The Relationship Between FOSS and Democracy 239
An anonymous reader writes "Free software is about freedom. So it shouldn't be any surprise that the ideals behind the free software movement have spread to the place where freedom is most affected: government. The old definition of e-democracy is, basically, 'using computers in politics and governance.' So a politician sending out a batch e-mail is e-democracy. The new movement is about removing the power from politicians and making governance collaborative. The analogy to FOSS is remarkable: think of the current governments as the old guard computing companies, and the collaborative governance movement as the geeks with crazy notions of a different way of organizing things. FOSS looked like an impossible pipe-dream when it started. Tell that to the Apache group today."
Re:If FOSS is about freedom (Score:1, Informative)
But that is not true freedom. A BSD-style license allows access to the original code while permitting commercial changes. Nothing has been taken away, because the original source still exists, and others are free to implement their own version of closed-source commercial changes in the open source version if they choose. That is a true, "maximized" freedom compared to the GPL.
Re:Who's going to clean toilets and guard prisoner (Score:4, Informative)
What I find completely amazing is this simple fact: Most well-run and successful open source projects seem to bear very little relationship to a true democracy (i.e., majority rule) in form or function.
The head of these projects is often referred to as a "benevolent dictator" - he whose word is law. The contributors cooperate (and sometimes compete, sometimes even via nasty political infighting) in what is in essence, a ruthless meritocracy-slash-technocracy, led by that 'benevolent dictator.'
1000 Joe Q Publics writing to the Linux kernel mailing list will be easily outweighed by a simple "NO" from Linus, or any single one of the other frequent kernel contributors. 1000 Joe Q Publics complaining about how some feature didn't get implemented yet will be told, "Go fuck yourself, we're not here to work for you, if you think it's that important, either write the code yourself, or wait until we decide to get to it." Last I checked, they weren't asking people to vote on which features to implement in the next version of the Linux kernel.
Openness and Democracy are often found together, and a well-run democracy requires an educated populace (which, in turn, requires information to be available to the populace so that they may be informed), but the two ideals are absolutely not identical. Opening up governance to "egalitarian collaboration" simply means that you'll see a lot more trolling, a few more Goatse bills, and god help us all if Anonymous decides to get involved in governance "for the lulz."