Inter@ctive Week: Cold War In A Digital Age Jul 31, 2000, 16 :01 UTC (10 Talkback[s]) (3363 reads) (Other stories by Rob Fixmer)
"...who are the latter-day Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels whose manifestoes moved
both the Chinese government and the U.S.
Senate to action last week? Why, two computer
science students, of course: Linus Torvalds,
who fashioned Linux, a free and open operating
system (OS), while a 21-year-old student at the
University of Helsinki, and Shawn Fanning, who
invented the Napster music exchange
technology as a 19-year-old student at
Northeastern University in Boston."
"These two revolutionaries each created a
"people's software" around which fanatical
followers have constructed suspiciously left
wing-sounding tenets like "Code must be
distributed openly and universally," and "Music
wants to be free." I thought these
slogans sound innocuous until I read an article
last week on the front page of The New York
Times about how the government of China had
turned against that bastion of capitalism,
Microsoft, and its chairman, Bill "the richest
man in history" Gates, to throw its official
support to Linux. What could be more
un-American?"
"This situation oozes paradox. Here's the most
closed society in the developed world insisting
that the survival of its citizens and sovereignty
demands an open source OS. So Windows is
no longer the official OS of China. As Times
reporter Craig S. Smith wrote of Linux, "The
almost communistic 'from each according to his
ability, to each according to his need' approach
appeals to China's Marxist leaders."
