-----Original Message----- From: Oddball [mailto:monkey9@iae.nl] Sent: June-16-12 12:25 PM To: Anton Aylward Cc: opensuse@opensuse.org Subject: Re: [opensuse] How to import passwords from FF into SM?
Well i have to admit that the only way i can use code, is the way you describe here, and i am glad there are ppl who freely give it to be used by everybody who wants to use it! Now that is the exact reason i use and prefer open source above it's closed brother. Sharing is 'commie' talk in a 'capital' world, but i believe in it, because everything belongs to everybody, but because a few ppl believe otherwise, hundreds of millions of ppl are poor.
Maybe I am extra grumpy because it is insanely hot here, over 27 degrees Celsius (for our 'merkin cousins, that's over 80 degrees Fahrenheit ;-), but I can't let that stand. I get especially angry when someone accuses me of evil, such as impoverishing hundreds of millions of people, just because I want to be paid for my work. If this is not what you meant, I suggest you rephrase, or explain more clearly, precisely what you meant. First I will say that I use open source software and in my view the world is a richer place because some companies have been able to develop a business model that lets them distribute and support open source software. But, I would observe, that they use a business model that can not work in all cases. Second, I would say that generally software developed at government labs ought to be open source, or at least freely available to the citizens of the country that supported that development, because tax dollars are involved and thus that software is the property of everyone who paid taxes in that jurisdiction. But ... To claim that private enterprise is to blame for global poverty is simple minded folly. Private enterprise is nothing more than production and distribution of goods: agriculture, manufacturing, and both local and international trade; and cash or capital is a mere convenience to make trade, both local and international, easier. There is recent evidence that Homo sapiens survived the latest ice age while Neanderthals went extinct, even though they had existed much longer than we have, and they were better adapted physically to the north European climate than we were, because they did not engage even in local trade while we did. It was our sociability and willingness to trade that let us take advantage of opportunities in harsh environments that could not be exploited if one limited oneself to only those resources available locally; one could argue that that is one of many attributes that actually makes us distinct as human beings. There are many causes of poverty, the most ubiquitous being environmental and laziness. There are many places in this world that are so harsh that opportunities for survival are limited at best. I worked for a time in the Punjab, and for several years before I had arrived, the monsoons had failed. Consequently, the reservoir nearest me was scarcely deeper than the average toddler's wading pool, even though, when designed, and after a few years of good monsoonal rains, it would have been a decent sized lake hundreds of meters deep. That reservoir, in such times, supported many tens of thousands of hectares of farmland. At the time I arrived, all of that farmland had returned to the desert, growing nothing, and leaving the locals starving. I say that if those people want to live there, that is their prerogative, but do not blame me if as a result of such folly they occasionally starve. It is smarted to operate a farm in the Niagara region of southern Ontario than it is to try to operate a farm in the desert (and yes, I am aware that some 'merkins, having more dollars than sense, operate farms in deserts of the 'merkin southwest. If they want to do so, that is their prerogative, but they have no one to blame for the coming poverty when they face the same crisis that the native populations in the same deserts experienced centuries ago. The idea of sharing is not new, the earliest traces of it that I have seen being in the earliest Judeo-Christian. I have not read about similar concepts in any of the pre-Christian Roman or Greek literature I have read. Some of the older testament laws were specifically designed to help the poor (such as farmers being prohibited from gleaning their fields so that the poor could find plenty of food by gleaning the fields after the harvest had been taken). The first church, in Jerusalem, was what we'd call communist today: everyone, rich and poor alike, sold everything they had and put it into a common purse, as it were: share and share alike. We don't know why that experiment failed, but fail it did and that is why Paul and his colleagues are reported to have commonly raised funds to help that church as he travelled the Mediterranean. The next experiment with communism that I am aware of was in the US, centuries ago, practiced by the first settlers. We know why that experiment failed. Some in the community were lazy, and enough of them failed to work their fields as they ought to have during their first summer that many crops failed, and most of the settlers died. All would have died had their native neighbors not come to their aide. Their experiment with communism ended quickly once they figured out why the crops failed and why so many starved to death. Two more recent examples will suffice. First, in China, there was a man made famine right after the communists one their revolution. I have this on the authority of a man, a friend of mine who lived it and for some reason I'll never understand still loves China. What he told me was that the communist leaders won the support of the agricultural communities by promising they'd have an easy life because the communist