Sunday, December 31, 2017

I just stumbled over opensource.google.com where they say that

Google believes that open source is good for everyone. By being open and freely available, it enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real world problems.

Their Why Open Source? document is comparable to my Why software must be free document. With a few fundamental differences of course…

Google does great work by showing how the world government should be organized. Google is loved and adored by a big part of the human world population. They are better than Microsoft and Facebook in getting loved.

In Net states rule the world; we need to recognize their power (April 2017), Alexis Wichowski explains why national governments are getting more and more helpless, and he suggests to grant more power to the “net-states”:

The world needs net-states in order to defeat the non-states. We’re not beating them on our own. To win information-era wars, countries need to recognize the power of the net-states, not as an ancillary locale of assembly in the cyberspace, but as critical entities wielding the kind of power and influence necessary to go toe-to-toe with non-state actors. The world needs net-states, because they occupy the same territory as the non-states: the digital sphere.

OTOH it seems clear to me that we should never ever let Google do the job of governing our world. Because their interests are in fundamental contradiction with those of the majority of humans. Because they are good only for those who accept the rules of their game.