'Til All Are One

There was enough at LCA to be excited about to give you heart pal­pit­a­tions. If I was forced to single out one thing, it would have to be the One Laptop Per Child Pro­ject (OLPC).

One of my primary interests has been the inter­ac­tions between people and tech­no­logy, and I have long felt that there has been scant atten­tion payed to how this oper­ates in devel­op­ing coun­tries. Sus­tain­able devel­op­ment is a vital goal, and an import­ant part of this ongo­ing pro­cess is the use of appro­pri­ate tech­no­logy. This can range from bare hands and rudi­ment­ary tools to com­plex com­pu­ta­tional and engin­eer­ing infra­struc­ture. The key is to select what is most applic­able in a given situation.

So-​​called ‘developed’ regions of the world might be able to accom­mod­ate expens­ive, dis­pos­able and inef­fi­cient tech­no­lo­gies and meth­od­o­lo­gies. This has guided policy, R&D, pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­bu­tion and use within this part of the world. The play­ing field is entirely dif­fer­ent in devel­op­ing regions, and so solu­tions need to be craf­ted with their needs in mind.

You can’t expect to suc­cess­fully shoe­horn a solu­tion designed for Sydney onto Mogadishu, or even onto Man­in­grida. To date, how­ever, most approaches try to do just that. This only works to an extent, if at all. In many cases it would be bet­ter to rethink things from the ground-​​up to come up with some­thing more appro­pri­ate. This doesn’t mean that you’re throw­ing out the baby with the bathwa­ter. Suc­cess­ful designs often base them­selves upon exist­ing policies, tech­no­lo­gies and ideas, and then pro­ceed to modify or redesign parts to fit their goals. The OLPC is a prime example of such an endeavour.

Whether it is suc­cess­ful or not is another mat­ter. That remains up to the gov­ern­ments which pur­chase and dis­trib­ute them, and the com­munit­ies which accept them. The greatest chal­lenge of the OLPC isn’t tech­nical, it’s socio-​​political.

The pen­guins are on the march in India. It’s won­der­ful to see the states of Ker­ala and Tamil Nadu tak­ing their future devel­op­ment ser­i­ously by adopt­ing free soft­ware on a wide scale. My par­ents are from Tamil Nadu, and most of their fam­il­ies still live there. Some of them have been involved quite con­sid­er­ably in edu­ca­tional and com­put­ing pro­jects, which have unfor­tu­nately been based around Win­dows. This doesn’t help any­one in the long term (apart from the vendors con­trolling the lock-​​in), so it is ter­rific to see them work­ing towards some autonomy and freedom.

P.S. As of today, I am a quarter of a cen­tury old. Howzat?!

Update: On the con­verse, we have abso­lutely appalling con­duct in the so-​​called ‘developed’ world. How can a demo­cracy func­tion when the mech­an­isms of gov­ern­ment are hid­den behind pro­pri­et­ary data con­structs? Is it truly wise to hand the keys to pub­lic inform­a­tion over to cor­por­a­tions that have zero account­ab­il­ity to the popu­lace? Even their so-​​called ‘open’ formats aren’t really open at all.

This is quite disturbing:

A 2006 Gal­lup sur­vey of Amer­ican pub­lic opin­ion found that “many Amer­ic­ans har­bour strong bias against U.S. Muslims”.

• 22% say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbour.
• 34% believe U.S. Muslims sup­port al-​​Qaeda.
• Only 49% believe U.S. Muslims are loyal to the United States.
• 39% advoc­ate that U.S. Muslims should carry spe­cial ID

The fact that such a large per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion har­bours resent­ment against Muslims may explain much of America’s aggress­ive Middle East policy from Israel to Iraq. It’s a lot easier to play with the lives of mil­lions of people if you don’t think of them as civ­il­ised human beings, but ter­ror­ist supporters.

This appears to be con­sist­ent with other stud­ies:

The Media and Soci­ety Research Group of Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity con­duc­ted a sur­vey in Novem­ber of Amer­ic­ans with respect to their atti­tudes towards Muslims. Nearly half (44%) of respond­ents favoured restrict­ing the civil rights of Muslims in some way.

