you think this is such a great idea that you sell that rather than the baby-logic you're offering now. Ideologues aren't convinced by it, and intelligent people see through your rhetorical games.

Re:Socialism works though.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I say if that's what you're looking for, emigrate. You're free to do that in America,

And he is just as much free to advocate for change in America, despite your terribly self-serving attempt to stick him in a philosophical box of your delusion. If you don't like the fact that he can advocate for change then perhaps you should emigrate to a country where that's not allowed.

Re:Socialism works though.

[rho]

Never said he couldn't advocate for change. I said he shouldn't use such obvious tricks as they're unconvincing. In fact I encouraged him to advocate truthfully rather than hide his opinions in sham intellectualism. You're not really adept at this reading thing, are you?

Re:Socialism works though.

[rho]

A little military support from each country goes a long way...

You let me know how well that multi-language, multi-cultural piecemeal army works out when it actually happens.

Re:Socialism works though.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Never said he couldn't advocate for change.

And I never said that you said he couldn't advocate for change. So what's your point?

Re:Socialism works though.

[An Onerous Coward]

I didn't suggest "unilateral disarmament". I suggested nuclear disarmament, which is an obligation we have under the NNPT (the same treaty we're using to brow-beat Iran). By violating the treaty ourselves, we undermine the goals of the treaty, and pave the way for a world full of nuclear nations with itchy trigger fingers. How we will be safer in such a world, I leave to you to explain.

As we reduce our own nuclear stockpile (and given the detterent power of the four or five nukes possessed by North Korea, we certainly don't need 10,000 for our own defense) we would simultaneously be using diplomatic and even military measures to keep other nations in compliance. Our abiding by the terms of the NNPT will make it harder for others not to abide by those terms, and put some moral force behind whatever actions we take to enforce it on others. Your hand-waving to the contrary, disarmament is very much in our own best interests.

As for whether we make the world more dangerous rather than less, the last time we left Europe more or less alone they started two World Wars. Your argument is not compelling.

Yeah, because Europe today is exactly the same as Europe of 100 years ago, and the United States' foreign policy today is exactly the same as it was 100 years ago. You're basically saying, "Look at all the wars we didn't start! It's non-responses like this that make me wonder if you even believe your own words.

Regarding Nicaragua: The United States funded a paramilitary force whose objective was the overthrow of the Sandinistas, and whose actions frequently qualified as "terrorism." The government being overthrown, while of a socialist flavor, did not seek to align itself with the Soviet Union or implement one-party rule, and held democratic elections.* The evidence for similar Soviet meddling is sparse, and mostly based on the claims of an important Soviet defector named Vasili Mitrokhin. Our support for the Somoza regime (basically a family of election-rigging dictators) was unconscionable, and it's pretty clear that the Sandistas had far more popular support and democratic character than the regime they overthrew. But U.S. foriegn policy is such that a dictator who does what we say is superior to an electorate that doesn't.

Regarding Saddam: while the people shredder may or may not have existed (and your uncritical acceptance of it certainly marks you as being as gullible as myself), nobody is denying that Saddam's rule was brutal and murderous. But I stand by my assertion that more Iraqis are dying right now than would have if we'd continued our policy of containment towards Hussein. His estimated body count ranges from 300,000-1,000,000** over the course of twenty years. Meanwhile, the Lancet report estimates 600,000 deaths arising after our invasion four years ago. So even without taking into account casualties from the first Gulf War or from the subsequent embargo, we're already approaching body count parity.

Of course, nobody actually wanted to see a civil war break out. It's just that our fearless leaders in the White House were so obsessed with making the invasion a reality, that they didn't listen to anyone who warned that it might be a possibility.

It must be comforting to the Iraqis to know that they're dying for freedom now.

I recognize your kind, too. You're simply an unapologetic proponent of what they call "American Exceptionalism". It's the simple belief that the United States is uniquely good in its character. When expressed as a foreign policy, it amounts to the claim that the U.S. is always noble in its intentions and goals, and usually laudable in its implementation.

The hallmarks of this ideology include a belief that it is downright heretical to judge the actions of the United States by any norms of international conduct, much less be held accountable to such norms. No matter that we happily use

Re:Socialism works though.

