Recent Events, FOSS and Security, Gaming Personalities

[tcpip]

Somehow I neglected to mention in my last post two excellent events which I recently attended. First was John Foxx's Tiny Colour Movies. I shouted dukeofmelbourne to the event as it was he who introduced me to early Ultravox some twenty years ago. It was excellent, an arthouse-style archive of movie fragments from disparate sources, combined with the Foxx providing backing music. The second was a more intimate affair, but one by a person who has probably affected more people indirectly; dinner with arjen_lentz who regularly visits Melbourne to provide MySQL training and do more work for OpenQuery. As usual it was excellent technical and friendly conversation and I quite enjoyed the contributions by laptop006.

Free and Open Source software is one of the areas where, it seems to me, the morally right policy is also the best technical approach. Widely reported, for example, has been a serious OpenSSL exploit which has affected Debian and Debian-derived systems (e.g., Ubuntu), which of course was widely discussed on Slashdot. Now despite the seriousness of the problem, it was found and patched remarkably quickly. Would this even have been discovered in a closed source model? Would the company holding the patents and copyrights admit the problem? Would they release a patch? With those questions in mind - and given the general usability of FOSS desktop UNIX-like systems, it never ceases to surprise me that people, every day, are still using MS-Windows and other closed-source solutions. It's morally wrong, and it's technically dangerous.

Over the years, I have realised the people who are attracted to roleplaying games are an interesting bunch. Many are people with either an incredibly systematic knowledge (it seems that every second sysadmin is a RPGer). Many (such as patchworkkid, artbroken, drzero for example) are people of significant literary merit and talent. But some however are special and not in a good way. For example, one has to be a "very special individual", to start an abusive tirade because an observer comments that a regular gaming schedule might work better than an inconsistent one. Such a "special individual" would include Ian Bouch (yeah, top-posting, start from the bottom *sigh*). Congratulations Ian; I don't often condemn people on my journal for their personal behaviour but you sir, are an arsehole.

Comments

[dputiger.livejournal.com]

tcpip,

I homed in on this post as something interesting when I saw you say: With those questions in mind...it never ceases to surprise me that people, every day, are still using MS-Windows and other closed-source solutions. It's morally wrong, and it's technically dangerous. I'm going to table the "technically dangerous" bit, but I think you've hit on something very important when you define the use of closed-source software (specifically Windows) as "morally wrong."

Upon consideration, I think FOSS users can be thought of as generally belonging to at least one of three camps. Placing oneself in one of these groups does not exclude membership in the other two, and some people (including you, I think) are a member of all three. Economic FOSS users are those people and companies who use open-source software because they believe doing so makes financial sense, delivers a competitive advantage, or both . Members of this group can be users (IT departments, individuals, etc) or developers, and the corporate-backed efforts of companies like IBM or Sun would also fall into this category.

Next we have what I'm calling the Philosophers. Users in this group may or may not think FOSS is the best economic decision, but they put enough of a premium on the ideas, goals, and overall position of FOSS to use it even in situations where it may not be the best financial choice. A simple example of this group would be an individual who buys an OEM system with Vista pre-installed. Instead of using Vista, he deletes the OS and loads a Linux distro of his choice, even if the distro in question requires substantial configuration tweaking in order to run properly on his hardware. Put another way, this is the person who is willing to sacrifice a "reasonable" amount of time, energy, and in some cases, functionality, in order to have an FOSS-based system.

Finally, there are the Moralists. For this group, FOSS solutions aren't just a preference, they are a component of moral living. Some members of this group will view the situation more practically than others, and may accept the use of closed-source code as a necessary evil, but for the more "devout" members, anything less than absolute devotion represents ideologically unacceptable compromise. Richard Stallman is, I think, an excellent example of an extreme Moralist.

Having defined my terms, I'll actually say something. ;)

After reading your original post and considering the issue, I think that there's a definite tension between Economic and Moralist developers/users that actually ends up benefiting the closed source (i.e. Microsoft and Apple) camp. I throw Apple in here, by the way, because while the OS X kernel may be open-source, Apple's overall design methodology is, in my opinion, as closed-source as it gets.

Microsoft solutions don't ask any uncomfortable questions (with the possible exception of "Where the FUCK is your license key, user BitTorrent79?!") and they don't attempt to turn one's computing preferences into a referendum on personal morality. People all over the 'Net debate Vista vs. XP, but no one asks whether one solution is spiritually or ideologically purer than the other. Even when we bring Apple into the picture, such debates are muted, and tend to be anchored in economic terms (MS is a monopoly!) rather than moral ones.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent response. Anyone would think that you write IT articles on a regular basis or something :-)

I particularly congratulate you for making the clear and unambigious distinction between philosophy and morality. Due to the machinations of academic history there is an assumption that the two belong in the same discipline. This is certainly not the case; morality is a subset of philosophy in the same was that science or law or art is a subset of philosophy.

That comment made, I also think that the position of Apple is really worth exploring, as they are trying to do different things at different times, and may become very unglued as a result. As you have mentioned, the Apple OS X kernel is *nix-like, which includes all the technical benefits that come from the open-source side of things, but the rest of it is a proprietary as one can possible imagine.

Ultimately they're trying to be a bit like the *nix world, free and open source model and they're also trying to be a in the Microsoft world, that is make a play for monopoly profits (Apple too is monopolistic; just a smaller one for Apple products).

In their attempt to have the best of both worlds, I cannot help but think they might end up getting squeezed in the middle.

And yes, I do fall into all three camps :-)