Having been in the Enterprise Applications business for all of my career, I have more than a little nose-thumbing and resentment for the sirens of Open Source. I have always considered them arrogant and petulant at the same time, especially Linux bigots. I most love the quote: "Those who hate Microsoft use Linux. Those who love Unix use BSD." Linux and that Open Source gang have always been haters, denizens of the Long Tail, envious of market share. What they never quite realized about their 'business model' is that in order to be responsible and responsive to real paying customers, you need to do some proprietary computing. These days it doesn't surprise me one bit that Oracle is fielding its own Linux and that Torvalds himself has accused various kernel geeks of bloating his OS. This is not only cosmic, but real-world justice.
wonder, why the Open Source community has yet to respond with a viable alternative.Some of the Open Source bleating has also found a convenient target in the Diebold folks vis a vis their efforts to build voting machines. Here is one place where one of the particular strengths of the Open Source model - independently verifiable security - can be put to good use. One wonders, OK I I think the answer lies soemwhere between, they have to work at real jobs, they don't really care about democracy and, they're just haters who shouldn't have been taken seriously in the first place.
I do take the White Hats seriously however, and I do have this from Emergent Chaos:
The right to vote, and to have one's vote counted is fundamental to how and why we accept our government, even when it makes colossal mistakes. This is an ideal which people around the world recognize and aspire to. The imprint of legitimacy which an election confers on a leader is important enough that even the Soviets faked elections so they could claim that mantle.
If we had voting systems that were trustworthy, transparent and understood by those operating them, then we could buy our voting machines from Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and not have to worry a lot about it. We do not, and cannot. We have transitioned from paper ballots and their understood problems into a brave new world of computerized and untrustworthy voting systems, and we are poorer for it.
So let's see an open source, free, secure, tamper resistant voting system. Democracy is waiting. Or is that kind of freedom not free either?
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