Well, it's been a while since I wrote. There are lots of things I could discuss, such as the fact that I am engaged to be married! But at the moment I feel inspired to write about something else.
I am amazed at how the world is reacting to what the media calls the "global financial crisis", and what I call "American bankers raiding the world's wealth". There has been a lot of writing about how unreal and absurd this situation is. One observation that made me think, courtesy of Lewis Black the comedian, is that, if these bankers that have gotten rich by looting the global economy were leaders of nations, the people of those nations would rise up and kill them. But since they are leading corporations, people expect them to steal.
I have no doubt that he speaks the truth.
But what I am inspired to write about is not anti-American rage, or shooting thieves. I am inspired by the creativity and independence that I am seeing from the world. Small powers, poor countries, and some not so poor, rather than seeing this as a tragedy, see an opportunity here to make their own future. To back out of the game where other countries try to play ball in the same arena as the United States, and instead make up their own game! As someone who grew up in what in America is considered a very poor area, I think that I can relate to this independence and ethic.
I'm sure others could write about this from many angles, but as a technical person I only see one angle. Countries are starting their own efforts to produce their own independent software technology platforms, complete with the infrastructure and salaried staff to develop and support it going forward. In this new future, they will not be held hostage to pay licensing fees to American corporations for software technologies. In the spirit of the scientific community in the open, pre-patent times, they are joining a global community of technologists and programmers, to solve practical business problems, and further computer software research, and share freely their thoughts, writings, and even blueprints and computer program source code.
Some people may be familiar with what is called the Free Software movement, or the Open Source movement. And true, these countries are participating in these same circles. But this doesn't feel the same as those movements. This is something new, something that is starting now, in 2009. Maybe I should come up with a name for it before everyone else realizes it's happening.
One facet of this new independence, is that nations are developing their own computer operating systems. Many of them are building on the GNU/Linux system. The GNU/Linux system is a UNIX-like computer system, but with modern support for just about all personal computer and server hardware. There have also been millions of hours of labor put into making it a more comfortable and easy to use system than UNIX used to be. The result is a system that comes complete with source code, so that programmers can fix or study or modify any part of the system that they see fit. This system runs on personal computers, laptops, cellular phones, cash registers, internet servers, military equipment, airplane entertainment systems, and on and on. GNU/Linux is available on the internet at no cost, and is distributed with a license called the GNU General Public License. The GNU GPL is kind of the opposite of copyright; it ensures that no matter who uses the software, or what companies want to do with it, that they are in fact forced to share what they have done with the rest of the world. This license has largely made these events that are happening now possible.
What is happening now is that countries are releasing their own nationalized versions of GNU/Linux. A version such as this is called a "distribution" of Linux. This in and of itself isn't necessarily new. SUSE was originally a German Linux distribution, Mandrake a French, Conectiva a Brazilian distribution. But just in the last few years we have also seen Ututo, an Argentinian distribution, and Redflag, a Chinese distribution, which is being merged with another asian Linux distribution to form Asianux. In Korea there is Hansoft Linux. Recently Russia has announced a project to begin their own operating system, the details of which are not forthcoming, but it is reasonable to think that it will probably be Linux based. Yesterday I learned of Pardus, which is a Turkish distribution. I'm sure there are many others that I am unaware of. I believe that Spain has a distribution based on the Debian distribution, which is not associated with any particular country, but is really kind of the distribution that most Linux software is compiled and tested on.
There may not be as much exciting business news as there was ten years ago, when NYSE decided to standardize on Linux, or when Oracle decided to sell a Linux version. This is more of a situation where governments need to build their own strong infrastructures, without having that infrastructure based on inflexible platforms that are sold to them from a foreign country, in most cases Microsoft being the vendor and the United States being the foreign country. And these governments are coming to understand they can stand on their own, and build on the benevolent gifts that have been given to the world from the Free Software and Open Source communities.
