[cc-community] Omigod. The world just turned upsidedown.

Aaron Shaw adshaw80 at gmail.com
Fri Mar 9 13:02:58 EST 2007


Did the world really turn upside down? Politicians (especially conservative
ones in neoliberal democracies) capturing and exploiting trends that enable
them to downsize state expenses and claim popular empowerment at the same
time doesn't seem like anything too new to me (cf. the Reagan
administration)...

Rather, I would say that this is an event which heralds the extent to which
F/LOSS has achieved widespread political and corporate legitimacy such that
it will no longer remain the exclusive terrain of the political "left."
Besides, leftist politicians have also utilized F/LOSS to reinforce their
populist and anti-neoliberal/anti-microsoft public appeal. In other words,
this is business - and by extension politics - as usual.

Just my 2¢


Aaron Shaw







On 3/9/07, David Berry <d.berry at sussex.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> *Open source politics*
>
> Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has promised that an incoming
> Conservative (UK) government would create a level playing field for open
> source software in the UK, in a move which could save taxpayers more than
> £600 million a year.
>
> In a speech at the Royal Society of Arts, he also announced the
> appointment of Mark Thompson, of the Judge Business School at Cambridge
> University, to advise the Party on how to make Britain the open source
> leader in Europe.
>
> Mr Osborne reckoned that opening up the market in software would enable
> the Government to slash 5 per cent off Whitehall's annual IT bill, because
> open software allows users to read, change and improve its code, in contrast
> to proprietary software where a company controls the source code.
>
> http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=135394
>
>
>
>
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