Living together BUT not married: RR/MC and Linux

[David Bovill]

On 21 Nov 2005, at 19:19, Mathewson wrote:

> My wife is Bulgarian, her father was ina Communist prison
> camp . . .

Goli Otok?

> Earliert his year I went to Sofia (Capital of Bulgaria) and
> listened to Richard Stallman, and reached the follwoing
> conclusions:
>
> 1. He is a long-haired hippy rather like the ones in Brazil
> (mind you, I bet he can't speech portugese).
>
> 2. I agreed with almost everything he said - BUT not for
> the silly, loony-lefty reasons he gave.

Mr Stallman is a little difficult.

> However, I do think that there is a place for open source
> initiatives; especially in places such as (and if any one
> wants to point out that I am not politically correct; don't
> waste your time - I am a fairly right-wing reactionary - so
> there) Africa (or, to put it really crudely; the places
> where the colonial powers made the mistake of leaving
> without bothering to educate the local people so they could
> get ahead rather than become prey to horrible dicators;
> c.f. Mugabe, Idi Amin, and so on), India and the rest of
> the sub-continent, where a very large section of the
> population doesn't stand a chance to get on the escalator
> which will give them a chance in a proper meritocracy.

The reasons local government in many regions support open source, the  
reason the EU and Brasil and Spain and support open source is that  
money that would be spent on largely US bases licenses can instead be  
spent on training and local skills acquisition.

It is a myth to think that open source is free or saves money - it  
simply redirects the cost to developer time, while empowering those  
very developers to go on and create new cool stuff (locally).

We largely have left wing long haired Americans  to thank for this  
very un-american economic attitude. However it is absolutely no  
surprise that this comes from the US - as it is about freedom of  
knowledge (read speech) in the digital era.

Open source may be about (facilitate) "sharing" - but their is  
nothing left wing about the desire to stimulate innovation in the  
market by ensuring a healthy transfer of knowledge and avoiding  
monopoly.

Can i suggest that we move the political aspect of this discourse to  
a suitable Yahoo Group?