U.S. Representatives Torpedo UN Information Summit

StoneLion writes "The United Nations World Summit on Information Society was established to 'harness the potential of knowledge and technology' and to 'find effective and innovative ways to put this potential at the service of development for all.' You'd think open source software would be a natural for many UN member countries. But NewsForge's Joe Barr discovered that the US is driving policy for the organization, and its official position is that 'using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit'; in other words, they want to make the world safe for capitalism." We've mentioned WSIS before. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

Re:Unnecessary violence

[Shisha]

I know adoption of free software could help a lot of people in a lot of ways, but let's face it: the US has a _lot_ of misguided foreign policies (e.g the way they deal with countries producing illegal drugs in South America, not even getting into the whole war on terror thing).

On the other hand I'm not sure that UN has the position or moral authority free software want's to be associate with. Take for example that only last year Jan Kavan (former Czech foreign minister) used to be the chairman of UN. Mr Kavan was convinced of lying by a British court of justice. He also work for STB (Czech equiv. of KGB) and spied on people who fled to the UK from the communist Czechoslovakia.

My point is that just the fact that US has a misguided policy does not mean that what UN is doing would be in the best interest of everyone. Dodgy people who are mainly intrested in driving their agenda are involved in the UN. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

capitalism

[kperrier]

in other words, they want to make the world safe for capitalism

The horror! And we all know that capitalism is the root of all evil in the world! After all, it was not the communists in the Soviet Union that killed millions of their own people! It was the capitalists!

Nothing that a pointless poitical dig to ruin what was otherwise an ok news post on /.

Re:Capitalism

[andy1307]

From the article

The United States position, formed at the behest of the Business Software Alliance, CompTIA, and other organizations dedicated to maintaining the status quo and curtailing the growth of free software, is that no software development methodology -- closed and proprietary versus open source -- be recommended over any other.

Choice is capitalistic. Excluding non-OS software is limiting choice.

Re:Funny World...

[iminplaya]

It makes me sadder still that said people who say the U.S. is evil and makes things bad for its citizens and the rest of the world somehow never give any substantial evidence of that.

Does this [nwu.edu] count??

Re:Best Politicians Money Can Buy

[Jim Starx]

Shouldn't Open Source just be considered competition? After all, it's just code. The automakers in Detroit seem to be doing fairly well, even with cheap foreign competition.

Cheap, but not free, and their are tariff's to ease that. There's also some amount of social pressure to buy US made products when it comes to cars and such because you'll be supporting american workers, open source, being free and all, isn't tied to that.

Let me be clear though, I'm not saying ms needs to be protected here. What I'm saying is that socially open source represents a signifigantly diffrent ideology then someone undercutting your prices. You can't treat one as simply an extreem of the other. Ms needs to realize that if people choose to freely distribute their work then they have no right to bitch that it's cutting into their profits. It IS cutting into their profits, but they're just gonna need to deal with it. Its rather sickening that such an obviosly beneficial choice is being ignored.

Re:Funny World...

[demachina]

" It makes me sadder still that said people who say the U.S. is evil and makes things bad for its citizens and the rest of the world somehow never give any substantial evidence of that."

It makes me sad how ignorant Americans are of the most basic history of their government. There is no shortage of evidence that the U.S. has caused untold misery around the world for decades.

The U.S. has installed a non stop cavalcade of ruthless dictators since the end of World War II. The standard criteria is any government that "isn't with us is against us" so we arrange to topple democraticly elected leaders, who are usually nationalists or socialists and replace them with right wing dictators who are willing to do what we tell them, who are friendly to big American corporations and wealthy landowners, and are willing to ruthlessly kill anyone in their country who doesn't see things that way. Sometimes our puppets go bad, as in they stop doing what we tell them, for example Noriega in Panama and Sadam in Iraq and we even have to topple them:

Here are just a few examples, its a much longer list than this:

The Shah of Iran was installed in to power by a CIA sponsored coup in 1953 when they helped topple a democraticly elected nationalist leader,Mohammed Mossadegh . The Shah rivaled or surpassed Sadam in torture and oppression of the Iranian people and was a key reason why they seized they U.S. embassy when he was toppled and why the hate the U.S. with a passion to this day:

http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/htdtisirancoup.ht ml

In 1973 a CIA sponsored coup in Chile removed a democraticly elected, very popular, socialist and nationalist leader, Salvadore Allende and replaced him with General Pinochet, another ruthless military dictator and a 17 year reign of terror:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/chile/story/0,13755,10 38 615,00.html