[An Onerous Coward]

What "obvious tricks" did I use? When did I ever hide my true opinions about anything? I said the Iraqi occupation was harming our own interests, and I believe that. I said that keeping a huge nuclear stockpile is harming our own interests, and I believe that. I said that ratcheting down our military expenditures might make the world safer, and I believe that. I said that our unwillingness to let other countries choose to decide for themselves whether to experiment with socialism has been harmful to ourselves and to other countries, and I believe that as well.

But you seem to think you know my "real agenda." In your mind, I really object to these things in order to weaken the United States, to give "our enemies" leverage to take over the United States and turn it into a workers' paradise. No? Then what are these "real ideas" that I'm hiding? That capitalism is pure evil and communism is the ideal? Why would I use sham intellectualism to mask opinions I don't actually hold?

Now back off, or I'll be forced to stoop to your level and accuse you of secretly wanting to bear Sam Walton's love child.

Minor Quibble

[YetAnotherBob]

The poster places Cuba in North America. It's a Carribean Island. Historicly, Ethnicly and Politically it's part of Latin America (generally Identified with South America).

Re:Only one side of the argument

[jdp816]

You still fail to counteract my point. The poor of the US are much better off than the poor or middle class of other nations, and even the upper class of a few places. The fat cats are not living the high life while the masses suffer in poverty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_ States

There may be the ultra rich on top, but the poor aren't doing bad, and I'm one of them. We own a house, have two vehicles, zero credit debt, and we're under 30 and make well UNDER the median income for our age and household. Anyone who tries to tell me how the "poor" of the US are doing are talking about me and in general they are wrong. The ultra rich in the US aren't the fat cats of capitalism that people talk about because the companies they run don't have employees working for pennies. Just how poor are all those people who work at MS for Bill Gates, eh? How poor are the people at Harpo who work for Oprah? Just because there is a wealthy person at the top, it doesn't automatically follow that those who work for them are poor.

Castro does not like rivals.

[twitter]

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.

Using the fruits of free markets by Communists is not really unusual. Tyrants pillage whatever they can. The Soviet Union routinely coppied western designs, which you could call an adoption of free market solutions. I'm looking at this as more of a case of Castro wanting to be the Bill Gates of Cuba than him wanting to be RMS.

What's unusual is the willingness of people in supposedly free markets to surrender control of their information by using non free software. Government protection and promotion of non free software, even when combined with market manipulation by M$, does not really explain the continued dominance of non free software. Free software offers all classes of computer owners both lower costs through competition of suppliers and more control of their work. It is surprising that companies like Verizon and Viacomm do not follow the lead of companies like IBM, Chrysler and Lowes. It's even more surprising that more individuals have not sought out free software. In the case of a big dumb company, bad decisions can be forced from above.

Things are fortunately changing. As Vista shows, there's also a performance hit to slavery. This performance difference may finally create enough free software demand to loosen M$'s vendor lock and things will be downhill from there.

Gentoo? Really should be Ubuntu

[smchris]

I mean, with Cuba's decades of involvement in Africa.

Sorry, just popped into my head. I'm not sure _how_ sarcastically I mean it myself because they have countered the cold war soldiers with some good done by their physician outreach.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

US Emabargo and US based MS

[Technician]

Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows

Since the US forbids any export from the US to Cuba due to the embargo, I can easly see the drive for another OS.

Re:Corrected Headline:

[Dutch Gun]

When the US trades with or invests in some third world country, we're accused of exploitation. When we have nothing to do with a country (ala trade embargo), we're accused of interfering with their economic development.

Note - I actually agree with you. The embargo is a stupid and dated idea. At this point, though, the US might as well wait for Castro to croak. It would be a good time to offer an olive branch without the US government appearing as waffling on its pro-democracy commitments around the world (and hopefully soothing the Cuban population of the US a bit, which is vehemently anti-Castro).

Re:Corrected Headline:

[GaryPatterson]

I tend to agree that the embargo over Cuba is counter-productive, as greater access to goods and services from the US would undermine the control held by the local government. Well, that's my opinion anyway.

There is a problem with the "no embargo for anyone" model though. South Africa was isolated due to its racist policies, and after some time this had the effect of a major shift there. While the country is no paradise, it has improved greatly.

So I'm left with the question: how can we tell when to embargo, and when not to embargo?

I wish I had an answer.

Re:Corrected Headline:

[Anonymous Coward]

Stallman was able to visit Cuba because the US embargo is laughably unenforceable. The real reason why Cuba is poor is because, like some of his predecessors, Castro owns everything, Cubans own nothing, and the benefits of what Castro owns go back to Castro and not his serfs. And no, Castro is not the reason why Cuba has the highest literacy and lowest infant mortality rates in Latin America. Cuba was way ahead of the rest of Latin America before Castro took power.

