March 26th, 2008
Is open source anti-American?
While Matt Asay and Paula Rooney chose the meat in Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s remarks at OSBC, others chose to play the political game of gotcha.
So, is open source anti-American?
Whitehurst admitted that open source advocates in the developing world benefit from an anti-American, and anti-Western bias where it exists.
Open source is a way of avoiding “intellectual property taxes.”
Whitehurst drew an immediate challenge on this point, with an audience member saying even GPL violations are common in other countries. Whitehurst took the diplomatic way out, calling open source licensing a new issue the company is watching closely.
I suppose that if you can turn Roger Clemens’ alleged steroid use into a partisan issue, you can twist open source’s performance in other markets into a foreign policy issue.
But should you?
Personally I think we have a split here between the elites and the folks on the street. Whitehurst talks to the former, and his questioner — the one who said they don’t care about any license terms — may be more in touch with the latter.
But if ordinary users in other countries are fairly ignorant of a license’s fine print does that make them any different from Americans?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/26/08
