Nietzsche. Gotta love it.
So, this weekend I've been reading My Life by Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton's Living History. I enjoyed her book more than I did his. It was better written, and you know, not 900+ pages. I know that it would absolutely horrify my family but darned if reading her book didn't increase my already profound admiration of the woman.
I learned a new two dollar word today:
recondite adj.
1. Not easily understood; abstruse.
2. Concerned with or treating something abstruse or obscure: recondite scholarship.
3. Concealed; hidden.
I was talking about the "brain drain" in Africa with a friend recently. It's really quite sad, but it's difficult to imagine a solution. It seems to be a relatively common occurance with former colonies. There isn't much of a future of graduates so they leave the country - taking any hope for home-grown improvements with them.
I wonder sometimes about a world where families sell their children as slaves because they are so destitute they feel there is no other option. Is redemption possible for such a world? How can we sleep soundly at night knowing about such horrors?
But, in happy news, Brazil has basically told Bill Gates to get bent. Rock on Brazil! What chance do developing economies really have in the world of technology when the cost is absolutely prohibitive? The open source movement is really where it is. Open source enables the creation of software to specifically address the needs of the users. Instead of attempting to tweak your software to do something it wasn't created to do, you are given incredibly broad creative scope.
So maybe there is hope afterall.
2 comments:
Open source software is growing in leaps and bounds in the poorer nations of the world, for the obvious nations. The problem is that for a lot of things (and I'm talking mostly about the desktop side of things, rather than the server), OSS is very much just as good as it needs to be to survive. In many cases, it's just plain shoddy.
That said, as more governments look seriously at open source projects, I 'm rather hoping that they'll (at least collectively) fund the development required to bridge the divide, even if large companies and richer nations aren't willing to do so. After all, changes for the better end up (eventually, at least) getting fed upstream back into the original projects, and benefit everybody.
It is quite the conundrum. I suppose I see the situation as follows: utilization of OSS will enable developing nations to participate in technological fields, which will enable better technology based education, which will allow for improvement and funding of OSS - as the people in the countries using it realize the potential.
But, shocking though it may be, I am a bit of an idealist.
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