Talks from the Red Hat Summit [LWN.net]

Talks from the Red Hat Summit

Posted Jun 9, 2006 17:23 UTC (Fri) by surajvijayan (guest, #17740)
Parent article: Talks from the Red Hat Summit

Eben Moglen's talk was quite interesting.. I thought the stress on Americanism, Yankee ingenuity and bringing freedom the American way was misplaced. Would have been better if he had taken a more universal approach.

Talks from the Red Hat Summit

Posted Jun 9, 2006 22:24 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

Well what he said is very true (historically yankee was very associated ingenuity) and he is addressing a American audiance and he he is a American.

So that is not suprising.

Also he had to point out how difficult it is to translate the idea that Freedom is good for Freedom sake and that individual effort and self-interest provides superior results then some concerted governmental or large business effort. At least in terms of progress.

As Americans we tend to take this for granted while in other culture people may have a hard time understanding how self interest combined with low regulation can lead to superior results for sociaty as a whole.

This is the whole point behind GPL and why Free software is actually pro capitolistic rather then communistic as people would like you to beleive.

This is a very difficult point to get across to some people.

So his ultimate point was to get across to the Americans in the audiance that they have to make a concerted effort at educating of this notion of "Superior Results Through Self Interest and Freedom" to the rest of the world. That if your talking to somebody in India, China, Africa, or in some parts of Europe they may not immediately understand what your talking about. It may seem counter intuitive.

The the politics is something to be proud of and is very compelling to the average person and average business owner and that Freedom is a good thing that should be promoted. Rather then just concentrating on "Open source software is a better model for software development" mantra. (which is absolutely true.)

If you just go at the OSS angle and say it's a better model then people will miss the point of WHY it is a better model.

quite a different take

Posted Jun 10, 2006 4:43 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

I thought he was saying that where the USA is (business monopolies, patents) is not where the USA was heading a few generations ago (encouragement for ingenuity to be acted on) and that free software is about getting back on course.

Talks from the Red Hat Summit

Posted Jun 14, 2006 18:50 UTC (Wed) by surajvijayan (guest, #17740) [Link]

I hate to sound un-Americam, but ingenuity is not a pergotaive of US. There have been many, many creative inventions and discoveries outside of US.. many, many centuries even before US was created.

I thought this talk was not addressed just to people in the US, Redhat is a global company, it provides product and services around the globe.Furthermore, this talk has been published on the internet for people all around the world. When addessing global audence, it sounds a bit jingoistic when the term yankee ingenuity is repeatedly used..

I think you are using the term communism to refer to old failed, Soviet system, this is not true. True communism has very strong idealistic and revolutionary characteristics that can benefit mankind immensily. I find lot of qualites of true comminism is Free Software (Richard Stallman). Free Software is very co-operative work, it is ment for comman good - not just in self interest as you suggest.