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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."
I don't know why EWeek is specifically highlighting open source software. I don't see how closed source software is immune from this concern.
If you're a nonprofit, you need to look at all the software you're, open-source or not. If you're using software you need to examine it to make sure its not sending a message at odds with your organization.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
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.
This particular anecdote is rather punchy, as stories of the "OMG if I say something about geography on te7 interwebs someone willz hate me!!!111" variety generally are; but the connection with open source software seems deeply tenuous and circumstantial.
I, for one, am shocked, shocked that a program might not have sane defaults for every situation, particularly if "sane" is not terribly well defined.
As for the payment processing thing, various sorts of black holing of countries based on their dubious reputations is not an "open source" thing, or a "closed source" thing or, for that matter, anything to do with code at all. It is wholly a matter of CYA and cost/benefit calculations, no matter what software the vendor doing the deciding is running. An interesting anecdote about the complexity of doing stuff that seems simple; but barely source related at all.
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.
It's Open Source... How hard can that be! I mean really. it might be 2 lines of code more, or (if done right) just another database entry.
It isn't rocket surgery people. that's the strength of OSS, you *can* fix it without having to beg for a fix from your vendor!
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
And I am shocked, shocked that you didn't RTFA, which made it pretty clear that this software came attached with a "we don't want fraudulent donations" agenda.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
I pointed out that this isn't just any omission and addition. When you omit Israel and add Palestine (which is not even recognized as a country by the United Nations) to a country drop-down menu, you seem to be making a very loaded political statement. Ugh, this is not a story. This isn't the case on the agency's own site, but it was the case on the pages for Causes, which puts widgets... Facepalm.
If my reading of the article is right, it goes something like this:
There's a Ruby API that lists countries and regions. One of these is "Palestinian Territory -- Occupied". Someone decided to shorten this to "Palestine".
Meanwhile, someone at Facebook decided that a certain list of countries contains high risk of credit card fraud. One of those countries is Israel. So they won't take your credit card if you live there, probably because they've run into fraudsters operating in that country and they don't want to risk it. Just like they won't take a credit card from Nigeria, to name one.
So, someone sees this and concludes the worst. The Facebook application is anti-semitic. Overreact much?
Honestly, I think people are a bit too touchy about Israel/Palestine. Sure, it's a touchy subject, but a simple set of unrelated mistakes and people assume you're part of a vast conspiracy to destroy their nation? I think we as a society owe it to ourselves to be more careful about such accusations, and not simply react.
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"
Wtf does this have to do with the crap that is "Web 2.0"? When has giving a donation been considering "Web 2.0"? Online donations have been around since forever. Well I guess everything else that is labelled "Web 2.0" such as social networking and user generated content has been around forever as well, so from that stupid and pointless viewpoint I guess it would be "Web 2.0". Did Kdawson post this story?
Not really, its a decent immediate decision for a temporary duration (over the weekend maybe), but what they should have done is made the sign-up/donation system to better to weed out bogus donations.
Just because Israel may not support them as much as a different country, it may not mean that the per-capita support wasn't equal.
I'm sure they get a lot of bogus donations from the US, UK, etc, but they also get a lot of legitimate ones as well. So they were just willing to sacrifice Israel as a whole, and thus the bogus, as well as the legitimate donations.
So yeah, I agree, "so what" but I don't think it was the right decision from either a profit, or a beneficial to the cause perspective.
neither why is open source per se or social networking potential culprits there.
- Palestine appearing in the countries list because is a (valid?) short form of "Palestinian Territory, Occupied". If isnt valid is not Web 2.0 or open source fault, was a developer decision that could had been taken in any part of the chain (i agree that the chain in this particular case is pretty long).
- Israel not listed because, as with other 14 countries, their IP space is very used by fraudsters. Maybe with spam is easier to understand... If Israel were responsible for 80% of world spam, and because of that becomes filtered from a lots of mail servers (lots of countries used to be widely filtered because of spam coming from them), that would be anti-semitism of those servers admins? Maybe a bit worse, if an israeli ISP a lot of spam is being sent, and it ends a rbl (if behaves badly that way, will end in most), would be antisemitism too?