The true irony

[Marcos Eliziario]

If Microsoft were a soviet state-owned company, and most of the world were communist by now, Linus would have been probably incarcerated.
People's General Prosecutor - So, Linus, you say you're not a revisionist, but at the same time, you're telling me that you could build an operating system more efficient and secure than "People's Windows". So, following your reasoning, comrade Bill Gates is really a people's traitor? linus - No I mean that .... People's General Prosecutor - Shut up you traitor! You are only allowed to answer the questions this court makes to you! We won't allow you to transform this court in a circus!
Magistrate! The court has just seen the attitude of this man that tried to bring doubt and delay the advancement of computer science in the Soviet State. His actions clearly indicate that he has been a victim of brain wash by foreign spies working for foreign powers.
He tried to bring FUD over a outstanding product of proletarian computer science, and therefore he is guilt of contra-revolutionary activities.
For his own good, we demand this court to send him to Siberia for reeducation for no less than 20 years. We also recommend that during his reeducation he should be allowed to work as a way to speed up his reeducation.

That's a shame.

[gadders]

Much as I like open source software and all, it's a shame that Stallman decided that the ends justifies the means and has reached out to oppressive regimes to push his free software agenda.

And I realise you're that this will be a case of Godwin's law, but would he have pushed free software to Nazi Germany? And yes, I realise this is very hypothetical.

Bravo, bravo, bravo!

[jotaeleemeese]

You just ignore the little elephant in the room: there is no recognition of copyright or intellectual property in socialist or communist countries.

The GPL is based precisely in copyright, and since you don;t care to read what the GPL is all about, in many places it is fully documented that people areencouraged to make shitloads of money using GPLed software at the heart of their bussiness model.

But you can't ignore the facts and ejaculate as much propaganda as you want, I am sure that will make you feel better.

No, it does not.

[jotaeleemeese]

You want to have your cake and eat it matey.

Socialist countries do not recognize copyrights and intellectual property.

Copyright granted to individuals or private organizations is abhorrent to a socialist or communist state/

You are chosing to ignore the flipping obvious: if the GPL is based in capitalistic institutions like copyright and Intellectual property it is impossible to equate it in any sensible way with a socialized organization of any kind, the comparision is particularly inept when using communist or socialist states as a point of reference or allegory.

What a moron.

[jotaeleemeese]

IP laws, as you ingonratnly call them, are the foundation of the GPL licensing model.

Stop spinning things matey, the more you defend your baseless argument the more uninformed you look.

Don't tell this to the Brits....

[jotaeleemeese]

.... but they teach in school that South America starts in Mexico... I, as a humble citizen of the land of the snaked and the cactus, laugh at it quite often.

They obviously haven deciphered the NAFTA moniker....

Bullshit.

[jotaeleemeese]

The US enforces its ludicrous embargo in more sinister ways than just "nothing to do with a country".

Companies with offices elsewhere can't make bussiness in the US if they trade with Cuba, executives of companies dealing with Cuba have been detained in the US for questioning even if they have no bussiness in the US, citiznes from other countries, for which the US has no jurisdiction, are stopped to enter the US if they have a visa from Cuba stamped on their passport.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg, the only countries that can about get away with things were sworn US enemies or nemesis (like China, who is getting closer to Cuba by the day) or Mexico, because we can (the US is not going to piss off one of its biggest bussiness partners just because Mexico is the best friend Cuba has had on the Western hemisphere).

That is untrue.

[jotaeleemeese]

There are many examples of tribal societites that can't be described in those terms.

Maybe when humans associate in big conglomerates certain valued of solidarity dissapear, but it is not in our genese to be egoistic motherfuckers.

Measure your words buddy.

[jotaeleemeese]

Repressive regime? Yes.

Murderous? Show us your numbers and your sources.

Re:Measure your words buddy.

[kwiqsilver]

Here's one:
http://www.lanuevacuba.com/archivo/alvaro-vargas-l losa-17eng.htm

The national hero tortured and killed anybody who opposed Fidel.

Read any Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch report on Cuba. Many of their executions are of "criminals" but when self expression and questioning the government are crimes, lots of those executed criminals should be considered murder victims.

Yes, because we all know .....