Such atti­tudes often stem from ignor­ance. It is exceed­ingly easy to dehu­man­ise a race/​religion/​culture if you know noth­ing about them:

A sur­vey com­mis­sioned and pub­lished by National Geo­graphic shows that a large major­ity of young Amer­ic­ans between the age of 18–24 are geo­graph­ic­ally illiterate.

Less than 15% of the sub­jects could loc­ate Iraq or Israel on a map. Only 17% could loc­ate Afgh­anistan, even though the sur­vey was car­ried out after the war. 11% could not loc­ate the U.S. on a map.

Now, I am not post­ing this to pick on Amer­ic­ans. In fact, I feel that at least to some extent these res­ults also apply to Aus­tralia and other West­ern coun­tries (e.g. the UK). We like to think of ourselves as ‘enlightened’ soci­et­ies, yet the ignor­ance many people appear to exhibit is astound­ing. There is much in the way of mis­in­form­a­tion and FUD being spread around, inten­tional and oth­er­wise. The solu­tion, I feel, is edu­ca­tion. For instance, I bet that the aver­age Aus­tralian knows very little about Islam: its beliefs, its his­tory and the cul­tures sur­round­ing it. It is all to easy to judge people and events by our own val­ues, the prin­ciples by which we were raised. People need to under­stand that what may look like ‘com­mon sense’ to them is in fact a cul­tural con­struct, and that other cul­tures may see things dif­fer­ently. This diversity is what makes the world inter­est­ing, and this abund­ance of dif­fer­ent views is what has pro­pelled human devel­op­ment since the very beginning.

Those who like to argue that Islam is a back­wards reli­gion or that its people cel­eb­rate an ana­chron­istic cul­ture ought to invest­ig­ate the 1001 Inven­tions Web site:

A unique UK based edu­ca­tional pro­ject that reveals the rich her­it­age that the Muslim com­munity share with other com­munit­ies in the UK and Europe.

1001 Inven­tions is a non-​​religious and non-​​political pro­ject seek­ing to allow the pos­it­ive aspects of pro­gress in sci­ence and tech­no­logy to act as a bridge in under­stand­ing the inter­de­pend­ence of com­munit­ies through­out human history.

Pia has very elo­quently indic­ated the divide between reli­gion and cul­ture, and in doing so I feel she has demon­strated how truly close many world reli­gions are in their core beliefs and values.

Another year, another Soft­ware Free­dom Day…

Scrub that. That sounds far too mundane.

Soft­ware Free­dom Day rocked!!!

*ahem*

I could not attend last year (since it coin­cided with my mum’s birth­day), but this year I dived in head-​​first as an offi­cial helper on the A/​V Team. I was assigned to do video edit­ing and encod­ing, which basic­ally entailed crop­ping the begin­ning and end off the recor­ded present­a­tions and then encod­ing to Ogg (Vor­bis and The­ora) format. I had a wicked rig set up in the UNSW Law theatre that we were using for the talks, con­sist­ing of two laptops and a DV cam­era. The DV cam­era was ori­gin­ally inten­ded to serve as a backup to a DVD cam­era we had set up else­where, but due to some tech­nical glitches it rose in import­ance. I ended up being solely a cam­era­man, since we weren’t able to read our recor­ded DVDs on the day (it later turned out to be a simple mat­ter of final­ising the disc).

Although it was tir­ing keep­ing an eye on the cam­era for the entire day (through all of the talks), I must say that I enjoyed myself immensely. Pia did a fant­astic job of organ­ising and co-​​ordinating the event, not just in Sydney but also glob­ally (as Pres­id­ent of Soft­ware Free­dom Inter­na­tional). Silvia had the A/​V Team well organ­ised, and des­pite some minor set­backs I think we are well-​​prepared for LCA 2007.

What impressed me most was the speech by Sen­ator Kate Lundy. She proved that it wasn’t orches­trated in an inter­view with James Purser a few days later. She truly under­stands what free soft­ware is about, and she does not fall into the com­mon traps of see­ing free as gratis, or open source as only hav­ing a cost bene­fit. She’s set up her own Joomla-​​based web site, and she uses Auda­city to record her audio.

