It has been true probably longer than you think - but again only in the worlds of economic theory and political economy (which might not necessarily been what you were taught at school). The first person I am aware that studied the economic drivers of technological change was Joseph Schumpeter in the early 20th century. He argued that technological advancement was driven not so much by the generation of ideas - but the economic exploitation of them. "Innovation" was the successful economic exploitation of an idea - not the invention of an idea.
There is a Wikipedia article on Schumpeter, but if you want to get a better a idea of his work and ideas try Schumpeter and technical change (by A. Heerje), Evolutionary economics: applications of Schumpeter's ideas (edited by H. Hanusch) or Schumpeter and the political economy of change (by D. L. McKee). Of course anything by Schumpeter is also worth reading (though very dry)
A point to note - specific fields use everyday words in different contexts. A couple of weeks ago there were people on Slashdot arguing that people should accept that in the IT world kilo means 1024, not 1000. IT isn't alone in this. Economics and political economy make use of ordinary words in very specific contexts as well - innovation is one of them. This was an economics article and I think the use of the word innovation was correct.
Anyway - it has been an interesting debate. I'm glad you raised your point - I've been meaning to discuss the meaning of "innovation" for a while, but rarely make the effort to post. Bringing the issue up so directly gave me the impetus to get off my arse and put in my 2 cents.
Interesting point that you make. In the field of economics and political economy, though, innovation is capitalising on a new idea or process. Mr Joe Citizen might be the inventor the assembly line (or perhaps the idea of the assembly line). Mr Henry Ford, was the innovator when he applied the idea to car manufacturing (please note I'm not suggesting Ford didn't invent the assembly line as well - just making a point).
Words only have meaning within a context. Richard Rorty wrote about this quite a bit. Revisionist semantics happens when you re-interpret a text based on a different (normally more modern) definition of a word. This article was written in the context of modern economics and used a modern economics understanding of the word "innovation".
For someone not from an economics or political economy background it is entirely probable that a reader might think this is a manipulation of the language. However, the use of innovation in this context has been around for most of the 20th century (certainly since the days of Schumpeter).
Revisionist semantics IS like revisionist history - but this isn't revisionist semantics. It is the normal process of language.
I don't disagree with you that Communism isn't dead. Communism is a political philosophy and philosophies don't die - they just become more or less popular. And yes I through in a quick, response that did not present a coherent counter-argument (alas lack of time - which I am doing again). I just think that your definition of communism is overly broad and therefore not useful. As it happens the reason you felt the need to make the statement you did is because the poster you were replying to didn't understand the socialism/communism distinction at all.
One feature of communism that I don't think features much with progressives etc, is the idea of revolution and the (armed) overthrow of the capitalist state. Many progressives are in favour of wealth redistribution, a greater emphasis on the needs of society as a whole (rather than policies that encourage individualism) etc, but I don't see much advocacy of armed revolution.
Anyway I haven't read your other posts and I've still got plenty of work to do etc, so I'm not really in a position to criticise your position. Have fun.
Not being a text crazed teenager (sounds a bit weird doesn't it) or SMS junkie I think a scroll wheel would be just as easy to text with. When I text I'm looking at the keys and counting the number of times I press it when doing messages. I'm not looking at the display. What happens? I'm halfway through a message when I realise I've been messing over half of it up. It's worse if I use my wife's phone - hers has a button that switches between lower case, upper case and numbers. The number of times I've switched to numbers and forgotten to switch back is is too numerous to remember.
With a scroll wheel I'll be looking at the display. Scroll clockwise/anti-clockwise to get the letter/number/whatever, hit the middle button to enter or tap to enter. Obviously there would need to be some refinement to improve speed, but I think there is potential for a scroll wheel to do just fine on a phone.
You need to get it right. Assload is an imperial unit - you can't have a metric assload of podcasts. The metric equivalent is ARSEload. I'm not sure what the conversion rate is, but I think one arseload is the equivalent of 0.03 imperial Libraries of Congress.