In 1954 a CIA coup overthrew the democraticly elected leftist Jacobo Arbenz, once again to be replaced by a string of ruthless military dictators in to the 90's:

http://www.nsulaw.nova.edu/iachr/background.cfm

The CIA was also involved in the 1963 coup in which the Bathists took control of Iraq. The CIA apparently gave the Bathists a list of people, mostly left leaning, who were to be exterminated when they took power. Control of the Bathist party was eventually seized by Saddam Hussein:

http://www.bnfp.org/neighborhood/jmoore.htm

Lest you think this is all ancient history all indications are that the unrest in Venezuala a couple years ago which once again nearly toppled a popularly elected socialist leader was being stirred by the Bush administation through the CIA and the U.S. military which was meeting with the opposition leaders trying to overthrow Hugo Chavez who is very critical of the U.S. on all fronts:

http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGLISH/Ven787.htm

We are also on pretty reasonable terms with the dictator of Turkmenistan who surpasses Saddam in cult of personality:

http://archive.tol.cz/transitions/thedict1.html

It should also be pointed out President Mushareef of Pakistan, out close ally in the war on terror is also a military dictator who seized power in a coupe. So much for our advocacy of democracy and freedom. Its ironic that we took down Iraq for an imagined WMD threat while Pakistan has been actually selling critical nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran. Did we do anything about it, no. Mushareef just pardoned the man responsible and we look the other way.

Bottomline is if your government protects the wealthy 1% in your country that own all the land and industry, and you open your country to exploitation by American corporations and you do what the U.S. government tells you, you will have no problems with the U.S. Otherwise you are headed for a world of hurt.

All of this was well documented by the Church commission in 1975:

http://history-matters.com/store/store

Re:Only michael would cry for another buearacracy

[protohiro1]

I didn't laugh at how stupid it sounded. This is the classic slashdot fallacy, the people who thought that the summit was stupid are not necessarily the same people that are laying blame now. Slashdot does not operate by consensus.

Article Misrepresents Declaration

[tabdelgawad]

You know, I went one step beyond RTFA and clicked the link to the actual WSIS declaration of principles here:

http://www.itu.int/wsis/documents/doc_multi-en-1 16 1|1160.asp

I think the article by Barr misrepresents what the WSIS declaration says. At best, he's confusing what the declaration actually says with what the US representatives may have wanted it to say (or at least what *he* thinks they wanted it to say!). The declaration includes plain language about

1. The importance of public domain: "A rich public domain is an essential element for the growth of the Information Society, creating multiple benefits such as an educated public, new jobs, innovation, business opportunities, and the advancement of sciences. Information in the public domain should be easily accessible to support the Information Society, and protected from misappropriation."

2. The role of open source: "Access to information and knowledge can be promoted by increasing awareness among all stakeholders of the possibilities offered by different software models, including proprietary, opensource and free software, in order to increase competition, access by users, diversity of choice, and to enable all users to develop solutions which best meet their requirements."

3. The only mention of Intellectual Property in the declaration is followed by noting the importance of knowledge dissemination: "Intellectual Property protection is important to encourage innovation and creativity in the Information Society; similarly, the wide dissemination, diffusion, and sharing of knowledge is important to encourage innovation and creativity."

But who am I to spoil the fun of everyone straw-manning the declaration?

Re:Funny World...

[KrancHammer]

Forgive me. My language was imprecise. I should have said: Dictators, dictator enablers ,and human rights violators. And yes, I am aware the United States, most especially during the cold war, propped up dictatorships left and right (well, mostly right), but I was referring to the world as it exists today. France and Germany especially cannot seem to shake that nasty national habit.
And another thing.. if by "unilateral actions from the US" you are referring to the recent and continuing war in Iraq... I am sure that Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan will all be very surprised by your definition of unilateral action. [cpa-iraq.org]

Re:Capitalism & OSS

[bhima]

I wouldn't call capitalism a 'clear' winner.

The 2002 per capita murder rate of New York City is 200 times that of Vienna. Plenty of other systems work very well at achieving a different balance of priorities in their civil societies.

It just the USians that say 'Our way is best' and run all over the world forcing capitalist democracies on various unfortunate countries. This in light of their own inability to conduct free, fair and accurate elections is quite ironic. (No disrespect to Jimmy Carter, he's a good man).

In fact given the changes in the US Government and laws, since 9/11, I don't think it would be a far stretch to say that the US is leaning away from capitalist democracy and going more towards a Fascist Theocracy. Or maybe it would be more correct to say that members of the current ruling elite in the US show these tendencies with the approval of a sizable and vocal minority.

Anyway my point is: It depends greatly on the goals of a civil society for their measurement of success and comparisons between them must take this into account.