Category Archives: Politics - Page 2

A Revolutionary Effect.

Posted by on October 16, 2011 No comments

The Occupy protests are spreading.  This is in spite of quite a bit of silence in much of the mainstream media, who only covered them when ultimately forced to.  I should except Russia Today and Al Jazeera from the above statement, their coverage has been very good.  I’ll chat about my views on the protest movement another time, but something else has caught my attention.

The protest camp in New York made it into the IT media earlier this week.  This was in the form of an article covering their IT infrastructure, which I must give praise where it’s due, seems very nicely put together given the circumstances.  The sentence that caught me is in the above article, it’s a quote from a protester referring to the disappearance of a laptop during a police raid,  and I’ll quote it below.

“We’d love to get an Apple, because a lot of the software we’re used to is on the Mac,” one said. “Linux machines are always nice, given Linux is having the same revolutionary effect on the industry as we are on society, but even Windows machines would be a help.”

The above is quite accurate, GNU/Linux is having a revolutionary effect.  But the thought struck me a little later that this isn’t the entire story, is it?  GNU/Linux is a great system, a colleague of mine was at a presentation given by a Microsoft employee where the MS guy went through the Windows Server 2008 kernel and the Linux kernel.  After 1 hour 45 minutes, the conclusion was that they’re much of a muchness, he had to admit that the Linux kernel is every bit as good as the Microsoft offering.  Of course, with tools like openQA from the openSuSE team, the future is looking even brighter.

So the software is great, we know that, but revolutionary?  I submit that it isn’t by itself revolutionary.  You can get the code to BSD Unix, but that doesn’t really seem revolutionary in the way that is implied above, so what do I mean?  Enter stage left, the GNU General Public License, or GPL for short.

My understanding of things is this.  The BSD code can be referred to as “Open Source”, which means you get access to the source code and can play with it as you see fit to do so. However, you’re not required to give your changes back.  This means that BSD code has found it’s way into both Windows and the MacOS, but they are not required to return any improvements they made on other people’s hard work to the community.

The Linux kernel is under the GPL, which comes with a string attached.  If you modify the program and distribute it, then you have to make the modified source available so that others in the community can do the same.  For this reason, GPL’ed code is known as “Free Software“, it is not “Open Source”.  For a background to how the GPL came to be invented, I recommend “Free As In Freedom” a biography of the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M Stallman.

I’ve come to believe that the General Public license, and the associated “Four Freedoms” (see the “Free Software” link above), have been the thing that allowed the revolution to happen.  Think about it, a license that says high quality software and the improvements to said software are all available freely to everyone.  Individuals, communities and corporations alike.  We can study it, improve it, redistribute it, but not lock it away.

Now that’s revolutionary!

Sitting in the aftermath

Posted by on August 13, 2011 1 comment

Well, an awful lot has happened in the last week here in the UK.  At one point it almost seemed that the country was going up in flames.  The recent riots will be the source for many theories and political manoeuvres in the coming weeks and I’d like to get a few of my own thoughts down now that the dust is starting to settle.  I don’t claim that I’m right on any of this, but these are the directions my thoughts are meandering.

The causes of this are no doubt, varied and complex.  It’s not really possible to encircle those who took part into one simple demographic and point the finger there, the people involved came more or less from all over.  So the usual tired old tactic of “blame the <insert group here>” doesn’t really help, not that it ever did.  For my part, I suspect that part of this was fuelled by a feeling of impotence and disconnection from society.  After all, the programs that reached out to a lot of these people, that bled a lot of this pressure off have been cut.  Aspirations snatched away, a route out of the places their in taken, where do they vent their frustration?  Where else is there?  The politicians don’t seem to want to listen, or seem to have any idea at all what life is like outside planet Westminster.  When David Cameron said that we have a problem with gangs in this country, the first reaction I saw from so many people was “Welcome to the real world!”

In addition, we have the ever present celebrity and corporate sales driven culture, pushing all the latest designer goods and “must have” accessories in your face.  Things that you can’t afford, to be honest that you don’t really need, but we’re going to torture you with consumerist propaganda anyway.  So, you have all these things dangled in front of your nose as often as the media can, displayed by the celebrities that we’re all pushed by the media to be obsessed with.  But you have little chance to properly scratch that itch, ever.  This extends into the middle class by the way, don’t be fooled for a minute.  Then the chance comes along to scratch it and scratch it well. Is there any surprise that there was looting?

A few years ago I wrote about the dangers of walling up and suppressing your dark side, instead of acknowledging it and coming to terms with it.  This whole thing seems to be heading into the same sort of territory.  It seems to me that society has created a disconnect in society a large swathe of people with little reason to invest in society.  They see that politicians don’t care and are ineffectual and so don’t care for them. They’re tortured with consumerist propaganda, left with no way of resolving the desires that said propaganda invokes.  Their options for getting out of that trap are ever more limited and so their list of options grows thin.  Then we ignore them, push them aside and try to suppress them.  I’m not surprised there was an almighty explosion of rage.

How is society responding?  Badly, from what I can see.  One of the proposed solutions is to cut rioters benefits, maybe their access to council housing.  I can see the temptation of this path and almost signed the petition myself, but on reflection I can’t see it helping and refuse to sign it.  The only thing I can see that doing is taking the things I’ve touched on above and making them worse.  Throwing fuel onto an already dangerous fire doesn’t seem very helpful to me.  For my part, I suspect that the usual political sound-bites about being “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” won’t work.  A lot of the people in the riots had already been “cracked down on”, you can only crack down so far before it just doesn’t work any more.  How do you crack down on someone who doesn’t care and has no investment in wider society?  At what point do you start looking like the kind of regime that the Arabs have been so bravely trying to divest themselves of?

So what do I suppose might work?  I do often like to end my posts on a question, to try and leave food for thought.  This time I will offer my own thoughts in conclusion.

It’s time to bring these people in from the cold, re-engage with them and give them a reason to give a damn about wider society.  This will be something like opening a Pandora’s box, as it means that we have to take a long hard look at our society and the way we do things, it will probably mean that a fair few cherished attitudes and beliefs will have to change as well.  This will be painful, but the alternative is worse and eventually we will have a pressure explosion that will wreck everything.  How about we take the pressure out before it gets to that?

News International, not just a question of phones.

Posted by on July 12, 2011 No comments

The News International scandal has been rumbling along for a few days here in the UK, it’s spreading outside our borders as well, this one really does have wings.

It’s quite rightly provoked a storm of massive proportions, one that will leave things forever changed in the UK.  The whole subject of the relationship between the media, the police and those in power is now being opened and there will be many hard questions to be answered in the days and weeks that follow.

One question I have is relating to the scale of corporate power, more specifically multinationals.  As anyone who’s watched the film “The Corporation” will know, they are hardly moral, no matter what they claim.  They are arguably described as psychotic, fixated on one goal and regarding anyone and anything as disposable in the pursuit of that goal.  These corporate behemoths straddle the globe and carry a lot of weight and wield a lot of influence.  In short, they have an awful lot of power, but no democratic accountability; nobody elected them.

So, does the News International storm raise questions about the role of multinational corporations in national politics?  Does it raise worrying questions about the amount of power they wield?  Most definitely in my opinion.  These are questions that we have put to the back of our minds, but the News International situation gives us the chance to turn these questions over and ponder them.  It gives more power to the elbows of those who would raise these concerns and then push for a resolution to them.  I think that’s no bad thing.