You need to be careful. NASA once lost a satellite because of metric/imperial conversion. You might really irritate someone if you say "I'm sending you an assload of podcasts" when you meant "an arseload of podcasts". It could end in a disaster.
Absolutely true and I would add that Windows Power Users don't want to feel like they are unskilled for even a short period while they learn a new system.
On a side note, I convinced a friend of mine to visit the local apple retailer when they were thinking about buying a computer for home. I had suggested having a look at the eMac, or an iBook, because of affordability. They ended up buying a G5 iMac. Why? Two reasons. First, the salesperson showed her that the basic tasks - email, browsing, music and digital pictures - were all easy to do on a Mac. Second, the look and feel of the iMac and OS X were completely different to the PCs at her work. She liked that because when she uses the iMac she doesn't feel like it is an extension of work. She can run Word on the Mac, and do work related activities without feeling like she is at work.
The whole "we must duplicate the known interface" doesn't always work. Provided the basic WIMP concept is in place, and that the interface provides useful enough clues as to what happens when you press buttons, click on icons etc, then being different to Windows might be beneficial rather than a hindrance for non-power users.
Nicely said pieterh. The greatest problem with modern economics is that too many people equate Smith's "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest with monetary compensation. Self-interest can, but does not always mean financial interest. Smith had a much better understanding of this than the economic "think-tanks" that bear his name.
However corporations package it, the community is strong to its principles and will not be subverted for capitalism.
OSS can't be subverted for capitalism for the simple reason that OSS is a product of capitalism. For OSS to exist as a mainstream system of production (as opposed to university/academic system) it requires two things; easy access to the internet; and easy access to computer hardware. With few exceptions both of these requirements are provided by the market. Change the market in either of these areas (e.g. massive price hikes in hardware or Internet access) and you will get a decreasing OSS.
OSS is changing the market and shifting the point of scarcity away from software (which was scarce largely through artificial means) to hardware and bandwidth, both of which are naturally scarce.
This does not mean that existing corporate interests (i.e. proprietary software producers) are not threatened by OSS, nor that they won't use measures (lobbying governments) to harm OSS development. It is important to distinguish between sectional interests within capitalism (or class fractions as Poulantzas describes it) and capitalism as a whole. It is also important to note that what is good for one sectional interest is not necessarily what is in the best interests of capitalism, or markets, as a whole.
If only neo-cons would understand that, then we might one day actually get effective capitalism, rather than b-grade pseudo-mercantilism. Where's Adam Smith when you need him?
What you are saying is true, but I there are two points I would like to make to your reply. First, secrecy in software is already present in proprietary software. The only peole that get to see how Microsoft implements CIFS is Microsoft (and maybe some others on an NDA). Not entirely dissimilar to a guild - though not closely related enough to be a useful analogy.
Second, the comparison between early construction guilds and software is tenuous because they occur at a different point in history. The Internet, combined with a philosphy of sharing that developed alongside the rise of pure science (share information, prove through the use of repeatable experiments) has certainly fostered an openess in the open source area and may well havve given rise to a lesser desire to horde information.
Perhaps I'm just an idealist, but either way, I believe that software has not yet evolved substantially for patent examiners to be able to determine what is fundamental knowledge and what is genuine innovation.
The reason software patents should not be allowed is because computers, and therefore software, is still a nascent field. Sure it may be 50 years old, but compared to construction engineering, which goes back thousands (even if it hasn't always been called construction engineering), it is new. For any doubters out there - compare the error rate in software compared to the error rate in construction engineering. If bridges had the same reliability software has, no-one would ever use them.
What is the significance of this? Nascent fields have what are called "lockean blocks". A lockean block is a basic piece of knowledge that underpins a particular field. Without certain fundamental knowledge of building methods, materials (physics in the modern case), you can't operate effectively in construction engineering. For this reason lockean blocks should not be patentable. To block access to fundamental knowledge in a field, will impede the development of that field. The patent system acknowledges this with its criteria of "non-obvious".
