I see the task of defining an open source license that excludes military uses as no more difficult
Then you don't understand what an open source license is. It is a grant to use the code for any purposes - read the Open Source definition. You may feel that adding a license statement against the military may be reasonable; someone else may feel that a license statement against pornography may be reasonable; and yet another may feel that a license statement against religion is reasonable. What you end up with, then, is a collection of software with license terms where you have to read every license to make sure your use is conforming, which is something that Free Software was created to prevent, and something that Free Software developers and users don't want to deal with.
Does anyone know of an OSS license that includes some statement to the effect of: "This software is free for use, redistribution, and modification by any entity for any purpose, as long as any form of it is never used for military purposes." ???
It's a contradiction in terms. Open source software can not have restrictions on fields of use, which includes the military. Once you've stepped over that line, you're no longer open source. This (like most of the rest of the open source definition) comes from the Debian Free Software Guidelines (and ultimately the base ideas of Free Software.) The point being, is that I can download and use any program in Debian without worrying if it has clauses against military or Unitarians or vegitarians or meat-eaters or males or whatever other category you might want to think up. Otherwise, get ready to read a huge stack of licenses to find out whether any program you're using can't be used for your purposes.
Frankly, I wouldn't use a program with a no-military license. Militaries are tools, for use for good or bad, in defense against a cruel invader or a righteous uprising, in attack versus a psychotic despot or defiant democracy. Because some of their uses are bad, doesn't mean we need to stop all of them.
I'm all for open source being used for military, as long as the author hasn't specifically proscribed such uses.
It's open source. The author can't specifically proscribe any use and it still be open source.
(And no, distribution is different from use.)
if a country like Iraq or Libya or N. Korea (or China?) were using stuff from freshmeat to aid their military.
And how are we going to stop them? Blame Microsoft for translating their software to Chinese and selling it to them; blame IBM for selling computers to the Nazis and showing them how to use it. But for the most part, free software is just out there. If an agreement with the world's largest superpower isn't going to stop them, how is something in the license?
Now, there are closer lines to cross. What about accepting translations from the Chinese? In my role as the one-time maintainer of the GNU Unifont, I accepted Farsi glyphs from some Iranians. A paranoid might want to avoid that.
Remember that in the US you can be put to death for treason during wartime,
I think you've got a pretty solid defense that you aren't helping the enemy during wartime if you just write software with no knowledge of their use. And war is war; China and Iran and Libya, while not places we are happy with, are not at war with us. As long as you act as a software maintainer of civilian software, I can't see a solid case against you, even if you accept translations.
Just out of curiosity, anyone know what mathematicians, engineers, and phycicists would do in regards to these complex problems before there were these programs mentioned?
Left them alone. For example, fractals as a consistent theory was never persued prior to modern computers. The Mandelbrot fractal took several minutes to draw on my old 386; think of trying to work it out by hand. Even if someone discovered it (they discovered the related Julian set), it's a lot harder to work with when you can't see what's going on quickly, and it's a lot less interesting. Fractals were generally considered monsters, and hedgewords were added to all the appropriate theory to exclude that hairness.
It only took 14 lives, several decades and tens of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to prove that they should have stuck with the original plan to begin with.
To prove that? How do you know that the original plan would not have killed as many, if not more, people? Or that the original plan works better then the space shuttle? All we know is that the space shuttle didn't live up to the original expectations and sometimes failed catastrophically (which is like, duh, sitting on a million tons of rocket fuel isn't the safest place in the world, and neither is falling from a hundred miles in the air. Both of which any serious plan of ours currently has.)
Game rules are not copyrightable. They can be patented, but as far as D&D goes, the time for that passed long ago. Any copyright that exists is only on the specific way the rules were written. Rewrite the book yourself, using different wording but preserving the same meaning, and you'd be ok. Certain terms may be trademarked, but they're easy enough to discover and work around.
And WotC (back in the old, old pre-MtG days) got sued by Palladium for including rules on using Primal Order (their rules for gods) with Rifts in the book. I heard it almost drove them out of buisness. If you can afford to spend hours in court arguing copyright and trademark law, go for it.
Yes, DVD is better quality, but except for videophiles, people don't care much about the negligible difference.
