“For the last two years, I’ve been keeping track of the UN sponsored, International Telecommunication Union administered, World Summit on the Information Society process that held its first mass meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in December 2003. The process culminated last week with a meeting of over 19000 people in Tunis, Tunisia. I was reading the final reports emanating from the conference over the last several days, a question occurred to me. What happened to open source?”
“UN sponsored, International Telecommunication Union administered, World Summit on the Information Society process that held its first mass meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in December 2003.”
… I’m already lost.
19000 people, as many as that? The conference must almost have cleaned out the world supply of freeloaders, liggers, fatheads, crooks, creeps, polical extremists, sharks, bribe-takers, extortionists, fantasists and brown-nosers. I’m not sure anyone really knows what the conference was about. Anyway, thank god they didn’t talk about open source. The UN is welcome to the lot of them.
It doesn’t really matter. Open Source doesn’t need the UN or any bigwig’s help except in that it needs for them to stay out of the way. Nicholas Negroponte and the $100 laptop don’t need really need the UN, either. The Media Lab is working directly with governments and foundations on the $100 laptop. However, the forum in Tunisia was a good venue for international publicity and Negroponte is more than smart enough to use such opportunities for his own purposes. If the UN is helpful, good, but he doesn’t need them.
I really liked how Negroponte said, in relation to the $100 laptop, “We’re just going to do this.” It’s perhaps not unlike how Open Source came to be and what makes it work. People just “do it.” They don’t ask governments, think tanks, or businesses if they think it’s a good idea. Neither do they ask premiers, potentates, and presidents. They just do it. Furthermore, while they may ask for money, they don’t ask for it first. They just do it. Open Source would never amount to anything if we waited for the experts and the powers to O.K. it — there’s always plenty of people who’ll tell you something cannot or should not be done. Of course, some Open Source projects work and a lot of them don’t, but that’s no different that any other enterprise.
> Open Source doesn’t need the UN or any bigwig’s help except in that it needs for them to stay out of the way.
So Open Source doesn’t need UN except that it needs UN?
Proprietary software developpers are lobbying the UN for patents, which can hurt Open Source as Bruce Perens’s very good speech said.
So OS definitely needs UN to stay neutral and it would definitely help if the UN was using ODF for example.
First I heard of this meeting.
Well FOSS does sort of need the UN, because the UN is the only group that can bring together all the needs and desires of developing nations. Without the UN we wouldn’t know just many computers need to be created, how much fiber optic needs to be laid and the such. It’s not like developing countries can just send an email to ubuntu asking for X amount of durable thin-clients.