Is a nice spin to blame web 2.0 and open source for things that dont implies them to happen. Next big hurricane, if being tracked by web 2.0 sites and with open source software, will be blamed to them too.
My company does exactly this, and it is a conscious decision.
Anyone that tries to tell us that we "can't" do business like this needs to join the free world.
And to be blunt, it is really only a PR nightmare for American companies.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
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
Please don't bring the Israel/Palestine mudwrestling into slashdot. The walls have just been freshly painted, and it's not fundamentally a technology issue anyway, since those lobby groups will latch onto anything for publicity.
"Deutschland"? Sounds like some kind of barbarian lingo.
The proper name for this province is Germania.
FUD. The pro-Israel activists are more annoyed that Palestine is recognized and is in the drop down menu more than Israel being omitted.
They spend a lot of time discouraging recognition of Palestine as an independent state and at every opportunity. Re-read the article again with that in mind. Palestine certainly IS a country and is recognized by many others around the world. The UN reference is a red herring. Israel occupies Palestine with military force.
Take note that it was a pro-Israel pressure group that started this 'controversy' with immediate threats to the developers.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
So you would be happy if they replaced "Israel" with "The Zionist Entity"? Whether or not you think it matters, it's important to many people. Maps are political statements, as are lists of countries and their names. Pretending that Israel does not exist is a common practice in the Middle-East.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It might as well read: "A Cautionary Tale of Closed Source Social Technology". Go check ten random sites with nationality registration. Chances are, "Israel" is on the list, but "Palestinian Territory" isn't. They are no more indicative of the failure of closed source than this is of a failure of open source.
I wonder how many times they've bitched about the omission of Palestine... gee, none? What a surprise. Hypocrites.
I'm a little bitchy, but one can't play the anti-semitic card every time Israel is omitted/criticised. It devalues everybody.
People leave things out, forget, or usually just plain didn't know better. Similar things were said for some commercial product a few years back (I think it was Windows or Office, but I could not recall). It was either a language or time zone setting that neglected the country.
This is like all the software bug news articles - yes, there are bugs in software, but you know what, people actually FIX them, they don't STAY that way there are new versions, etc. It's all just some techno-political FUD mudslinging to influence the ignorant.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
While I sympathize with the Israelis in this case, it's open source, right?
Fork it and add your country. Then make it better software than it was originally. Hit them where it hurts.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
The courteous way to deal with people is to assume that they've made an honest mistake before throwing around conspiracy theories and wild accusations of rascism and religious hatred.
What their stance: that a product should be boycotted and that an organisation must be anti-Semite and anti-Zionism, based on a country options drop-down box is reasonable?
Someone who isn't acting like an arrogant, spoilt child would simply point-out the error and ask that it be fixed. Then if nothing happens, perhaps send a stronger letter. Sending a threatening flame-mail, right off the bat, makes this group look like a bunch of arseholes (in my opinion).
They look even more antagonistic and stupid when the reason for the ommission of Israel is taken into account. It is due to being on an online fraud black list:
Actually, no statement was made. The inclusion of Palestine was a glitch, and Israel was not included due to fraud originating from the country. I know this is slashdot, but would it kill maybe 3 or 4 people to actually RTFA before going off on rants? Doing that makes us all look bad. Thank you.
Great Intellect...
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.
From TFA:
Israel was omitted because of fraud from that country, which seems like a good reason. Palestine was probably included in the list because it is recognised by the UN, and is included in ISO 3166-1. If you were to delete Palestine from the list, it would certainly be a very loaded political statement, but its inclusion is not.
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!
"The CIA world factbook is one of the best places to get geographical data on countries."
Yes, you are right. You can trust them because they are not controlled by any government.
That's not how the Zionist lobby operates. They don't rely on courteous behaviour and goodwill. They bully people into submission by crying 'anti-semite!' and threatening to 'go and tell the whole Jewish community'.
