Two Oxford dons have published a paper which claims that engineering and terrorism share a common mindset. (The lead author is Diego Gambetta, right.)

Personally I can see a closer relationship between being being an Oxford sociology professor and having your head…but I digress. (Someone needs a lesson in logic.)

The real problem is that people who know better are taking this Luddite nonsense seriously. Here’s the lead from an article in the current Foreign Policy (the whole article is behind a paid firewall):

Osama bin Laden studied engineering. So did lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Exceptions to the rule? Hardly. Most highprofile Islamist terrorists are, in fact, highly educated. And according to new research at Oxford University by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, most of them may be engineers.

Had they been permitted to freely study religion, or political science, don’t you think these people might be more inclined to do that? Seems to be what their chosen majors actually would have been, had they been free. Which they weren’t.

Which is the point.

This wouldn’t be so bad if policymakers weren’t actually falling prey to the nonsense. The UK, for instance, now plans to pass a law making “distribution of hacking tools” a crime. Isn’t a C++ compiler a “hacking tool” if it’s used by a hacker?

Add in the demand by some in the UK to filter the Internet for copyright, the offer by AT&T to do precisely that here, and it doesn’t take a tinfoil hat to realize that, inside this political year, there is some serious dreaming of suppression going on.

I would think that if engineers are inclined toward terrorism, then FOSS programmers are even more so-inclined. Question is what can be done about it?

Non-violent thoughts only, please.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is challenging a patent regarding
online gaming.
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is
challenging a bogus online gaming patent threatening small
businesses and innovators of multi-player Internet games.
Sheldon F. Goldberg was awarded the illegitimate patent for
the “method and system of playing games on a network,” and
claims to own rights in all online gaming systems that use
tournament-style play, advertising, and have real-time
updates of ladder-rankings in multi-player games. Goldberg
has used this bogus patent to coerce licensing fees from
numerous small businesses, demanding payments that are
excessive yet less than potential litigation.”

Today users have many choices for combining Linux and Windows on the same machine. You can go with a traditional dual-boot system in which the operating systems reside on different disk partitions but share a common partition for files, or you can use an emulator such as Wine, which lets you install Windows applications right in your Linux system. Virtualization programs, such as those from VMware, bring you closer to the more ideal solution of using both systems at once, but one is always the host and one is always the guest, shown inside a window. But by combining VMware Server with some free software, you can run Windows XP along with Linux, not inside a console window, but completely integrated into the Linux environment.

Mr. Buzzword for February appears to be proprietary open source.

This is an open source project which is owned or controlled by one company. Even though it may have a GPL license, you have no more power over it than a single voter in a political system.

The definition has changed since I first wrote the Open Source Incline back in 2006. It’s now a development model, not a licensing model.

But the intent is still the same, and the impact similar, as Savio Rodrigues notes. In the proprietary model your own features and bug fixes may be ignored by the project’s “owner” so what’s the use?

You have even less control over the project’s business model. If the “owner” wants to let someone do a proprietary fork which undermines your work, there may be little you can do. Especially if you happen to work for said owner.

Few of us come to this debate with clean hands, because we all like to eat and have roofs over our heads. Savio, whose post started this thread, works at IBM, which through Eclipse offers a different model.

And Big Blue also must eat, as a commenter e-mailed me after I praised IBM’s Jazz contributions. They do want to lock people into buying Rational tools, he said, and open source is a means to that end.

Even my own objectivity can be sullied by my desire to eat well. I avoid topics involving ZDNet, C|Net and my wife’s employer for that reason. I may tilt at windmills here, but some windmills are more equal than others.

Which is sort of the point. As projects, or blogs, scale, they have to become group efforts, and a successful effort requires some sort of business model to pay the bills. Everyone must compromise. Someone must rule.

As time goes by, moreover, we all have to get big or get out. I supported John Edwards on my personal blog but when any market narrows you have to accept your second choice, or your third, and hope for the best.

In open source, however, at least you can see the code, add your fix, add your feature, tell your friends, blog about it, put it on your Web site and hope, through the magic of Google, it’s found by those who need it.

That’s a big achievement. That’s reform. That pushes history forward just a little bit.

Which is all any of us can legitimately ask for.

NXP and Purple Labs have

announced an inexpensive Linux mobile phone.
“NXP Semiconductors, the independent semiconductor company founded by Philips, and Purple Labs, a leading supplier of embedded Linux solutions for mobile phones, jointly announced today the release of a 3G Linux reference feature phone offering video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing and video streaming at a transfer price below US$100. The new Purple Magic phone serves as a reference design for phone manufacturers creating entry-level 3G handsets, including those targeting mobile markets such as Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.”

LinuxWatch
investigates Debian’s difficulties with corporate support.
“Debian, either directly or through related Linux distributions such as Xandros, is used both by Linux enthusiasts and Fortune 500 companies.
Of course, you couldn’t prove that by the vast majority of Debian developers who never see a thin dime from their Debian work. Or, I should add, get access to new hardware, travel expenses to Debian developer conferences and so on.
The reason for this is twofold. First, Debian, as a developer community, has never wanted any kind of “business” organization or corporate partnerships or sponsorships. It is purely a volunteer operation and woe unto any would-be developer who tries to change Debian’s ways.”

“The question comes up but it is not something I really worry about. There are other people who could take over what I do. I would like to think that they would be worse at it but it is not like [Linux] would go away or be in trouble”

The infrastructure and tools required to make Linux a green operating system are now in place, according to Linus Torvalds, who was in Melbourne this week attending Australia’s largest Linux conference. via BuilderAU.com.au

apc
covers an LCA talk by LWN’s Jonathan Corbet.
“Kernel release 2.6.24 came out on January 24, just before linux.conf.au began. Corbet estimates 2.6.25 will be finalised sometime around April.
That rapid cycle represents an astonishing volume of new code. “We are adding about 2000 lines of code to the kernel every single day of the year, without exception,” Corbet said. “Nobody can really keep up with this [on their own] any more. It’s an amazing process, and it seems to be working.”
The project which those numbers immediately bring to mind is Wikipedia, which uses similar open source principles, along with an “anyone can contribute” ethos.”

KDE.News reports
that Sun and Frontline have donated a new server to KDE.
“During a tutorial today on-stage at linux.conf.au, Sun Microsystems and Frontline donated a server to the KDE project, available for shipment within hours. Aaron Seigo, Plasma developer and KDE e.V President, accepted a certificate from Ross Cunningham of Sun Microsystems and David Purdue of Frontline on behalf of the KDE project.”

“The support of Qt by S60 will be the first environment that will allow developers to write full applications (including UI) without using the native Symbian-based application framework”

Symbian, Sony Ericsson and Motorola claim they are confident Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech will leave them unscathed, despite analyst suggestions to the contrary. via ZDNet UK News