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[David Aikema]

On 5/19/05, Don Parris <gnumathetes at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone else here see the irony of Communist Cuba adopting libre
> software, especially while the libre US continues its dependence on
> non-free software. ;)

I don't think that it's ironic at all.  To me, the ideas of communism
and open source seem to have a much closer correspondence then that of
free enterprise and open source.  Of course, communism in theory and
communism in practice are two different things... human sinfulness
always gets in the way.

Anyways, I think that the main reason for this is political...
Microsoft is a US-based company after all, and it and the US don't get
along to  well.  Hence, you gain access to and control over the source
code so you can ensure that backdoors are in the compiled software
(unless of course your compiler setup to insert those backdoors but
let's not go there).  I think that in China, there's actually a
government-sponsored Linux distribution for example.

David