It’s strik­ing to see how Sen­ator Lundy dif­fers from her former nemesis (while she over­saw the Com­mu­nic­a­tions and IT shadow min­istry), Richard Alston. That is a man who was labelled ‘The World’s Biggest Lud­dite’ by sev­eral inter­na­tional news out­lets dur­ing his ten­ure. It is shame­ful to see how under­ap­pre­ci­ated she is in her party. Would it not best serve the interests of the coun­try to have a (shadow) min­is­ter who actu­ally knew some­thing about their port­fo­lio? Maybe so, but that would inter­fere with the politicking

Kle­pas poin­ted us on IRC to a brilliantly-​​done film explain­ing the concept of Trust­worthy Com­put­ing. It con­cisely and clearly demon­strates why so many of us in the FLOSS world prefer to call it Treach­er­ous Com­put­ing.

Unfor­tu­nately, the pro­du­cers decided to make the film avail­able as a Sorenson-​​encoded Quick­time file. I find it amus­ing that people who oppose digital restric­tions are using such a highly-​​proprietary video format. For­tu­nately for us, there is a DivX/​MP3 ver­sion (still not as good as The­ora or even XviD, but it’ll do) avail­able at Google Video.

Once you have fin­ished view­ing it, head on over to Against-​​TCPA for more information.

I must nom­in­ate Hotel Rwanda as my Movie of the Year. I know that it was offi­cially released last year, but it only came to Aus­tralia this year. I rank it right up there with two of my other favour­ite movies, The Killing Fields and Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fire­flies).

These movies deal with incred­ibly dis­turb­ing sub­ject mat­ter: the effects of war on a civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. Each movie took its own approach to the topic, but they all mas­ter­fully cap­tured the des­pair and suf­fer­ing that people go through. What I also like about these films is that they have dealt with incid­ents which were either ignored or for­got­ten by people in other coun­tries. Hotel Rwanda cov­ers the Rwandan gen­o­cide of 1994, The Killing Fields is set in the Khmer Rouge dom­in­ated Cam­bodia of the 1970s, and Grave of the Fire­flies is about Japan dur­ing World War II.

Hotel Rwanda and The Killing Fields both deal with civil war. Who cares about that? After all, it’s not in my back­yard. Most of the coun­tries in Africa are in some sort of war, yet the West cur­rently seems more con­cerned with Pope John Paul II’s funeral or Prince Charles’s wed­ding. In the case of Cam­bodia, Viet­nam (with dip­lo­matic sup­port from the USSR) turned out to be the Good Guys (fun­nily enough), invad­ing the coun­try and depos­ing the Khmer Rouge with pop­u­lar sup­port (des­pite their mis­giv­ings about the Viet­namese). The USA, Thai­l­and and China act­ively worked to sup­port the Khmer Rouge. Did we hear about any of this on tele­vi­sion? Is it in any school his­tory books? Nope, it’s as (self) cen­sored as the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion of Korea is in Japan.

The Rwandan gen­o­cide was yet another shame­ful event in world his­tory. The United Nations and eco­nom­ic­ally developed coun­tries had the power to inter­vene and halt the blood­shed, yet they didn’t. The US had been in Somalia only a couple of years prior, but I guess Rwanda wasn’t import­ant since it it didn’t lie on any major ship­ping lanes. The UN itself, France and other coun­tries also deserve much of the blame.

Grave of the Fire­flies is some­what dif­fer­ent, yet the same. Firstly, it is anim­ated. This is no children’s movie, how­ever, even if the two prot­ag­on­ists are chil­dren. I don’t think more impact could have been achieved if it were a live action film. Grave of the Fire­flies cov­ers yet another ignored event in world his­tory: the effects of World War II on the Japan­ese pop­u­la­tion. It is nat­ural to ignore the aggressors (or even applaud their suf­fer­ing), par­tic­u­larly ones as bru­tal as the Japan­ese in WWII, but it is import­ant to remem­ber that they are just as human as every­one else. Many Ger­mans con­sider the Allied fire­bomb­ing of Dresden as a war crime, but did you know that the fire­bomb­ing of Tokyo caused more dam­age and loss of life than the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Naga­saki (which BTW were dropped on non-​​industrial res­id­en­tial areas)? I won’t get into the debate over whether such attacks were truly neces­sary (it was a war, after all), but we shouldn’t for­get the human suf­fer­ing which took place as a res­ult, regard­less of whom it is.

… well, sort of, any­way. Allow me to explain.