Videocassetes are pains. You have to rewind, you can't skip to the part of the movie you want instantly, you can't play them on computer, they jam and they don't usually have all the extras that DVDs have. (Can you really live without the Weird Al love scene on the UHF DVD?) There's a noticable difference in quality, too, even to someone like me who rarely notices stuff like that.
My harddrive is filled with pictures and music and videos and code (invariant in size with UTF-8). My bandwidth is usually filled with pictures and videos. None of this changes in size with character coding. I happen to have a large percentage of the Project Gutenberg archives on my disk - surely an unusual situation - but even doubling the size of that (again, that wouldn't happen with UTF-8 or if I kept it compressed) wouldn't make much difference. It's not that big a deal.
Really? Here's why Mickey Mouse may have fallen into the public domain [asu.edu], not through copyright expiration but rather through lack of proper notice when notice was required.
The problem is a 70-odd year "failure to have proper notice" means that Disney and you are going to have a long battle, and if you have the money, you may win. What you'll win won't be worth the money, though. If it fell into the public domain through copyright expiration, you've got a solid clear case that might be worth fighting.
the united states constitution places no restrictions on states with regard to freedom of speech.
Why don't you go educate yourself? Try reading the 14th amendment, and then go read what everyone agrees it means. The amendment itself is as clear as mud, but everyone agrees that the intent is to apply the Bill of Rights to the states.
if they cut all anit-bush articles from the newspapers they provide, i may say the policy is stupid and should change, but you won't catch me saying it's unconstitutional.
You would find me and a lot of other folk saying it's unconstitutional. Content-based censorship has never been recognized as constitutional, and is far more remincent of a dictatorship than any form of democracy.
i'm sick of people whining that my tax dollars don't give them enough.
People are complaining that their tax dollars are being wasted on something that doesn't work and is unconstitional. It takes librarian time and money to add and run these censorship filters.
Or put it this way, would you be happy to hand your credit card details
Whatever happened to encryption? Any one on a local network can packet sniff your information anyway, so handle it properly and no one can read it.
I can show you the agreements I have to sign that make me legally accountable for protecting any information I am privy to in the use of those licenses.
I'm sure Martha Stewart and the heads of Enron had to sign papers saying they would not embezzle, cheat and scam their way to fortune. It didn't stop them.
idiot [reference.com] - A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers.
moron [reference.com] - A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education.
Bush, Jr., may not be the best public speaker, but he does not fit the above definitions.
Gee, you think it's possible he wasn't using the above definitions?
dork [reference.com] - 1. Slang. A stupid, inept, or foolish person. 2. Vulgar Slang. The penis.
Bush, Sr., was by your own words intelligent,
But that doesn't prevent him from being inept or foolish.
fool [reference.com] - One who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding.
Yeah, you described Clinton well there.
Cute. My side's wise and intellegent, but your side's full of fools and idiots. Maybe you should open your eyes and actually look at these people; there's fools and idiots, wise men and geniuses on both sides.
taxpayers buy computers for children to use, but it's considered a first ammendment violation for them not to deliver all internet content?
They buy computers for people in the library to use, and the first amendment says that the government doesn't have the right to pick and choose what content is acceptable; the government cannot say the library should get rid of its books on guns, and likewise, when the government gets a connection to the Internet, where it would have to proactively delete content, it can't do so.
if they don't have a right to view any internet content at taxpayer expense, how can it be uncontitutional for them to view partial internet content at taxpayer expense?
They don't have any right to libraries, so why not have libraries that cut any anti-George Bush message out of the newspaper before they put it on the shelf?
leave me alone.
You chose to come here; you chose to post. If you want to be left alone, go away.
Do it for the children! Give us all your rights for the children!
This covers more then just children. This covers all library computers.
I feel we should err on the side of caution. I do see frustrated students that find sites that probably shouldn't be blocked. At the same time, however, I see very few blatently "bad" sites on our computer screens at school.
But why do you see few blatently bad screens? How many students are going to be blatant enough to browse porn sites during class or at a library? You're letting some corporation silently censor your children, who won't tell you what they're censoring, and who have historically censored sites in opposition to the censorware programs, NOW, and a bunch of other sites important for young citizens.
Perhaps you are OK with Johnny "just being a kid", but that's not what I think it means to be a kid, and I dont' want my daughter to have any part of it.
I'm not okay with what Johnny is doing, but the point is, you've got to take it up with Johnny. Trying to slap a ban on the Internet doesn't solves the problem - every blocker has huge holes, and the real world still exists out there.