The problem with lockean blocks is that they can really only be identified once a field has matured. Until then there is a very real possibility that a lockean block will be patented. In other words because software is a relatively new field a patent examiner cannot identify what is "non-obvious" because we haven't quite worked out what obvious is. For this reason software should not be patented.
In 100 or more years, the software field will be very different. It may even be possible that software works with the same kind of reliability buildings/bridges/automobiles (well hopefully better than automobiles). Perhaps then we might be able to distinguish between a fundamental building block in the software field and a true software innovation worthy of a patent.
In summary, software is a field that is not yet mature enough for patents.
For anyone interested in reading about the lockean block concept (though not as it applies to software) have a look at:
Suthersanen, U. 1997. Exclusions to Design Protection - A New Paradigm. Chap. 1 of: Sterling, A. (ed), Perspectives on Intellectual Property Vol 2: Intellectual Property and Market Freedom. London: Sweet & Maxwell.
I did something similar for my wife and I. Our setup was quite simple - Mandrake 8.x with LTSP running on a Celeron 333 with 384MB RAM as the server (and workstation) and a P133 as a client. With that setup we could run very comfortably -
KDE (two sessions) StarOffice 5.2 Netscape 6 a Win4Lin session (wife) running Word 97, Excel 97 and IE.
That setup ran remarkably smoothly with the only the occasional delay if we were both trying to start an app at the same time. The two machines were connected with standard 100 ethernet.
Obviously this setup wouldn't scale to many more than two users and is not suited to a corporate environment, but it does show that modern hardware is far more powerful than necessary IN SOME CIRCUMSTANCES.
Do we still use the same setup? No - the motherboard of the server got messed up by a power surge and I decided I wanted a Powerbook.
And with thin clients 50 users can go home and have some unplanned free time if the server takes an unexpected timeout...
Which isn't all that different for a lot of organisations with workstations. Where I am - everything goes on the network. While I can save on the local drive, for all practical purposes if the main server goes down I can't access any of my work/templates/records etc etc. For all intents and purposes I can do bugger all.
For orgs with document management systems there is certainly no difference between having workstations and thin clients. If the main server is down, you can't do anything document related. In one govt org I deal with there is no point in saving to your local drive, as the system is such that you effectively have to redo the document into the DMS.
Yeah - lose a server with thin clients and you get to go home early - but the same can also be true for workstations.
As someone said earlier - open source politics is what democracy is supposed to be about. More properly, open source politics is what particpatory democracy is supposed to be about.
In Australia, the first mainstream example of participatory democracy was the Australian Democrats. They have party members elect their leaders, and even require party policies to be balloted by members. As such, they were probably the first member driven party since the early days of federation (the ALP probably began as a very member driven party - but that has changed).
Now, for those of you that follow Australian politics, you will no doubt have noticed that the Australian Democrats are not in a very healthy state at the moment. At the last federal election they received their lowest level of support since their inception and lost all three of their senators that were up for re-election (including OSS advocate Brian Greig).
The decline in support for the Australian Democrats can be traced partly to their support of the GST, which alienated a lot of left-leaning voters, but most substantially to a major public brawl within the party back in 2001 (I think). This brawl included the dumping of then party leader Natasha Stott-Despoja - an individually who was both popular within the Democrats and the electorate at large.
This public spat shows the biggest difficulty faced by advocates of participatory democracy. Democracy is both beautiful and ugly. It involves the resolution of sometimes diametrically opposed positions. Such resolutions are not always peaceful and rarely ever private. As such, when the Democrats faced such an ugly moment it was became the political drama du jour and was lapped up by the press.
Now here is the kicker - if you have a public spat, voter very quickly stop voting for you. The media portrays you as "deeply divided" and "unlikely to recover". Politically that is the coup de grace.
Politics is not like software. In software if you have an idea you can demonstrate that idea in practice and you can debate the technical merits of that idea using quantifiable data. This does not preclude personal ambitions etc getting in the way, but OSS development is the development of a technical product.