Today, we had a news sub­mis­sion about the BSA’s new scheme to teach chil­dren about the ‘evils’ of soft­ware pir­acy. To make this ‘learn­ing’ (or should I say ‘indoc­trin­a­tion’) more fun for the kid­dies, they got a mas­cot. Take a good look at it, what do you think it is?

It’s a fer­ret… supposedly.

When I first read that the BSA was using a fer­ret, I thought that we should call it a rat instead, since BSA is filled with dirty low-​​life rats. Then I hopped over to the site and had a look at it for myself. I swear, it looks like a weasel! A drugged-​​up homie weasel!

On a whim, I fired off an e-​​mail to Mike Magee at my favour­ite IT news site The Inquirer. If you’re not famil­iar with The Inq, think of it as The Register without the hubris. Indeed, Mike was the founder of The Reg, and he told me that he still owns 23% of it. Here’s part of the e-​​mail I sent to Mike:

The Busi­ness Soft­ware Alli­ance has received US Justice Depart­ment fund­ing of $200,000 to ‘edu­cate’ chil­dren about soft­ware pir­acy. More info at

http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​w​p​-​d​y​n​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​/​A​1​9​6​7​7​-​2​0​0​3​M​a​y​6​.​h​tml

What I’m won­der­ing is why this organ­isa­tion, which boasts some of the richest com­pan­ies in the world as its mem­bers, is receiv­ing US gov­ern­ment funding?

Another point of interest is the mas­cot of this new Play​itcy​ber​safe​.com ini­ti­at­ive. It is _​supposed_​ to be a fer­ret. To me it looks like a weasel. A ser­i­ously drugged-​​out, homie weasel. A weasel may be the per­fect choice for the BSA, but is a drugged-​​out homie char­ac­ter really the best choice to encour­age chil­dren not to steal? I would say it does the exact oppos­ite. You can see this weasel at

http://​www​.play​itcy​ber​safe​.com/​i​m​a​g​e​s​/​k​i​d​s​h​o​m​e​_​f​e​r​r​e​t​.​gif

And here’s part of Mike’s response:

Many thanks for the nice let­ter. And for the tip. The BSA is up to all sorts of tricks and we’ll cer­tainly cover this one.

A few hours later… BANG! Weasel Watch is born! Some excerpts:

HEAVILY SUBSIDED TRADE organ­isa­tion the Busi­ness Soft­ware Alli­ance (BSA) has received $200,000 fund­ing from the US gov­ern­ment to pro­mote a soft­ware pir­acy scheme aimed at children.

But that has raised ques­tions about why the Justice Depart­ment has chipped into the scheme, see­ing as the BSA is already sub­sid­ised, in fact paid for, to the tune of mil­lions, by some of the richest IT com­pan­ies in the world.

and

In fact the BSA Weasel, pic­tured above, looks like it’s either drugged up or it’s about to bite someone’s ankle, don’t you think?

SCORE!!!

Okay, this is just bizarre. The art­icle is based on the annual “Pat­terns of Global Ter­ror­ism” report. Isn’t it ironic that a gov­ern­ment that claims to be the bas­tion of free­dom across the globe is cri­ti­cising another gov­ern­ment for not clamp­ing down on civil liber­ties? Per­haps they should invade Canada, just as they have done with their neigh­bours to the south on so many occa­sions?

The art­icle was recently covered in Slash­dot, and there were some inter­est­ing responses. Two of my favourites:

I’ve heard it explained many times, that the reason why Amer­ica is tar­geted by ter­ror­ists is that “cer­tain ele­ments” are simply jeal­ous of our out­stand­ing qual­ity of life. They want to des­troy what they can’t build for themselves.

If you’re right about Canada — what, with all the pot smoking, low crime rates, free health­care, and civil liber­ties — I would expect Canada to rise to the top of the ter­ror­ists’ hit list. So, maybe instead of try­ing to get the damned Cana­dians to coöper­ate with us, we should simply launch an advert­ising cam­paign in the Islamic world explain­ing that Canada is the more logical tar­get for their anti-​​western fringe element.

and

Bush claimed shortly after ⁹⁄₁₁ that we were attacked because they hate us because of our freedoms.

So what a great way to pre­vent a future ter­ror­ist attack. Remove those freedoms so they (the­or­et­ic­ally) have no reason to hate us anymore.

