Sun's McNealy Sees the Light on Open Source

If you were looking for a sign of the times in computing, you could do worse than consider the trajectory of Scott McNealy. When he was running Sun, open source in his view was pretty much the un-American cancer that Microsoft had proclaimed it to be - largely because of the inroads that GNU/Linux was making against Sun's proprietary Solaris. That was then; this is now....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Chinese Whispers

One of my hobbies is to try to spot the emergence of unintended consequences of major events. The classic, perhaps, is the fall of the Communism, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which was supposed to be a victory that showed the West's strength, but turned out instead to make our lives hugely less safe. Here's another - and a profound one at that:

Just as damaging for China in the long run, however, may be the effect on ordinary citizens. One place the Tibetan flag no longer flies is in the window of a bed shop in the English city of Sheffield. Its owner is a Tibetan sympathiser, who displayed the flag last month. Two young Chinese, apparently students, visited and made threats. That night his windows were smashed. A celebration supposed to mark China's emergence as a friendly global power has made some people think for the first time that its rise is something to fear.

Only a whisper at the moment, but I predict it will become a fearsome - and fearful - roar before long.

Godless Commies Choose Godless Commie OS

Given the number of times free software has been mischaracterised as communist, this seems rather appropriate:

Cuba's communist government is trying to shake off the yoke of at least one capitalist empire _ Microsoft Corp. _ by joining with socialist Venezuela in converting its computers to open-source software.

Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code.

"It's basically a problem of technological sovereignty, a problem of ideology," said Hector Rodriguez, who oversees a Cuban university department of 1,000 students dedicated to developing open-source programs.

Of Kerala and Communism

Kerala is probably best-known for its democratically-elected communist government, but its decision to go for GNU/Linux instead of Windows in its schools is probably now a close second. A few weeks back, Richard Stallman was explaining his role in the decision, and now here's a piece in Business Week that has some figures (alas, only made-up ones by analysts) about the broader Indian market. (With thanks to James Tyrrell for the link.)