[jotaeleemeese]

... it is almost impossible to pirate software.

We all know all those copies of software, in uncountable countries around the world, sold on street stalls, are all the real deal.

Substantial difference.

[jotaeleemeese]

When MS (or any other company for that matter) deals with repressive regimes, they profit from it.

By sharing knowledge (what is what FOSS is all about) nobody is profiting, Cubans are perfectly capable to do their own development and deployments, Red Hat or Novell are not going to go there any time soon.

And just for your information, there is no embargo when it comes to certain things, educational and cultural cooperation being one of them, which I think is what FOSS is all about (not a product, but technological education and cooperation).

I do not know how much of their budget Cubans use for repressive activities. What I know is that they devote a substantial amount to health and education (health standards are comparable to those of rich, developped countries, embargo and all), so the hope would be that some of the money saved by using FOSS would also go to those activities.

Re:Substantial difference.

[RexRhino]

What I know is that they devote a substantial amount to health and education (health standards are comparable to those of rich, developped countries, embargo and all)

How do you know this? Where are you getting your information? Since the Cuban government doesn't allow any foreigners to collect health statistics, and there isn't any sort of multi-party democracy where government statistics would be under scrutiny by opposing political parties, you have to accept that they spend a substantial amount on health and education purely on faith. Those with a soft spot in their heart for Communist dictatorship usually take the Cuban government's word on the issue, while others tend to be skeptical.

Much like that supermodel Helena Houdova who was arrested for taking pictures of homeless kids in Cuba, which is considered counter-revolutionary terrorism because "Cuba doesn't have homeless children", there is a certain suspention of disbelief that socialists are willing to have when it comes to the desperate poverty in Cuba. ( http://www.radio.cz/en/article/75411 )

Although, given that Cuba openly admits to flying in top doctors and high tech equipment to treat Castro, I don't dispute that the Cuban upper-class have access to advanced western-style medical treatment... but I don't think they are flying in top surgeons from Spain and Swizterland to treat the average guy on the street.

But I am getting off topic: If you greatly help a repressive regime, for no profit, that is good? But make a profit and that same act is suddently, magicly transformed into an evil act? Even when it helps the repressive regime LESS than the no-profit act? Geez, no wonder socialism is such a messed up ideology! You evaluate the morality of acts based on their motive, as opposed to the outcome.

And all that aside, I think that the U.S. should drop the embargo on Cuba. The U.S. has been Castro's greatest ally (even more so now than when Castro was being funded by the CIA before he switched sides to the Soviets)... Castro can blame all the poverty caused by incompetent mismanagement and flawed central planning, and blame it on the "evil capitalists". It gives the Cuban government a perfect scapegoat. It also gets Cubans to rally around Castro (as the people of any soveriegn nation resent interference by foriegn governments)... Had the U.S. ended the embargo 30 years ago, Castro would have probably gone the way of Pol Pot, or Nicolae Ceausescu. Castro, from his beginings as an apolitical revolutionary for hire, to nowadays being idolized by reactionaries as a sort of proxy act of token anti-Americanism, is 100% the creation of idiotic American foreign policy.

Show us who is selling FOSS to Cuba.

[jotaeleemeese]

Then we can compare equal with equal.

Stallman is promoting freedom in a country that has precious little of it.

If you can't see why that is a good thing, we have very little else to talk about regarding this topic.

It is still not right in 2007

[dbIII]

You are repeating things becuase you have not got the point. There are design flaws in MS Windows that have directly led to the net being a dangerous swamp as far as security is concerned - and that is today and not in 1998. Even the bizzare SF situation of getting a virus by displaying an image has occured due to one of many bad design decisions, along with things just connecting to listening ports that never should be exposed on a network and then getting code executed. Firewall software is there because the system does not meet the standard - which also applies with antivirus software and spyware removal software. Don't take it from me - look at the archives of any sysadmin mailing list for people that work with MS Windows systems or consider where all that spam is coming from and how that virus gets sent to your mail server. I can only keep a few MS Windows systems secure by putting them under the adult supervison of other systems to keep anything nasty from the net from coming in and clobbering them - lucky so far, and I do mean lucky, someone has to be hit first with the next unidentified threat - but you would not believe how much of a mess other systems I've been called in to fix are. Seeing the Bagle worm get Win2k PCs to run all the printers in a small office until they ran out of paper was a sight - and that was an environment with up to date virus definitions on every PC.