What makes these inter­est­ing is that while being funny, they are at least partly groun­ded in truth. The argu­ment that ter­ror­ists attack the US because they are “jeal­ous of the Amer­ican way of life” is incred­ibly narrow-​​minded and arrog­ant. These people have a dif­fer­ent belief sys­tem entirely; there is far more to this world than raw cap­it­al­ism and mater­i­al­ism. What’s more, on most hol­istic meas­ures of qual­ity of life (which includes import­ant non-​​monetary factors like health, edu­ca­tion, pol­lu­tion and polit­ical free­dom), the US ranks quite low com­pared to many other nations. If I wanted to attack a coun­try because I was jeal­ous of their way of life, I’d be send­ing anthrax to Sweden or Denmark.

Per­sonal free­dom has dimin­ished markedly in the US, and unfor­tu­nately this has cre­ated some­what of a dom­ino effect into other states. The Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment, while not being nearly as undemo­cratic as that in the US, is a case in point. It was revealed last year that Aus­trali­ans are 20 times as likely to have their phone calls tapped by author­it­ies than US cit­izens. How­ever, I’m optim­istic that we won’t see any­thing along the lines of the Office of Home­land Secur­ity over here. I am more con­cerned about Ech­elon (more info), which seems to fit in well with the elev­ated occur­rance of wire tap­ping in both the USA and Australia.

What do you do when you’re the gov­ern­ment of a nation whose eco­nomy is not as good as it once was?

1. Spend $$$ on arma­ments in a Keyne­sian spend­ing spree.
2. Go to war with a small, easily-​​defeatable nation.
3. After win­ning, rebuild the nation so that it will be forever fin­an­cially indebted to you and heav­ily depend­ent on your tech­no­logy and expert­ise [altern­ate link].
4. PROFIT!!!

Do I sense some déjà vu? Hitler tried this, as did Gen­eral Leo­poldo Gal­tieri of Argen­tina and count­less other gov­ern­ments world­wide, includ­ing sev­eral US admin­is­tra­tions. Is eco­nomic growth worth such blood­shed and trauma? That obvi­ously depends on the cir­cum­stances at the time, but for this war I am still uncon­vinced. We’ll see what hap­pens.

I found an inter­est­ing art­icle in The Guard­ian from last year (April 4, 2002). Here’s an excerpt:

The Brit­ish people have acquired some not­able inform­a­tion about the Falk­lands war in 2002 that they were denied 20 years ago, when the war itself took place behind a blanket of cen­sor­ship. In the 1982 author­ised Thatcher­ite ver­sion of events, Bri­tain set out to recap­ture the Falk­land Islands with strong but tacit Amer­ican sup­port, in the face of French dupli­city, and won a bril­liant vic­tory against a demor­al­ised Argen­tine enemy. Twenty years on, thanks to the mem­oirs of the then defence sec­ret­ary, Sir John Nott, and an inter­view with the task force com­mander, Admiral Sandy Wood­ward, we are learn­ing a very dif­fer­ent ver­sion. Far from being an ally, Ron­ald Reagan’s US stands revealed by Sir John as per­sist­ently unre­li­able. Mean­while under François Mit­ter­rand, a will­ing France turns out to have sup­plied Bri­tain with price­less tech­nical details about the Exo­cet mis­sile. Admiral Wood­ward has now revealed that the fight­ing in the south Atlantic was “a lot closer run” than we were told at the time. “We were on our last legs,” the admiral says. If the Argen­tines had held out for another week, they would have defeated an exhausted Bri­tain. Think how dif­fer­ent our recent polit­ical his­tory might have been then.

In other words, the USA stood aside while the ter­rit­ory of its closest ally was invaded by its bel­li­ger­ent neigh­bour. Maybe the Brit­ish should boy­cott everything Amer­ican? Even fun­nier was the rev­el­a­tion that the UK was aided by France!