"If you want to allow unfiltered internet, do it at home"
Your daughter will run into things on that Internet that you don't consider good. A look at the Portal of Evil should quickly find something that will offend you deeply, but won't be blocked by a straight pornography blocker. There's probably stuff that you wouldn't mind your daughter reading that I wouldn't want my children reading. The Internet is a microcosm of the world; if you want your child to grow up sheltered, with your beliefs, you're going to need to do your custom filtering.
Furthermore, I'd be more happy with a filtered Internet if I didn't know that Quaker websties and the National Organization of Women website and websites talking about how bad the filtering software is and anything on Geocities were all prone to being banned, despite being valuable sites for growing citizens; and also if I didn't know that my website could go up tomorrow, and hidden between my Project Gutenberg links and programming junk could very well be a short story with hot lesbian sex of the type I'm fairly positive you don't want your daughter to read. There's too many false positives (and far too biased false positives) and way too many false negatives to implement it.
You mean the one that had the buggy context switch marked "you are not expected to understand this"? You mean the one that ran on one system that had mostly the same hardware on every computer? I don't honestly see how you can compare the Unix V.6 kernel with the Linux kernel; if the Unix V.6 kernel had to handle a dozen different broken filesystems and hundreds of different pieces of hardware, there would be some deeply sucky code in it, too.
Sendmail is good code. BIND is good code.
Both programs that ring bells as having many security flaws. I'd hardly catagorize a program that permitted the creation of the first Internet-killing worm as "good code".
If little Johnny visits "phat-butts.com" -- I don't want my daughter exposed to that during World History...
And when little Johnny is reading "Phat Butts" in class, and your daughter sees that, then what? Or if little Johnny's friends dare Johnny to expose himself to your daughter?
Democracy calls for a lot of personal responsibility and involvement; is the average Iraqi educated enough to understand the issues, and democratic enough not to give the keys to the country to the first dictator to walk by and promise everything?
Right, and the US is doing so much better in all those areas...
We aren't perfect; but the average voter knows what the issues are, and has some knowledge about the issue. Furthermore, we believe in democracy; no general or monomanic is going to get support if he just declares himself dictator, and people going by the back door are still going to have the ACLU and friends and a bunch of far-right jumping all over it.
That level of idealism is fine while your dad is paying the tuition and kicking in half of the money to pay your room rent.
And? I don't see why the "Big Business" mentality would encourage one to release code under the BSD either. In any case, the complete lack of idealism is what brings down societies; when the people will accept bread and circuses from the hand of a dictator, the society is doomed.
Are you saying when someone release their software in BSD license, you need do duplicate what they did?
No; but he wasn't offering to release his stuff under the BSD, but instead asking that we release our stuff under the BSD so he can use it under a commercial license.
That doesn't say much for the Japanese and Germans. I'd say they've come a long way since we made them make some changes.
Ever heard of the Weimar republic? The Germans were certainly familiar with democracy - but the first time we made them make some changes, it didn't stick.
It's true that the Japanese did not have a democratic society prior to the US invasion. But they did have an educated society, and a more complex social structure then "big man on top calls all the shots."
Democracy calls for a lot of personal responsibility and involvement; is the average Iraqi educated enough to understand the issues, and democratic enough not to give the keys to the country to the first dictator to walk by and promise everything?
This frustration and hatred also applies to Free Software projects/products, probably even moreso.
The reason why a lot of people use Linux is because it doesn't, in its own way. The people who use Linux are techies, and end users. And looking at the interface from their level - half the programs are backwards-compatible to a 30 year old operating system. gcc has the same options to pcc, whereever pcc had that feature. Stuff doesn't randomly move around a Unix system; people who break 15 year old scripts using undocumented features of BSD 2 promptly get hostile feedback.
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I see the task of defining an open source license that excludes military uses as no more difficult
Then you don't understand what an open source license is. It is a grant to use the code for any purposes - read the Open Source definition. You may feel that adding a license statement against the military may be reasonable; someone else may feel that a license statement against pornography may be reasonable; and yet another may feel that a license statement against religion is reasonable. What you end up with, then, is a collection of software with license terms where you have to read every license to make sure your use is conforming, which is something that Free Software was created to prevent, and something that Free Software developers and users don't want to deal with.
