>But other countries and communities can benefit from the same technical
>infrastructure that daily powers the Internet. And they can do so for free,
>without having to sell the farm to MS or Sun or Cisco, etc.
>
>I think that's pretty cool, and not something to be dismissed too quickly.
I notice that the kids programming today are getting better, faster than ten years ago. The widespread availability of Linux and its development tools could prove to be a serious radicalizing element. Consider that it's the first time that a significant codebase and toolset has been made available to people (youth, the third world, schools) who have very little money.
Sure, it's impenetrable to most people... but for the "talented tenth", it's a goldmine of knowledge. This is not elitist.
Likewise, to say that the Internet is elitist is completely wrong. The net is, today, virtually the only way that elite knowledge, hidden away in university libraries, can be disseminated to the global masses. It is an outlet for marginalized people to reach out to the world.
Today, it is more feasible than ever for someone to educate themselves about computer technology. Tomorrow, it will happen for other disciplines.
----
As an aside: the few open source programmers I've met are "nicer" than your typical programmer. You know how, at the university, there are the profs who are just these nice guys who are really pretty radical, but you figure that they have pretty boring lives, and then there are those profs who like to fuck the "new crop" of freshmen girlies every year. The open source guys are more like the former. If there's any kinky stuff going on, it's noncoercive and consensual :-).
I think that a lot of these open source rah-rah types aren't the programmers. --
-------------------------------------- John Kawakami johnk at cyberjava.com, johnk at firstlook.com