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A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies
eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."
Seems like people will always look for reasons to hate each other. Can't just make a suggestion; this is something we can HATE over!
Well, there was this time the mainland Chinese government and the one on the island were in bitter competition as to whose flag would be displayed in Red Hat Linux. I forget who won, and why displaying both wasn't a valid compromise. (Probably neither side wanted to compromise.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If it was one guy selling the software he wrote, you'd probably see the same implementations of his political views (provided that there was a way to do so).
With Open Source, the one guy can write his political opinions into his code ... which get grabbed and used in a different project ... which ends up in a third project ... etc.
And unless you have a similar political bent, you'd never notice it. At least until someone who did have such a bent brought it to your attention.
Really, what article is the summary about? I was afraid that after reading all that gibberish it could lead me to a rick roll...
So, even assuming the story is real, quite it could actually not be real, it has nothing to do with open source, I'll tag it FUD, thanks.Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Even Microsoft can get hit by this.
I worked for the university webmaster back when I was in school. My boss noticed the option "Palestinian Territories, Occupied" appeared in the dropdown list of some web-form software we were using. Being kind of a joker, he then changed Iraq to "Iraq, Occupied". It remains like that to this day, years later.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
Indeed. One of the fringe benefits of introducing FOSS to the tiny Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu was when I showed local geeks that they could actually choose the 'Pacific/Efate' time zone setting. (Efate is the island where the capital of Vanuatu is located.)
Windows and Mac OS X both display either Noumea (capital of New Caledonia to the South) or Honiara (capital of the Solomon Islands to the North). This creates a very real sense that, as far as the Big Boys are concerned, we don't exist. Worse still, Mac OS X thinks that Vanuatu uses Daylight Savings Time, like the adjacent time zone in Australia. My clock has been off by an hour for months now.
That may not sound like much, but believe me, that tiny little bit of tzdata goodness has created the impression among many local geeks that this software is designed not just for office drones in some distant country, but with them in mind.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
There was also the use of the UN flag under the Gnome or Tango icon sets (forgot which one) as a "locale settings" icon. It angered non-UN countries/users. Despite it having nothing to do with the UN at all, they felt slighted.
25+ years back, I somehow got "volunteered" into putting up the flags for the World Youth Baseball Tournament when it was held in the town where I lived at the time.
There were about 15 or 20 countries involved and the organizers handed me a big box of flags, one for each country, and said "Here you go", and that was the extent of the direction that I received.
Each flag had a little tag pinned to it saying what country it was for, so I just put them up in alphabetical order, more-or-less the way that they came out of the box.
This almost caused an international diplomatic incident!
Apparently you can't put country X's flag up next to country Y because they are fighting about something, or Y doesn't recognize X, or you-name-it. Phones started to ring, including mine, and I had to rush out again and re-arrange the flags to suit the diplomats.
I ultimately put those flags up in four different orders over the course of the week or so that the baseball tournament was on, because the arrangements never suited everyone. I only had the "diplomatic incident" occur once, on that first day, but I spent hours on the phone with various mucky-mucks smoothing ruffled feathers. And re-arranged those damn flags almost every day afterward.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
IMHO it is just the height of gall to take someone's free open source software and then bitch about his beliefs. Reminds me of those software companies that are like "We want all the software for our product for free but we don't want to follow your GPL license so we shouldn't have to!". That is what BSD is for people. You don't like the GPL choose software that has a license you like. If this bunch doesn't like this developers political views then fork it or use something else. But to whine about "The perils of Open Source" like developers are sitting around wasting their time trying to come up with landmines for lazy companies they've never heard of is just ridiculous.But as always that is my 02c on the subject,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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no, it's worse than that; read the article comments. They themselves chose a payments system which doesn't work for Israel (and Russia e.g.) due to the "high level of fraud" in payments from those countries. The open source code they are compaining about has the standard ISO country codes including Israel and even has the name manipulated in way which is more likely than not to be pro-Israeli ("Occupied Palestinian Territory", the UN official name, is changed to Palestine).
And lets be honest about this: this is a company who has contributed NOTHING to the author for his time or effort and then has the gall to not only complain about his output,but smear all those like him who are nice enough to offer their software to us in a manner that allows to customize it to our tastes,with that "perils of open source" crap. I repeat this is just like those greedy lazy companies that sponge off the GPL for the software for their products while having a fit that they should Deity forbid have to give back. The only reason I am not nastier in my disgust towards them is I had the good fortune to see the positive side of open source this very night.
A customer of mine for whom I have been doing a lot of work recently and have had the good fortune to strike up a friendship with is an amateur astronomer. He also does a little consulting work on the side with the local college and has struck up a friendship with the rocketry and astronomy clubs,who like to pick his brain since he is a retired NASA engineer(he used to help design the full scale mock ups and did a lot of TTL and CMOS work for them in Houston. It was way cool to hold some of the original plans for the shuttle in my hands.). As we all know college is expensive and since the astronomy club is considered a "hobbyist" club they don't get the really cheap software provided by the college. I try to keep an eye out for good free open source software I think my customers would like and recently came across Stellarium which compares in features to the over $500 software that the teacher that hosts the astronomy club uses. After David showed them the other day what Stellarium could do and told them that I would be out there with him tonight to check out his telescope....well it was kind of funny actually. I walk out there and there is a line of college kids with their laptops hoping I would give them "that really cool software that David uses". So under a starry sky we had a little Stellarium install fest with me setting up the machines(mostly Windows and one Mac and one EEE) while David set the positioning.
You see IMHO it is moments like THAT that make Free Open Source software great,not some company whining that the software they got for free doesn't do exactly what they want. I read TFA BTW. Did you notice what they did when they had a problem? Did they donate some money to the developers? Maybe paid them a little money in return for customizing the software to their needs? Nope they just bitched and whined and smeared all open source with their little FUD article. At least the college kids who I helped out are grateful and are talking about donating a little money or time or at the very least writing them an email to thank them for their wonderful gift.
But it never ceases to amaze me how these companies think because they get something for free they can act like it is shit. I repeat: fork it or use one of the myriad of other pieces of software out their that better suits your needs. But don't bother whining when you can't even send a couple of bucks to the developers to get it customized to your needs. They are NOT your free employees so don't expect them to jump through your hoops when you give absolutely nothing in return. And as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.