"A Walled Wide Web for Nervous Autocrats " - Wall Street Journal, Jan 8 2011
— Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a
fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book is "The Net
Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom."
Rather dismissive of the proponents of Open Source: "At the end of
2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be
fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks". I guess IBM and
others fall in to this group....
"The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the
implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley
and the political interests of Washington." Stop, you are making me
laugh too hard!
"But just a few weeks before Mr. Putin publicly endorsed open-source
software, FBI Director Robert Mueller toured Silicon Valley's leading
companies to ask their CEOs to build back doors into their software,
making it easier for American law enforcement and intelligence
gathering agencies to eavesdrop on online conversations. " Lovely.
But the author seems to at least _partially_ get FLOSS: "For ordinary
Internet users, there is one silver lining: The embrace of open-source
technology by governments may result in more intuitive software
applications, written by a more diverse set of developers." And more
transparent, (often) open standards, more flexible, no vendor lock-in,
(usually) more nimble, (usually) cheaper, etc.
-Glen
skype: @glennnewton
http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/--
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Locked