party would take care of them: share and share alike the wealth of China! So, when the war was over, many farmers partied for the first year, and put their feet up to relax, as it were, because the party would take care of them. So many did this that there was wide spread crop failure, and close to 50 million people died. It did not take the Chinese authorities long to figure out what went awry, and understood that a major part of the wealth of China was agricultural, and there was no wealth to distribute if the farmers did not work their fields as usual. The quickly ensured that all the farming communities in China learned that so that that mistake would not be repeated. Alas, like everyone I have met that have transformed the virtue of sharing into a political ideology (or equally accurate idiocy), they failed to take into account human nature. In China, that idea of willingness to share was soon transformed into compulsion to share, and the very friend who loves China and survived the famine that followed the revolution, was one of countless young people who were forced into slavery on government run farms. Of course, the government didn't call it slavery; they called it re-education. The end result was the same, of course, in which the people so enslaved had no choice but to obey, and slave their lives away, receiving only scarcely sufficient food to survive and woefully inadequate shelter, while the communist leaders lived lives of luxury. I can not understand his affection for a county that has treated him so shamefully. The folk in the Ukraine ought to be relatively wealthy since the farmland there is incredibly fertile. But, many decades ago, when my parents were young, while their crops didn't fail, their Russian masters forced them to share; and how many died as a result? Ironically, both Russia and China are doing well now, and will be major economic powers for at least the first half of this century precisely because they have adapted to transform themselves into having a form of the capitalism that you apparently despise. One other cause of poverty worth mentioning, in part because it will be causing major problems of the coming century, is stupidity combined with ignorance combined with lust for power by Muslim religious leaders. These leaders know that if you keep people ignorant, knowing only what you tell them, you can persuade them to do almost anything. That is why, across north Africa, through the middle east and into south western Asia, you have constant warfare instigated by these leaders against anyone who believes differently: in the Sudan, and across north Africa, Arab Muslims slaughtering black animist and Christian neighbors for many generations now, and throughout the middle east, Shia and Sunni clerics ranting, instigating violence, against each other as well as the West and Israel. You have Turkey and Iran waging a proxy war in Syria as a result. All that warfare is guaranteed to keep the entire Muslim world in poverty; and the rest of the world is at risk if they let themselves be drawn into it. War is bad for most businesses, and poverty is an inevitable result. It is important to note, though, that so-called religious wars have almost nothing to do with religion (except possibly Islam - in which the Quran has no redeeming content - trust me, I have read it cover to cover) and everything to do with political leaders exploiting general levels of ignorance among the masses and manipulating the ignorant into doing what they would otherwise not do. I am sure the software developers at Microsoft and Intel and IBM and Oracle, and all the other commercial software houses are much like me; we're just people who happen to develop software for a living. Some of us do it well, and some not so well, but that is beside the point. We're just people trying to earn a living. And you have the temerity to accuse us of contributing to global poverty because we want to be paid for our work? I don't know which is more obscene: the idea that I ought to work for free because I happen to develop software, so you can have it without paying for it, or that I am guilty of impoverishing the world because I want to be paid for my work; and this in spite of the ample evidence visible to anyone with eyes to see the world as it is that there are many causes of poverty. Might I suggest, to you, and any other open source fanatic, that it is more constructive to adhere to another philosophical idea, to be found in the writings of ancient Greek and Roman authors, as well as the Bible and some eastern religious, philosophical texts, variously known as meekness or the way of the middle? The idea we shouldn't share is not good, but I am not aware of any great examples of widespread evil that has happened because that idea was abused. That we should share is a good idea, but great evils have happened because some idiot took the idea and transformed it first into a political idea (and not taking human nature into account, specifically the tendency to be lazy, cause catastrophic famine and death) and then into a political weapon (as Russia did against the Ukraine). The middle is best, in which sharing is regarded as a virtue, widely practiced, but not imposed. Similarly, capital, viewed as merely a device of instrumental value in the support of trade, can result in great wealth, as most western countries show, even in these 'interesting times', but that other human attribute, greed, or the love of money, has caused all kinds of evil when left unchecked. The resulting position, with regard to software, is that there is a place for both open source software and closed source software, and neither has an ethical advantage over the other. Cheers Ted -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org