Does anyone know of an OSS license that includes some statement to the effect of: "This software is free for use, redistribution, and modification by any entity for any purpose, as long as any form of it is never used for military purposes." ???
It's a contradiction in terms. Open source software can not have restrictions on fields of use, which includes the military. Once you've stepped over that line, you're no longer open source. This (like most of the rest of the open source definition) comes from the Debian Free Software Guidelines (and ultimately the base ideas of Free Software.) The point being, is that I can download and use any program in Debian without worrying if it has clauses against military or Unitarians or vegitarians or meat-eaters or males or whatever other category you might want to think up. Otherwise, get ready to read a huge stack of licenses to find out whether any program you're using can't be used for your purposes.
Frankly, I wouldn't use a program with a no-military license. Militaries are tools, for use for good or bad, in defense against a cruel invader or a righteous uprising, in attack versus a psychotic despot or defiant democracy. Because some of their uses are bad, doesn't mean we need to stop all of them.
I'm all for open source being used for military, as long as the author hasn't specifically proscribed such uses.
It's open source. The author can't specifically proscribe any use and it still be open source.
(And no, distribution is different from use.)
if a country like Iraq or Libya or N. Korea (or China?) were using stuff from freshmeat to aid their military.
And how are we going to stop them? Blame Microsoft for translating their software to Chinese and selling it to them; blame IBM for selling computers to the Nazis and showing them how to use it. But for the most part, free software is just out there. If an agreement with the world's largest superpower isn't going to stop them, how is something in the license?
Now, there are closer lines to cross. What about accepting translations from the Chinese? In my role as the one-time maintainer of the GNU Unifont, I accepted Farsi glyphs from some Iranians. A paranoid might want to avoid that.
Remember that in the US you can be put to death for treason during wartime,
I think you've got a pretty solid defense that you aren't helping the enemy during wartime if you just write software with no knowledge of their use. And war is war; China and Iran and Libya, while not places we are happy with, are not at war with us. As long as you act as a software maintainer of civilian software, I can't see a solid case against you, even if you accept translations.
Just out of curiosity, anyone know what mathematicians, engineers, and phycicists would do in regards to these complex problems before there were these programs mentioned?
Left them alone. For example, fractals as a consistent theory was never persued prior to modern computers. The Mandelbrot fractal took several minutes to draw on my old 386; think of trying to work it out by hand. Even if someone discovered it (they discovered the related Julian set), it's a lot harder to work with when you can't see what's going on quickly, and it's a lot less interesting. Fractals were generally considered monsters, and hedgewords were added to all the appropriate theory to exclude that hairness.
It only took 14 lives, several decades and tens of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to prove that they should have stuck with the original plan to begin with.
To prove that? How do you know that the original plan would not have killed as many, if not more, people? Or that the original plan works better then the space shuttle? All we know is that the space shuttle didn't live up to the original expectations and sometimes failed catastrophically (which is like, duh, sitting on a million tons of rocket fuel isn't the safest place in the world, and neither is falling from a hundred miles in the air. Both of which any serious plan of ours currently has.)
Game rules are not copyrightable. They can be patented, but as far as D&D goes, the time for that passed long ago. Any copyright that exists is only on the specific way the rules were written. Rewrite the book yourself, using different wording but preserving the same meaning, and you'd be ok. Certain terms may be trademarked, but they're easy enough to discover and work around.
And WotC (back in the old, old pre-MtG days) got sued by Palladium for including rules on using Primal Order (their rules for gods) with Rifts in the book. I heard it almost drove them out of buisness. If you can afford to spend hours in court arguing copyright and trademark law, go for it.
Yes, DVD is better quality, but except for videophiles, people don't care much about the negligible difference.
Videocassetes are pains. You have to rewind, you can't skip to the part of the movie you want instantly, you can't play them on computer, they jam and they don't usually have all the extras that DVDs have. (Can you really live without the Weird Al love scene on the UHF DVD?) There's a noticable difference in quality, too, even to someone like me who rarely notices stuff like that.
50% of the bandwidth, 50% of the disk space
My harddrive is filled with pictures and music and videos and code (invariant in size with UTF-8). My bandwidth is usually filled with pictures and videos. None of this changes in size with character coding. I happen to have a large percentage of the Project Gutenberg archives on my disk - surely an unusual situation - but even doubling the size of that (again, that wouldn't happen with UTF-8 or if I kept it compressed) wouldn't make much difference. It's not that big a deal.