Politics is only part technical. For the main it is philosophy, morality, expediency, ambition etc - none of which are the subject of technical discussion. The GNOME-KDE flamewars might sound nasty, the kernel VM flamewars might sound nasty, but they are nothing in comparison to political disagreements.
Open source politics is great - but it is painful. Unless voters accept that it is painful, and ugly, and personal, open source politics will lose out to the great political cathedrals every time.
The ALP is a bottom up party? Are you sure? Do you really consider trade unions and factions the grass roots of the ALP and that they push ideas upward?
Don't you remember when Hawke and Keating walked into the caucas (party room for you non-Aussies) and said "we are going to an election and we're going to allow uranium mining" in complete contradiction to the ALP policy platform?
Don't you remember Latham giving the finger to Tasmanian forrestry workers to try and get a couple of votes in Sydney and Melbourne? Was that an example of bottom-up politics?
As for the ALP having their brawls in public, I'm not sure I agree. From my recollection the Party in opposition has their brawls in public, while the Government takes care of theirs behind closed doors. Back in the 80's the Liberal Party had plenty of very public spats.
I'm not denying any of your points - but the situation is still nothing like Florida. Noone has been disqualified for voting, the ballot papers are straightforward and consistent throughout the country. A political deal like that may seem unpalatable, but it is still not the same as the situation in Florida and not necessarily un-democratic (it was not a secret deal after all).
Except that FF are unlikely to get a higher number of first prefernces than the Democrats so voting above the line is unlikely to get FF elected
When it comes to doing deals with right wing nutters - the Democrats did a deal with FF only after FF announced that their support of families would include same sex couples. The Greens on the other hand did a preference deal with the ALP - who voted against gay law reform - and then have the audacity to criticise others.
Slashdot Mirror
If that isn't proof Linux is awesome
That isn't proof that Linux is awesome..
then I don't know what is.
Me neither.
New businesses have to come into being to supply you with the food and housing and coca cola that you lust for
Although to be fair, (European) Australians weren't originally into coca cola. That came later.
I don't know....kids today
0) BACKUP YOUR DATA
1) remove hard disk
2) hit it repeatedly on the table until hard disk fails to boot
3) return entire device to store
Do you really want to be redownloading your favourite pr0n? Didn't think so. Remember always backup your data before smashing up your hard drive.
Yes. Natalie Portman.
But you don't want to go there
And even if you do... I don't want you to go there.
I would like an iPhone to go there though...
It has been true probably longer than you think - but again only in the worlds of economic theory and political economy (which might not necessarily been what you were taught at school). The first person I am aware that studied the economic drivers of technological change was Joseph Schumpeter in the early 20th century. He argued that technological advancement was driven not so much by the generation of ideas - but the economic exploitation of them. "Innovation" was the successful economic exploitation of an idea - not the invention of an idea.
There is a Wikipedia article on Schumpeter, but if you want to get a better a idea of his work and ideas try Schumpeter and technical change (by A. Heerje), Evolutionary economics: applications of Schumpeter's ideas (edited by H. Hanusch) or Schumpeter and the political economy of change (by D. L. McKee). Of course anything by Schumpeter is also worth reading (though very dry)
A point to note - specific fields use everyday words in different contexts. A couple of weeks ago there were people on Slashdot arguing that people should accept that in the IT world kilo means 1024, not 1000. IT isn't alone in this. Economics and political economy make use of ordinary words in very specific contexts as well - innovation is one of them. This was an economics article and I think the use of the word innovation was correct.
Anyway - it has been an interesting debate. I'm glad you raised your point - I've been meaning to discuss the meaning of "innovation" for a while, but rarely make the effort to post. Bringing the issue up so directly gave me the impetus to get off my arse and put in my 2 cents.
