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+-   Bugs as a Tool to Promote Open Source-> on Wednesday June 11 2008, @12:58PM blackbearnh

Submitted by blackbearnh on Wednesday June 11 2008, @12:58PM
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blackbearnh writes "The latest interview over on O'Reilly's revamped news site is with Benjamin Mako Hill, who is involved in the OLPC project, the FSF board, the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as working on Debian and Ubuntu among other things. Hill covers a variety of topics: free vs open, free software on prorpietary OSes, why the OLPC is running into problems, why Debian and Ubuntu have been such successful communities, and his intriguing idea that bugs can help demonstrate the benefits of free/open source software to the general public.

So there's a famous technologist named Mark Weisner who actually talked a little bit about this; he described eyeglasses as the perfect technology, because when you wear eyeglasses you don't see the eyeglasses. You just see the world more clearly. And I think that that's the great example of the way the technology works in many cases. But of course if there's a smudge on the eyeglasses, they become pretty visible indeed. It's through errors in technology; when your web server isn't working you get that error from it. All of the sudden you know that it exists; you don't care what operating system your ATM runs until you walk up to it and it has a blue screen of death and you say "Whoa, my ATM runs Windows. Do I trust my money to it?" So in that sense errors provide a view of the tip of that iceberg and the way that we can see technology, and as a result start a conversation about why it might be important that we have control over it, why it might be something that we can modify, we should be able to modify, or use and how it might be important to our own autonomy.
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