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The Perils of Big IT Dependence: The Recent Global OS Outage
In the world of technology, diversity is not just a virtue, but a necessity. read more …
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It’s fun to make fun of CrowdStrike, but it might be a turn-off for some Purism customers to refer to Purism as coming from “Open Source Software” community rather than “Free Software” or perhaps freedomware or something.
https://www.fsf.org/
https://stallman.org/
As a Purism employee, does Randy Siegel consciously know about this and simply seek to downplay it?
I still have Windows computers in my life that seem to pop back up even when I try to quit using them; I’m just some forum junkie. No reason to take my word for it or believe me. But after I got my Computer Science degree and around the time I graduated when someone told me there was a guy named Stallman, I didn’t think a lot of it.
But about when I started life living alone and working, and interacting with other humans much less and getting sucked in to evil proprietary technology that was difficult to escape, I found myself actually reading the Stallman website at some point. Thems are some good HTML files!
And I began to realize that all the time I spent in rebellion against my problems, and in rebellion against a 10 year old binary file that I kept using and couldn’t quite change, and in the authority that its authors asserted over my life to worsen life for their profit…
It was all something that some other person already predicted, isolated as moral wrong, and decided to work against… from before I was born. And that man was Richard Stallman. And it was simply the case that no one told me about him. I suddenly understood why, in all those long hours in the computer lab doing homework or hanging out, there had always been the face of this man photoshopped onto Jesus hanging on the wall.
On his website or perhaps some of the materials that he links, although I forget exactly where, he suggests that the term ‘open source software’ was specifically coined and used by large corporations to undo the work that he was doing by encouraging people to believe that the novelty is that the source code is available, rather than encouraging users to believe that the novelty is publishing the software under a license that will legally guarantee the freedoms of its users, so that users remain free in perpetuity.
Do we think that:
- Randy has never read the websites that I linked above, and never heard of them
- Randy has heard of them but does not care
- Randy has heard of them, and cares to specifically use word choice to distance himself from them and from their version of trying to create software whose users remain free in perpetuity
(Edit: Or maybe some fourth option where he believes in order to sell to government contractors, he needs to use certain words already circulated around in government, and maybe governments circulate the word “open source” a lot as part of a corporate campaign unknown to them to try to ensure government employees don’t have freedom to think for themselves and instead serve the will of corporations?)
Surely it can’t be all three of them at once, so it has to be one or the other…
Edit:
So this is all just a curiosity that occurred to me, but I’m probably unqualified to argue about these terms, since there were other people like Stallman campaigning to get this right from before I was born, and during the time I was living and even recently I would sometimes revert to my wording from before I read these websites and refer to “open source” as good because so many people seem to colloquially have heard that, that it got burned into my brain from a younger age.
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Yes, it might be but that isn’t the core of the issue. The core of the issue is that capitalist success in ITC breeds monoculture and monoculture breeds greater vulnerability / single point of failure.
As I understand it, Crowdstrike actually provides the same product for Linux. So this outage could have been a (less wide-spread) global outage of Linux computers.
At the end of the day, the Crowdstrike outage is just a top-of-mind example of a deeper and more longstanding problem.
Or fifth option: you are overanalysing it and not as much thought went into the word choice as you imagine. 
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I has been tracking Randy Siegel Post which seems to be a new Evil FOSS employed from Purism.
I am very Nervous about the future of Purism and Community with these types of people. 
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I considered this, but he bothered to take the time to make an abbreviation for it, as though it was important and as though he did spend thought on it.
Then again, the government loves abbreviations for everything, so maybe somebody familiar with government does make abbreviations for things without thinking about it, because for some reason that is how government works.
Edit: i.e.
FBI
CIA
NSA
NASA
DHS
P.A.T.R.I.O.T.
OSHA
HIPPA
SCIF
SAP
UFO
UAP
NAFTA
SOPA
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Tru dat - although sometimes these are backronyms e.g. PATRIOT.
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I’m sure you’re well on your way to understanding government jargon, but to really become an expert you need to study the art of Federal Prose. I scanned the cover of my copy for your edification:
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Maybe more thought should go into word choice for important topics.
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The central point here though is “monoculture” - and how winning the capitalism game creates a vulnerability for society.
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