Cheers
Rockin' Az
Interesting point that you make. In the field of economics and political economy, though, innovation is capitalising on a new idea or process. Mr Joe Citizen might be the inventor the assembly line (or perhaps the idea of the assembly line). Mr Henry Ford, was the innovator when he applied the idea to car manufacturing (please note I'm not suggesting Ford didn't invent the assembly line as well - just making a point).
Words only have meaning within a context. Richard Rorty wrote about this quite a bit. Revisionist semantics happens when you re-interpret a text based on a different (normally more modern) definition of a word. This article was written in the context of modern economics and used a modern economics understanding of the word "innovation".
For someone not from an economics or political economy background it is entirely probable that a reader might think this is a manipulation of the language. However, the use of innovation in this context has been around for most of the 20th century (certainly since the days of Schumpeter).
Revisionist semantics IS like revisionist history - but this isn't revisionist semantics. It is the normal process of language.
Mate - I wish i had some mod points. You earned 'em. The did the B-52s proud.
I don't disagree with you that Communism isn't dead. Communism is a political philosophy and philosophies don't die - they just become more or less popular. And yes I through in a quick, response that did not present a coherent counter-argument (alas lack of time - which I am doing again). I just think that your definition of communism is overly broad and therefore not useful. As it happens the reason you felt the need to make the statement you did is because the poster you were replying to didn't understand the socialism/communism distinction at all.
One feature of communism that I don't think features much with progressives etc, is the idea of revolution and the (armed) overthrow of the capitalist state. Many progressives are in favour of wealth redistribution, a greater emphasis on the needs of society as a whole (rather than policies that encourage individualism) etc, but I don't see much advocacy of armed revolution.
Anyway I haven't read your other posts and I've still got plenty of work to do etc, so I'm not really in a position to criticise your position. Have fun.
Those who fail to understand philosophical distinctions and the fallacy of cold war ideological dichotomies are doomed to repeat them.
A. de Rozario 2005
With a scroll wheel I'll be looking at the display. Scroll clockwise/anti-clockwise to get the letter/number/whatever, hit the middle button to enter or tap to enter. Obviously there would need to be some refinement to improve speed, but I think there is potential for a scroll wheel to do just fine on a phone.
You need to be careful. NASA once lost a satellite because of metric/imperial conversion. You might really irritate someone if you say "I'm sending you an assload of podcasts" when you meant "an arseload of podcasts". It could end in a disaster.
Absolutely true and I would add that Windows Power Users don't want to feel like they are unskilled for even a short period while they learn a new system.
On a side note, I convinced a friend of mine to visit the local apple retailer when they were thinking about buying a computer for home. I had suggested having a look at the eMac, or an iBook, because of affordability. They ended up buying a G5 iMac. Why? Two reasons. First, the salesperson showed her that the basic tasks - email, browsing, music and digital pictures - were all easy to do on a Mac. Second, the look and feel of the iMac and OS X were completely different to the PCs at her work. She liked that because when she uses the iMac she doesn't feel like it is an extension of work. She can run Word on the Mac, and do work related activities without feeling like she is at work.
The whole "we must duplicate the known interface" doesn't always work. Provided the basic WIMP concept is in place, and that the interface provides useful enough clues as to what happens when you press buttons, click on icons etc, then being different to Windows might be beneficial rather than a hindrance for non-power users.
Nicely said pieterh. The greatest problem with modern economics is that too many people equate Smith's "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest with monetary compensation. Self-interest can, but does not always mean financial interest. Smith had a much better understanding of this than the economic "think-tanks" that bear his name.
OSS can't be subverted for capitalism for the simple reason that OSS is a product of capitalism. For OSS to exist as a mainstream system of production (as opposed to university/academic system) it requires two things; easy access to the internet; and easy access to computer hardware. With few exceptions both of these requirements are provided by the market. Change the market in either of these areas (e.g. massive price hikes in hardware or Internet access) and you will get a decreasing OSS.
OSS is changing the market and shifting the point of scarcity away from software (which was scarce largely through artificial means) to hardware and bandwidth, both of which are naturally scarce.