The above-​​quoted art­icle high­lights the impact of cen­sor­ship dur­ing times of war, not only on the part of gov­ern­ment but also on the part of the media. Over the past few days on my tele­vi­sion I have seen images of “Coali­tion” POWs held by the Iraqis, often fol­lowed by a state­ment claim­ing that these images were taken by Iraqis in viol­a­tion of inter­na­tional law. And indeed they were. Yet nobody com­plains when the US does it! They did it in Afgh­anistan, Guantanamo Bay and, yes, even in Iraq! I’ve lost track of how many inter­na­tional laws the US has broken, not only in this war but also in pre­vi­ous wars. These include the use of chem­ical and bio­lo­gical weapons (I thought Sad­dam was the one using those?!), cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and the tar­get­ing of civil­ian facil­it­ies. What makes me sad is that my own gov­ern­ment is an accom­plice to this. There are (were?) Aus­tralian cit­izens being illeg­ally and indef­in­itely detained in Guantanamo Bay like anim­als, and the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment doesn’t care.

Another thing I can­not under­stand is the ‘logic’ that some people seem to hold that since the USA helped France in World War II, France should help the USA invade Iraq. Why should France help the US when it is the aggressor? Note that I’m not try­ing to defend France, because I don’t like them much either. How­ever, this doesn’t make any sense to me at all. If I wanted to use such ‘logic’ (which it isn’t), then I could men­tion that the French gov­ern­ment prac­tic­ally bank­rup­ted itself help­ing the Amer­ican col­on­ists achieve inde­pend­ence. Louis XVI basic­ally gave his life for the Amer­ican people, since the French Revolu­tion might not have happened hadn’t he been forced to pay for his war debts through rais­ing taxes. I could also men­tion that although World War II began in 1939, and France was invaded in June 1940, it wasn’t until Decem­ber 1941 that the United States entered the war. Even then, it was Ger­many that declared war, not the USA. Some ‘friends’ they were! Of course, using such argu­ments would be excess­ively facile, so I include them only to show their idiocy.

Update: I just came across this hypo­thet­ical dis­cus­sion between a war­mon­ger and a peacenik. I found it quite amusing.

Update [2003–04-06]: Britain’s Chan­nel 4 screened a great comedy/​documentary on 5 Janu­ary called “Between Iraq and a Hard Place”. You can watch the whole thing over the Inter­net (stream­ing, requires Real­player) here.

I came across this art­icle at csmon​itor​.com. Basic­ally, it’s point­ing out how juven­ile a boy­cott of all words and products of French ori­gin would be, for example renam­ing French fries to free­dom fries. Besides, they are actu­ally from Bel­gium, not France. Maybe we should call them oil fries? It only makes sense

That got me think­ing. If so many Amer­ic­ans are eager to boy­cott everything French, what will they do with the admir­als, com­modores, bri­gadier gen­er­als, col­on­els, com­mand­ers, cap­tains, lieu­ten­ants, war­rant officers, ensigns, ser­geants, cor­por­als, spe­cial­ists and air­men in their armed forces? Surely they wouldn’t want to use those in the war against Iraq? That leaves only sea­men and privates for the assault (gen­er­als and majors are officers). Can they fight a battle without aero­planes (includ­ing jets and their pilots), armour, artil­lery, bombs, rock­ets, gren­ades, bul­lets, rifles or machine guns? Can they attack without magazines or the ammuni­tion stored inside them? And who needs sol­diers, any­way? Maybe they don’t need an army, navy, air force or mar­ines? Heck, per­haps they don’t need a mil­it­ary at all!

Strangely enough, weapons inspector doesn’t seem to be of French origin.

In semi-​​related news, Man­drake Linux 9.1 is out. OSNews has a great review of it, and Tweak­hound has an inform­at­ive inter­view with Man­drake Linux founder Gaël Duval. It looks amaz­ing, par­tic­u­larly com­pared to 9.0, which could have been bet­ter (although I didn’t think 9.0 was nearly as bad as many review­ers did). As a side note, I clicked the “More links HERE” link at the bot­tom of the Gaël Duval inter­view and found PCLinuxOn​line​.com lis­ted under “Other Good Linux Sites”. Yay!!!

I’ve seen com­ments by some Amer­ic­ans advoc­at­ing a boy­cott of Man­drake Linux because Man­drakeSoft is French. To them, I have this to say: Are you really that retarded?! I mean, that’s just idi­otic [see defin­i­tion 2]! Free soft­ware is an inter­na­tional effort. Code and developers come from all over the world. The corol­lary of this is that most of the code in Man­drake Linux isn’t from France at all. It also means that all GNU/​Linux dis­tri­bu­tions have some code that would have ori­gin­ated in France. Maybe you should boy­cott Red Hat, Debian and every­one else as well?