[CoLoCo] in defense of open source

[Ringo Kamens]

I have also alerted Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting of the
statements made by Discover. Here's the letter I just sent:
Dear Editor,

I was extremely upset to see a distinguished magazine in the
scientific community such as Discover publish such a poorly backed up
argument as was presented in the December 2007 issue of Jaron's World.
The arguments made in this article seem to be fabricated and have
little or no factual backing.

The main point presented by the author is that the open source model
isn't right for every situation and that furthermore, by design,
proprietary development techniques are inherently better at creating
radical, new, "wow moment" technology. "Why did the adored iPhone come
out of what many regard as the most closed software-development shop
on earth?". This statement implies that there was no predecessor on
equal ground to the iPhone and that the iPhone would only have
happened with closed-source labs. Before the iPhone, there were
GNU/Linux-based smartphones and PSP-type platform, we even put
GNU/Linux on the iPod. The best example of open source trumping closed
source is the operating systems that they tout. Closed source
development touts Windows, acknowledged by the majority of the
computer hacker community to be the most bloated, expensive, insecure
operating system on the market. In fact, Windows has had the most zero
days of any OS because of their use of "security through obscurity".
On the other hand, studies have shown that GNU/Linux systems are the
fastest, most secure, and cheapest (in terms of original price and
total ownership cost) systems on the market. The only study that has
shown any evidence to the contrary was one touted by Microsoft in
their "get the facts" campaign. This study was funded by Microsoft
themselves.

I would continue rebutting the points made in the article, but there
is already a blog posting which does an excellent job at doing so
available at http://ubuntukids.org/blog/?p=60

Sincerely,
Ringo Kamens
Centennial, Colorado
**phone number**

On Nov 20, 2007 4:20 PM, Jim Hutchinson <jim at ubuntu-rocks.org> wrote:
> On 11/20/07, Ringo Kamens <2600denver at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Jim: Do you have any plans to submit this as a letter to the editor? I
> > think that would be the best course of action.
>
> I will reply to the article once it's online. I may also send a short
> version of a letter to the editor with link if I can figure out how. I
> was going to send it to Full Circle as well. Thanks for the support.
>
>
> Jim
>
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