Anarchy, FUD and Me @ the UN
House on Red Corner · 2006-08-30
Yesterday, I went to a really nice seminar about Free Open Source Software at the United Nations. I was wearing a shirt with the Kubuntu logo and showing off my installation of Kubuntu on my laptop. I was with Og Maciel and we were both answering questions about Ubuntu.
We also got to participate in some discussions as well as hear some interesting presentations. Richard Stallman the founder of the Free Software Foundation gave a presentation about freedom in cyberspace and disagreed with anything but absolute freedom. He even dropped the term Anarchy into a discussion about how Open Source software is developed.
Then Danese Cooper, the Open Source Diva from Open Source Initiative gave a presentation about Open Source that removed most of the political message and gave a practical explanation of how and why it is developed and used. Just before lunch Og gave an passionate plead for the delegates to return to their governments and persuade them to use Open Source software in the execution of their duties to protect their citizens. Being Brazilian, he used an analogy that illustrated the difference in OS and proprietary software as the difference between Soccer and American Football. Every poor Brazilian kid knows you can roll up some socks and play soccer in the street, whereas you need highly specialized and expensive equipment to play American football.
After we had lunch, I was invited to sit with Richard Stallman and Danese Cooper, we heard some presentations that were more corporate in nature. For instance the Linux Professional Institute, the IT Director for the Spanish State of Extremadura (which switched completely to GNU/Linux and even wrote its own distribution), IBM, Novell, the Coordinator of the ICT Board for the UN and Microsoft.
Microsoft was there to be dismissive and even enlisted the Assistant to the US Consulate to try to call down the head of ICT for the UN Secretariat’s presentation on citations, however it seems as if this was more Fear, Uncertainty and Disbelief on the part of Microsoft, particularly in the cocky manner that the Microsoft Adviser to the UN gave his presentation which only demonstrated that corporation’s inability to conceive of a complete solution which utilizes Free and Open Source Software.
After the IBM, presentation about Open Source and Open Standards, I was able to sound off my experiences and tried to relate it to the UN’s case. My particular view on this whole manner is that the UN needs to be empowered to be able to perserve and maintain its documents for a really long period of time. Remember ten years ago, we were all using WordPerfect and now everyone is using Word, two different formats. The UN needs to have its documents in a format that is independent from vendors so that ten years from now whoever is producing the best software, will now require a complete reformat of all the document which stretch back to the League of Nations. What happens if one of these vendors goes out of business? So the document format needs to be in an Open Standard, one which is transparent, this decision is not for profits today and tomorrow but for future generations of humans who wish for peace on Earth.
Tags: Ubuntu