How Open Source Might Finally Become Mainstream 231
geegel writes "The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article on how autocracies are now embracing open source, while at the same promoting national based IT services. The author, Evgeny Morozov, paints a bleak future of the future World Wide Web."
Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Peer-to-Peer? (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is very well composed, but does not mention peer-to-peer solutions, which avoid the big-brother problem. Projects like Diaspora [joindiaspora.com] are working on systems that implement this kind of P2P-based web using web-of-trust [wikipedia.org]. I assume that Diaspora apps will be able to facilitate various services, hopefully including things like communication.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corporation (Fox News), which is probably why it didn't mention things like MySpace being owned by Murdock's political powerhouse, which is clearly along a similar (if not identical) line. Free Software best combats this with the Affero General Public License [wikipedia.org], which closes the "ASP loophole" by marking an implementation of the software as the same as its distribution (thus modifications must be made public). Examples include Diaspora (social media), Gitorious [wikipedia.org] (software forge), and Identi.ca [wikipedia.org] (micro-blogging) among others [wikipedia.org].
Re:It already is... (Score:5, Interesting)