Actually, here is the quote: Bernard Woolley (on the phone): "No, we can't have alphabetical seating in the Abbey: you would have Iraq and Iran next to each other. Plus Israel and Jordan, all sitting in the same pew. We would be in danger of starting World War III."
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
So, the next time we write code using FLOSS libraries, we must read every line of code?
How productive is that?
Where should I stop - 1000 lines, 10k, 100k, or all of the millions of the Linux kernel?
From the Big Fucking Manual:
Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better. Bah! stop the discrimination, you lofty fscking overlords.http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe2
Umm..... "You know who you are."
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
Looks outside window at UK society. I don't see why you think jewish people should be any more immune than the rest of us...
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dotan, You will find Israel, along with other "erased" countries such as France, Germany and the United States, all hidden under the "Industrial Countries" category. You will also notice that these other countries have a brief "at a glance" page not significantly different from Israel's.
Do you really think Israel's children are in a situation where they require the assistance of UNICEF?
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I don't see any risk here that's particular to open source. Analogous issues have come up with proprietary vendors, including Microsoft. And often, there is no way to win, because no matter what you do, someone will be upset.
As for Israel, personally, I think it is a country and it has a right to exist and I'm glad that the US supports Israel.
But it is simply a fact that hundreds of millions of people do not share this view. Odd as that view may seem to you or me, it doesn't seem odd to them. And some of those people are open source developers as well.
Self-important posturing or attempts at trying to control their minds through controlling language isn't going to work. What does work is dialog and compromise. For example, I think Israel should be on the list, as should be "Palestine (occupied territory)". There is also no requirement that these lists be mutually exclusive, so if there are different views of how the world should be divided up, put all of them on there.
And if you don't like a software product or don't like to support the author because you disagree with his politics or ethics, then simply don't.
So basically, if I get you right, you're pissed because they left Israel out. But also because they are not denying the existence of Palestine?
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
They can (and have) alter the borders of countries. For example, they can place a "contested" territory according to their whim and not according to the UN.
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.
Oh, please. Look at the size of the map! There is no way they could make Israel clickable -- it would be, what, a single pixel wide at best?
Seriously, get some perspective here. You are totally overreacting to a non-issue. Information on Israel is easy to find simply by using the alphabetical list of countries that is prominently located directly below the map, and is what most people are likely to use if they are looking for a specific country by name. And, back on UNICEF's front page, you will observe on the far right a block of flags showing countries involved with UNICEF. You will observe the flag of Israel among them, exactly the same size as all the others, in alphabetical order as you'd expect.
There is no global anti-Semitic conspiracy at work in UNICEF.
Hey, it gets better. Look at their map -- Cuba doesn't appear on it at all! What sinister motive is driving UNICEF to deny the existence of an entire island? I bet it's because that's where Guantanamo Bay is located! Yes, it all makes sense now...
The inital list was "feature" complete.
Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and a couple of other countries were ommited via the credit card processor.
( professedly due to exessive fraud.)
The person from israel who could not donate
found instant and easy issue with Palestine
being included.
The author blew it up for clicks or a donation
from Bill of Borg.
End of story.
G!
MACC
Well, for the US: the high underage pregnancy numbers would indicate so. ( about 20fold compared to OldEurope )Are French, German, or United Statesian children in a situation where they require the assistance of UNICEF?
G!
MACC
Does the UN objectively determine what is contested territory? How do you determine something like that objectively? If England were to claim Normandy is English (as it has been in the past), would it make it contested territory?
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Most people wouldn't kick up such a stink if their country were excluded. They would be mildly annoyed, rather than accusing the person who made the list of being an outright racist. I think they are more pissed off that Palestine was included. Yeah, its a loaded political statement - but the problem is that it is a loaded political statement that recognizes the existence of people that Zionists would rather we all forgot about.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Here be signatures
So, have WW III then and get is sorted out. Let the best survive.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.