UTF-8, aka UTF-FSS, still doesn't help. The name promised "file system safe," but it isn't.
Yes, it is. It avoids nulls and slashes, except in encoding nulls and slashes. That's all you have to do to produce acceptable POSIX filenames.
You still have to change all of your operating systems and programs.
Do you think you can wave your hand and magically add support to all the world's (sometimes very complex) scripts?
I'm tired of having to use the awkward wchar_t in C programs
Use a language where it's less awkward, or use Unicode via a different C package (the one in libglib, for example.)
not being able to use emacs (since vim and cooledit are the only text editors I've found with UTF-8 support).
You haven't looked very hard. Emacs21 has UTF-8 support, as do Yudit and kedit and several other editors.
Really? Here's why Mickey Mouse may have fallen into the public domain [asu.edu], not through copyright expiration but rather through lack of proper notice when notice was required.
The problem is a 70-odd year "failure to have proper notice" means that Disney and you are going to have a long battle, and if you have the money, you may win. What you'll win won't be worth the money, though. If it fell into the public domain through copyright expiration, you've got a solid clear case that might be worth fighting.
the united states constitution places no restrictions on states with regard to freedom of speech.
Why don't you go educate yourself? Try reading the 14th amendment, and then go read what everyone agrees it means. The amendment itself is as clear as mud, but everyone agrees that the intent is to apply the Bill of Rights to the states.
if they cut all anit-bush articles from the newspapers they provide, i may say the policy is stupid and should change, but you won't catch me saying it's unconstitutional.
You would find me and a lot of other folk saying it's unconstitutional. Content-based censorship has never been recognized as constitutional, and is far more remincent of a dictatorship than any form of democracy.
i'm sick of people whining that my tax dollars don't give them enough.
People are complaining that their tax dollars are being wasted on something that doesn't work and is unconstitional. It takes librarian time and money to add and run these censorship filters.
Well, I certainly agree that Bush is an idiot, but obviously about half of america disagreed, because they voted for him.
Actually, no; half of America believe he was better then the other guy. Doesn't necessarily mean they don't think he's an idiot.
Or put it this way, would you be happy to hand your credit card details
Whatever happened to encryption? Any one on a local network can packet sniff your information anyway, so handle it properly and no one can read it.
I can show you the agreements I have to sign that make me legally accountable for protecting any information I am privy to in the use of those licenses.
I'm sure Martha Stewart and the heads of Enron had to sign papers saying they would not embezzle, cheat and scam their way to fortune. It didn't stop them.
idiot [reference.com] - A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers.
moron [reference.com] - A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education.
Bush, Jr., may not be the best public speaker, but he does not fit the above definitions.
Gee, you think it's possible he wasn't using the above definitions?
dork [reference.com] - 1. Slang. A stupid, inept, or foolish person. 2. Vulgar Slang. The penis.
Bush, Sr., was by your own words intelligent,
But that doesn't prevent him from being inept or foolish.
fool [reference.com] - One who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding.
Yeah, you described Clinton well there.
Cute. My side's wise and intellegent, but your side's full of fools and idiots. Maybe you should open your eyes and actually look at these people; there's fools and idiots, wise men and geniuses on both sides.
taxpayers buy computers for children to use, but it's considered a first ammendment violation for them not to deliver all internet content?
They buy computers for people in the library to use, and the first amendment says that the government doesn't have the right to pick and choose what content is acceptable; the government cannot say the library should get rid of its books on guns, and likewise, when the government gets a connection to the Internet, where it would have to proactively delete content, it can't do so.
if they don't have a right to view any internet content at taxpayer expense, how can it be uncontitutional for them to view partial internet content at taxpayer expense?
They don't have any right to libraries, so why not have libraries that cut any anti-George Bush message out of the newspaper before they put it on the shelf?
leave me alone.
You chose to come here; you chose to post. If you want to be left alone, go away.
When it comes to children,
Do it for the children! Give us all your rights for the children!
This covers more then just children. This covers all library computers.
I feel we should err on the side of caution. I do see frustrated students that find sites that probably shouldn't be blocked. At the same time, however, I see very few blatently "bad" sites on our computer screens at school.