This does not mean that existing corporate interests (i.e. proprietary software producers) are not threatened by OSS, nor that they won't use measures (lobbying governments) to harm OSS development. It is important to distinguish between sectional interests within capitalism (or class fractions as Poulantzas describes it) and capitalism as a whole. It is also important to note that what is good for one sectional interest is not necessarily what is in the best interests of capitalism, or markets, as a whole.
If only neo-cons would understand that, then we might one day actually get effective capitalism, rather than b-grade pseudo-mercantilism. Where's Adam Smith when you need him?
Of that I have no doubt. But I still think you need to get out more.
What you are saying is true, but I there are two points I would like to make to your reply. First, secrecy in software is already present in proprietary software. The only peole that get to see how Microsoft implements CIFS is Microsoft (and maybe some others on an NDA). Not entirely dissimilar to a guild - though not closely related enough to be a useful analogy.
Second, the comparison between early construction guilds and software is tenuous because they occur at a different point in history. The Internet, combined with a philosphy of sharing that developed alongside the rise of pure science (share information, prove through the use of repeatable experiments) has certainly fostered an openess in the open source area and may well havve given rise to a lesser desire to horde information.
Perhaps I'm just an idealist, but either way, I believe that software has not yet evolved substantially for patent examiners to be able to determine what is fundamental knowledge and what is genuine innovation.
The reason software patents should not be allowed is because computers, and therefore software, is still a nascent field. Sure it may be 50 years old, but compared to construction engineering, which goes back thousands (even if it hasn't always been called construction engineering), it is new. For any doubters out there - compare the error rate in software compared to the error rate in construction engineering. If bridges had the same reliability software has, no-one would ever use them.
What is the significance of this? Nascent fields have what are called "lockean blocks". A lockean block is a basic piece of knowledge that underpins a particular field. Without certain fundamental knowledge of building methods, materials (physics in the modern case), you can't operate effectively in construction engineering. For this reason lockean blocks should not be patentable. To block access to fundamental knowledge in a field, will impede the development of that field. The patent system acknowledges this with its criteria of "non-obvious".
The problem with lockean blocks is that they can really only be identified once a field has matured. Until then there is a very real possibility that a lockean block will be patented. In other words because software is a relatively new field a patent examiner cannot identify what is "non-obvious" because we haven't quite worked out what obvious is. For this reason software should not be patented.
In 100 or more years, the software field will be very different. It may even be possible that software works with the same kind of reliability buildings/bridges/automobiles (well hopefully better than automobiles). Perhaps then we might be able to distinguish between a fundamental building block in the software field and a true software innovation worthy of a patent.
In summary, software is a field that is not yet mature enough for patents.
For anyone interested in reading about the lockean block concept (though not as it applies to software) have a look at:
Suthersanen, U. 1997. Exclusions to Design Protection - A New Paradigm. Chap. 1 of: Sterling, A. (ed), Perspectives on Intellectual Property Vol 2: Intellectual Property and Market Freedom. London: Sweet & Maxwell.
That's nothing MisterSquid...I'm into VRML...I can smell them...
I did something similar for my wife and I. Our setup was quite simple - Mandrake 8.x with LTSP running on a Celeron 333 with 384MB RAM as the server (and workstation) and a P133 as a client. With that setup we could run very comfortably -
KDE (two sessions)
StarOffice 5.2
Netscape 6
a Win4Lin session (wife) running Word 97, Excel 97 and IE.
That setup ran remarkably smoothly with the only the occasional delay if we were both trying to start an app at the same time. The two machines were connected with standard 100 ethernet.
Obviously this setup wouldn't scale to many more than two users and is not suited to a corporate environment, but it does show that modern hardware is far more powerful than necessary IN SOME CIRCUMSTANCES.
Do we still use the same setup? No - the motherboard of the server got messed up by a power surge and I decided I wanted a Powerbook.
