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Political Leaning and Free Software
00_NOP writes "HateMyTory is the world's first political rating site and occasionally gets blasted or promoted by British bloggers on either side of the political spectrum. But here's something even more intriguing: when the right come visiting they hate the site but they are disproportionately likely to be users of free software, whether that is just Firefox on top of their Windows box, or all the way with some Linux distro. But when the left rally to the cause they are more likely than not to be proprietary software users, albeit with a big bias towards Apple. If Microsoft's defenders think free software is the road to socialism, why don't the left seem to agree? As a leftie, and a free software advocate, I find this pretty puzzling."
What I found inspiring about the talk by a leading Conservative MP was that it emphasised not so much the savings of going Open Source, but that it embraced the idealogogy as a philosophy to run an entire government. I am not a Conservative, but this talk inspired my faith in UK politics as a whole.
By most of the worlds standards of political 'left' and 'right', the US is Far far right wing (embracing much of fascism), when fascism is defined as not just a dictatorship, but 'politics by corporation'. When lobbyists hold much sway over elected public officials (read MPAA, RIAA over senators), patent laws that allow and encourage submarine patents, lawyers that create nothing being able to sue those that do create things (hampering development of new products for 50 or 100 years), corporations dictating whether the environment is undergoing destruction or not (reguardless of how hot it gets or how many hurricanes Florida gets in a season), where 500,000 poor people can get flooded because of the desire to save a few million dollars, but watch a few thousand corporate executive types get killed and billions can be wasted on a war, arbitrarily made up, just to exact revenge on someone --anyone--, then you have fascism (in this case, defined as rule-by-corporation). Perhaps it had its beginnings when Andrew Carnagie was allowed to have more money than the US treasury.
Peter Cook put it best:
"American politics is very simple. They have the Republican Party, which is basically like our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is basically like our Conservative Party."
What you call a far-left bleeding-heart liberal we call a filthy Tory.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There's an article at the BBC about how the Conservative party is advocating the use of FOSS in government.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
The attitude to free software does not correlate well to the left-right axes of politics, but rather to the libertarian-authoritarian axes.
RMS and ESR are on opposite ends of the left-right axes, but they are both extreme libertarians on the libertarian-authoritarian axes.