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How Open Source Might Finally Become Mainstream
geegel writes "The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article on how autocracies are now embracing open source, while at the same promoting national based IT services. The author, Evgeny Morozov, paints a bleak future of the future World Wide Web."
At the end of 2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks...
Here are some opening lines from previous Wall Street Journal articles:
- At the end of 2010, the "global financial" traders, who tend to be morally crippled and calloused egomaniacs...
- At the end of 2010, the "journalistic reporting" newspapers, whose employees tend to be hypocritical parasites and star-struck airheads...
- At the end of 2010, the "United States", whose elected representatives tend to be greedy lawyers and ignorant blowhards...
How fun!
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Open Source, by its very nature, can't be "taken over". It is open for everyone to examine, and for anyone to fix if they find problems.
I do not doubt that governments may try to control the internet and other information access. But if they try to "take over" the software, then it is no longer Open Source, by definition.
I think muddling the issues of control and Open Source together will lead to little but confusion.
xIn Capitalist America, government works for big business.
Wait, that's still not a joke.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
FTA: How will officials in Washington react when China's Tencent (with a market capitalization of $42 billion, almost twice that of Yahoo) or Russia's Yandex makes a bid for AOL?
This article is very well composed, but does not mention peer-to-peer solutions, which avoid the big-brother problem. Projects like Diaspora are working on systems that implement this kind of P2P-based web using web-of-trust. I assume that Diaspora apps will be able to facilitate various services, hopefully including things like communication.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corporation (Fox News), which is probably why it didn't mention things like MySpace being owned by Murdock's political powerhouse, which is clearly along a similar (if not identical) line. Free Software best combats this with the Affero General Public License, which closes the "ASP loophole" by marking an implementation of the software as the same as its distribution (thus modifications must be made public). Examples include Diaspora (social media), Gitorious (software forge), and Identi.ca (micro-blogging) among others.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Clearly the fact that Google and Facebook are built largely on open source software is meaningless. Who's ever heard of those? No, it's when foreign governments start using open source software that people will pay attention ;)
I'm encouraged to hear that major organizations are finally seeing the light.
To use a (yet another, sorry) car analogy: Open source is like being able to buy a service manual and replacement parts at your local auto shop, and then doing the work yourself -- or paying a mechanic of your choice to do it for you. Closed source is more like buying the car with the hood welded shut, and any attempt to modify or service it yourself not only voids the warranty, but is actually criminal in some situations and jurisdictions. Moreover, the manufacturer is under no obligation to disclose or repair defects or "undocumented features" -- such as logging your travels and selling it to the highest bidder.
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Good grief! Open source becoming mainstream? Have these people not heard of BIND? Apache? Firefox? PHP? Perl? Since when have these been marginal? Anyway, the article is mostly complaining that open source software might be put to bad purposes but that can happen with any software. Quoth: "The embrace of open-source technology by governments may result in more intuitive software applications," I wonder if the writer has ever used govt mandated software. Intuitive it ain't. The writer's other point about (eg) skype failing because of different systems being used - how many non-Chinese people here have ever heard of QQ? These differences exist already.
bang goes my karma... again...
Android is open-source, but it did not make open-source software mainstream. I would say, it's almost doing as much damage as any iPhone I've seen, directly as a result of Google not giving a rat's ass about what proprietary crap vendors screw on top of it. What we are looking at here is exactly the difference between Apache license and GPLv3. I rooted a new Verizon Android for a friend the other day, and it was like pulling teeth. It was a dirty hack done, I can only assume, by a dirty hacker, bless his heart, and there is no guarantee that it will survive the next big update. If ordinary users are not trusted with full access to their devices, and have a locked (for most practical purposes) computer with proprietary top and zero documentation, talking about the licensing of some software components is moot, and "open-source" is just a feel-good word.
It's just too bad that democratic politicians aren't also nervous about wasting tax payer dollars on proprietary software, becoming dependent on the capricious whims of software companies, and become concerned about backdoors in their software.
Perhaps this difference in nervousness can be explained by the fact that democratic politicians are more susceptible to the financial and political pressures of corporations, while autocrats don't have to give a damn?
In any case, the whole article sounds like a smear campaign, trying to associate open source software with communism and "autocrats"; in fact, a number of democracies have also seen the light on open source software and also mandated its use there.
No offense, man, but it looks like you didn't actually read the article—you just skimmed it for something to disagree with. He doesn't say that at all. What he says is that it's likely that national governments, including the U.S. government, will resist purchasing and using software written by companies in other countries. And it's also likely that the U.S. government's attempts to get Silicon Valley companies to put back doors in all their software will feed into this trend.
The bit about open source isn't even the point of the article—it's just the lead-in. He doesn't actually draw any conclusions about open source other than that it may play some role in the balkanization of software on a national level, because it provides a jumping-off point for national versions of software. Frankly, it's a damned good article; the slashdot summary doesn't do it justice.
Wait, are shareholders not people now?
Sure they are but legally they are only entitled to one vote per person, not ten thousand times the political influence of the average voter by virtue of being a major shareholder in a corporation that "owns" a bunch of politicians.
And have we revoked the right of people to associate as they see fit, which implies the right to form corporations to pursue common business interests?
Well, you are free to hang out with anyone you want to but maybe it's time to return the corporation to its roots, when the purpose of a corporation wasn't "maximize profit for the shareholders regardless of legal or ethical implications" but rather to provide a product or service that would be beneficial to the community.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The most astonishing thing about this atrocious article is that not only does it not question whether it's legitimate for US institutions to undermine and manipulate the political and economic institutions of the world, it actually, openly proposes that openness is a threat, because it inhibits covert action.
The point of free and open source software is freedom. That is not the point of US power blocs and their covert operations.