Advocacy Unplugged

Just cut my hair myself. Would you rather cut your hair yourself or buy a new CD? What if barbers go out of job? What if farmers lose their livelihood when machines take over the back-breaking work? Invest in their education.

It is very human to be superstitious. Superstition is a confluence of the rational and irrational, the identification of implausible patterns.

Many things make us superstitious, and superstitions persist because it will always seem that the costs of upholding the belief are much less than the good that can result.

A casino can definitely make one superstitious. If you go at it often enough, you'll probably get a payoff now and then, then you have a lucky shirt, maybe a lucky stain, or develop some ritual to be performed before hitting the casino each day.

I think a near-death experience facillitates superstition too, a form of phobia, an avoidance of specific stuff related to the experience, in the fear that something bad will happen again.

The cost of wearing red on your wedding day or washing hands with water after a wake is tiny compared to happiness ever after and an untimely death in the house.

It is rational to find patterns in things and make conclusions and generalizations. Information gets summarized neatly and allow us to deal with the world heuristically.

I suspect that mathematicians and artists are more susceptible to superstitions, because searching for patterns is so important for them.

Scientists and researchers in general are also always on the hunt for patterns, but I believe the experimental nature of their work protects them somewhat from becoming superstitious. There may seem to be some pattern initially, but that turns out to be a chance correlation if the existence of the link is not repeatable.

Jasper was wondering why there's free stuff like OpenOffice.org, when Microsoft sells Office for a few hundred dollars. That's not an easy question to answer, but I'll try anyway, seeing that I brought it up.

Let us first consider the case of Google. They provide a search engine for everyone, for free. Why? Is there anything in it for them? I love google search, it makes the web useful. Then it gives 1 GB of email space, which is now 2.0754 GB and counting.

Blogger provides a free weblog service. It supports free speech by doing so, providing a way for anyone to express views if desired. A lot of free, give-away stuff is about freedom.

Removing the barrier of cost brings technology to the masses, allowing as many people as possible to harness the power and efficiency of using their computer. The limitation becomes not being able to afford better hardware, rather than not being able to afford better software.

The main reason people write software is so that they can use it. It is an act of goodwill to let others use it also if they want. Yes, you are probably being idealistic if you simply give away code you've written for free, but in a culture of idealism, everyone benefits.

You generate an open source community, where people discuss their ideas and visions, trying to make life easier for everyone. I like to make life easier for everyone. I like to code. Ideally, I'd get employed by a company to write this piece of software they want to use, and I'll share the code with anyone who wants it.

Of course, it isn't hard to imagine that the company won't want to freely give away the work they employed me to do. That's where Richard Stallman comes in. Created this license to copyright code by copylefting it under the GPL. Very useful, reliable, solid code was written and then GPL-ed.

I can't say it better, so I urge you to read what the GNU project has to say about copyleft. I write code, then copyleft it, so others can use my code and extend it, but if they want to distribute their code, they have to give others the same freedoms they had. Meaning that others must be able to use their code and extend it, just as they could mine.

It is much easier to build on code than start from scratch. It will be much faster and cheaper, so my employer might prefer me to do so. But they can't make the resultant program proprietary, so they can either hoard it or give it back to the community. Either way, the profit they make is from using the program, which is only logical.

Stallman and gang created this from nothing by donating their time and effort to write the initial seeds and chunks of code to copyleft.

Was browsing around the GNU site, which is a treasure chest for geeks and nerds. An article about the counter-intuitive effects of rewards is very interesting, and I read something similar before. It's certainly relevant to the work of the department I'm in.

There's this very intelligent letter by a Peruvian congressman in reply to a MS drone. He's pushing for the government to adopt software that is secure, that ensures information is accessible, so it's clear that Free Software seems the only way to go.

You need to be able to see the source code to know if there are backdoors built in, you need to use open file formats for standardization and so data is not locked in. And along the way, the IT industry can grow because using open source means that IT people can actually learn about software. It'll also be cheaper in the long run, because you won't be forced to "upgrade to new version" in order to fix a bug, and there isn't a monopoly on tech support.

It is inevitable. Move to Free Software. Use Linux. If not now, when you get your next computer. But for a start, convert your MS documents into an open format, like the OpenOffice.org one.