And with thin clients 50 users can go home and have some unplanned free time if the server takes an unexpected timeout...
Which isn't all that different for a lot of organisations with workstations. Where I am - everything goes on the network. While I can save on the local drive, for all practical purposes if the main server goes down I can't access any of my work/templates/records etc etc. For all intents and purposes I can do bugger all.
For orgs with document management systems there is certainly no difference between having workstations and thin clients. If the main server is down, you can't do anything document related. In one govt org I deal with there is no point in saving to your local drive, as the system is such that you effectively have to redo the document into the DMS.
Yeah - lose a server with thin clients and you get to go home early - but the same can also be true for workstations.
As someone said earlier - open source politics is what democracy is supposed to be about. More properly, open source politics is what particpatory democracy is supposed to be about.
In Australia, the first mainstream example of participatory democracy was the Australian Democrats. They have party members elect their leaders, and even require party policies to be balloted by members. As such, they were probably the first member driven party since the early days of federation (the ALP probably began as a very member driven party - but that has changed).
Now, for those of you that follow Australian politics, you will no doubt have noticed that the Australian Democrats are not in a very healthy state at the moment. At the last federal election they received their lowest level of support since their inception and lost all three of their senators that were up for re-election (including OSS advocate Brian Greig).
The decline in support for the Australian Democrats can be traced partly to their support of the GST, which alienated a lot of left-leaning voters, but most substantially to a major public brawl within the party back in 2001 (I think). This brawl included the dumping of then party leader Natasha Stott-Despoja - an individually who was both popular within the Democrats and the electorate at large.
This public spat shows the biggest difficulty faced by advocates of participatory democracy. Democracy is both beautiful and ugly. It involves the resolution of sometimes diametrically opposed positions. Such resolutions are not always peaceful and rarely ever private. As such, when the Democrats faced such an ugly moment it was became the political drama du jour and was lapped up by the press.
Now here is the kicker - if you have a public spat, voter very quickly stop voting for you. The media portrays you as "deeply divided" and "unlikely to recover". Politically that is the coup de grace.
Politics is not like software. In software if you have an idea you can demonstrate that idea in practice and you can debate the technical merits of that idea using quantifiable data. This does not preclude personal ambitions etc getting in the way, but OSS development is the development of a technical product.
Politics is only part technical. For the main it is philosophy, morality, expediency, ambition etc - none of which are the subject of technical discussion. The GNOME-KDE flamewars might sound nasty, the kernel VM flamewars might sound nasty, but they are nothing in comparison to political disagreements.
Open source politics is great - but it is painful. Unless voters accept that it is painful, and ugly, and personal, open source politics will lose out to the great political cathedrals every time.
The ALP is a bottom up party? Are you sure? Do you really consider trade unions and factions the grass roots of the ALP and that they push ideas upward?
Don't you remember when Hawke and Keating walked into the caucas (party room for you non-Aussies) and said "we are going to an election and we're going to allow uranium mining" in complete contradiction to the ALP policy platform?
Don't you remember Latham giving the finger to Tasmanian forrestry workers to try and get a couple of votes in Sydney and Melbourne? Was that an example of bottom-up politics?
As for the ALP having their brawls in public, I'm not sure I agree. From my recollection the Party in opposition has their brawls in public, while the Government takes care of theirs behind closed doors. Back in the 80's the Liberal Party had plenty of very public spats.
I'm not denying any of your points - but the situation is still nothing like Florida. Noone has been disqualified for voting, the ballot papers are straightforward and consistent throughout the country. A political deal like that may seem unpalatable, but it is still not the same as the situation in Florida and not necessarily un-democratic (it was not a secret deal after all).
The "decency" laws aren't as good as they used to be. Alas no more cool mags for me...
When it comes to doing deals with right wing nutters - the Democrats did a deal with FF only after FF announced that their support of families would include same sex couples. The Greens on the other hand did a preference deal with the ALP - who voted against gay law reform - and then have the audacity to criticise others.