But why do you see few blatently bad screens? How many students are going to be blatant enough to browse porn sites during class or at a library? You're letting some corporation silently censor your children, who won't tell you what they're censoring, and who have historically censored sites in opposition to the censorware programs, NOW, and a bunch of other sites important for young citizens.
Perhaps you are OK with Johnny "just being a kid", but that's not what I think it means to be a kid, and I dont' want my daughter to have any part of it.
I'm not okay with what Johnny is doing, but the point is, you've got to take it up with Johnny. Trying to slap a ban on the Internet doesn't solves the problem - every blocker has huge holes, and the real world still exists out there.
"If you want to allow unfiltered internet, do it at home"
Your daughter will run into things on that Internet that you don't consider good. A look at the Portal of Evil should quickly find something that will offend you deeply, but won't be blocked by a straight pornography blocker. There's probably stuff that you wouldn't mind your daughter reading that I wouldn't want my children reading.
The Internet is a microcosm of the world; if you want your child to grow up sheltered, with your beliefs, you're going to need to do your custom filtering.
Furthermore, I'd be more happy with a filtered Internet if I didn't know that Quaker websties and the National Organization of Women website and websites talking about how bad the filtering software is and anything on Geocities were all prone to being banned, despite being valuable sites for growing citizens; and also if I didn't know that my website could go up tomorrow, and hidden between my Project Gutenberg links and programming junk could very well be a short story with hot lesbian sex of the type I'm fairly positive you don't want your daughter to read. There's too many false positives (and far too biased false positives) and way too many false negatives to implement it.
Um...Unix? Unix V.6?
You mean the one that had the buggy context switch marked "you are not expected to understand this"? You mean the one that ran on one system that had mostly the same hardware on every computer? I don't honestly see how you can compare the Unix V.6 kernel with the Linux kernel; if the Unix V.6 kernel had to handle a dozen different broken filesystems and hundreds of different pieces of hardware, there would be some deeply sucky code in it, too.
Sendmail is good code. BIND is good code.
Both programs that ring bells as having many security flaws. I'd hardly catagorize a program that permitted the creation of the first Internet-killing worm as "good code".
If little Johnny visits "phat-butts.com" -- I don't want my daughter exposed to that during World History...
And when little Johnny is reading "Phat Butts" in class, and your daughter sees that, then what? Or if little Johnny's friends dare Johnny to expose himself to your daughter?
Democracy calls for a lot of personal responsibility and involvement; is the average Iraqi educated enough to understand the issues, and democratic enough not to give the keys to the country to the first dictator to walk by and promise everything?
Right, and the US is doing so much better in all those areas...
We aren't perfect; but the average voter knows what the issues are, and has some knowledge about the issue. Furthermore, we believe in democracy; no general or monomanic is going to get support if he just declares himself dictator, and people going by the back door are still going to have the ACLU and friends and a bunch of far-right jumping all over it.
That level of idealism is fine while your dad is paying the tuition and kicking in half of the money to pay your room rent.
And? I don't see why the "Big Business" mentality would encourage one to release code under the BSD either. In any case, the complete lack of idealism is what brings down societies; when the people will accept bread and circuses from the hand of a dictator, the society is doomed.
But you make us duplicate your simple things.
Are you saying when someone release their software in BSD license, you need do duplicate what they did?
No; but he wasn't offering to release his stuff under the BSD, but instead asking that we release our stuff under the BSD so he can use it under a commercial license.
That doesn't say much for the Japanese and Germans. I'd say they've come a long way since we made them make some changes.
Ever heard of the Weimar republic? The Germans were certainly familiar with democracy - but the first time we made them make some changes, it didn't stick.
It's true that the Japanese did not have a democratic society prior to the US invasion. But they did have an educated society, and a more complex social structure then "big man on top calls all the shots."
Democracy calls for a lot of personal responsibility and involvement; is the average Iraqi educated enough to understand the issues, and democratic enough not to give the keys to the country to the first dictator to walk by and promise everything?
This frustration and hatred also applies to Free Software projects/products, probably even moreso.
The reason why a lot of people use Linux is because it doesn't, in its own way.
The people who use Linux are techies, and end users. And looking at the interface from their level - half the programs are backwards-compatible to a 30 year old operating system. gcc has the same options to pcc, whereever pcc had that feature. Stuff doesn't randomly move around a Unix system; people who break 15 year old scripts using undocumented features of BSD 2 promptly get hostile feedback.