[Ian Anderson wrote, in part:]
> The adoption of Linux and open source is important but I'm sure it does
> (and should) take a back seat to putting food on the table and keeping a
> roof over one's head, especially if one is raising a family. There is
> currently a lot of interest in resurrecting CLUE, the time and resources
> should be spent building up the infrastructure, not lining up the hordes
> for battle.
There is already a lot of activity on the technical side of supporting Linux
users. However, the role of any national support group is political as much
as anything. As such, some people make a connection between the abtruse
concepts of free and open source and serious economic issues, such as those
raised by the protestors at the recent G8 meeting in Kannanaskis.
As most of those reading this will know, the concept of "open-source" is a
clever fusion of the socialist (anti intellectual property) and libertarian
approaches to politics, thus cutting a swath across a broad section of
American (and Canadian) political opinion, but by no means encompassing
the totality of of political opinion.
Every organization created to promote a particular product line is supposed
to wax lyrical on its benefits to mankind, and gloss over its problems. The
latter will be adequately covered by the promoters of alternative products.
Similar remarks apply to political agendas as much as commercial products.
In narrow terms, there is battle between MS (a private American company)
and "Linux" (i.e. the rest of us) over control of the desktop. Some other
private American companies (Caldera, RedHat) have tried to capitalize on
this without surrendering the political capital of an "open" solution.
>From the point of view of poor countries, MS is by no means the only greedy
American company propped up by adsurd intellectual property laws favouring
Western countries. Others are Oracle, IBM, Lucent (telephony codecs),
Verisign, not to mention companies outside the computer sphere, especially
the recording industry. In the latter case, the equivalent of "open source" is
individuals making their own music and publishing it.
Canadian readers may not be adequately aware of the impact of open-source
in third-world countries. Third world countries regard the "leadership" of
American firms in the high tech domain as a dangerous instrument of permanent
hegemony.
Remedies to this [perceived] hegemony have included setting aside patents for
AIDS drugs in the name of national emergencies and assorted forms of shared-
control ("open-source") software.
For the time being, neither side of the tech/globalization debate have been too
eager to make the connection, partly because of the presence of large private
tech players in the open-source arena, and partly because of the doubts about
whether the open-source pathway is ready for prime time.
Nevertheless, it is clear that somewhere somehow the opensource movement
will find it necessary and expedient to seek legal remedies in the form of the
support of national governments, and it may be within the ambit of bodies
such as CLUE to play a role in this.
In other words, opensource can be seen as a cause of wide social relevance,
not merely a grievance against a particular large American corporation.
Now let's pay more attention to Linux itself. Linux, narrowly defined as the
OS itself, will face increasing irrelevance on the desktop as richer and richer
services are defined on top of it. You can read elsewhere of MS's intention
to recover lost OS revenues from MS Office.
In case anyone has failed to notice it, MS Office has become an "operating
environment" in its own right, which to my mind is far more odious than
any real or perceived failings of MS Windows. The OpenSource world, mean
while is still refighting the ancient interface wars.
Nearly the entire array of "GNU" software above the OS level has been
ported to Windows 2000, and there is an emerging class of Unix-like stuff
being deployed in the BSD layer of Mac OS.
All this means is that a narrow definition of Linux leads to increasingly
irrelevant discussions, thinking over a 5 to 10 year timespan, which is the
timescale that major advocacy organizations have to think.
I might point out that both Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have predicted
obsolescence of the their respective brainchilds **in their current forms**
over that timespan.
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