| Monday November 24, 2003 CET
by Comrade Medvedsilnyn
|
Whoever said that old age dulls the wit hasn't heard of Norman Mailer. This literary genius and champion of the left has the power of the word still with him, as is evident from this interview in Dagbladet:
- I call [Bush] the spam president, says New York's literary lion to Dagbladet. Norman Mailer is now 81, but is still clear in his criticism of the current administration in Washington. - As you know, spam has no content, it's in the way, and can destroy your entire computer.
Mailer is more right than he knows. As is well-known, Micro$oft Corporation is one of the major backers of the Republican party. What most people don't know is that their insecure and intrusive software solutions (Micro$oft Windows and Micro$oft Outlook) are the primary reasons why spam spreads so easily on the web. When the I Love You-spam took down the internet, it did so through security holes in Micro$oft Outlook. Outlook is one of the most widespread e-mail browsers in the world, and is closely integrated with Micro$oft's lucrative Hotmail service. It is full of spam-friendly holes, so many that it's hard to dismiss them as accidental. There's a lot of money in spam. Most of the e-mail going over the web today is spam. Has the powerful spammer (or "direct marketing" as they call themselves) associations paid Micro$oft to allow this? Why else would they leave these holes open?
If so, the presidency of George W. Bush was paid for by spammers. Remember that the next time your computer is destroyed by a Viagra spam.
That it is possible to make good software without compromising with spammers and capitalists is demonstrated with Linux. Linux is an operating system that is free, stable, has all the software you could ever need, and - best of all - is developed according to communistic principles. It's based on the GNU GPL license, which says that you are free to make changes to Linux as long as you give away the source code and don't get paid for it. According to free market dogma, this shouldn't work. When nobody gets paid, who'll have an interest in making improvements and fixing bugs? And yet it does. Marx knew why - altruism. Programmers know that it is in everybody's interest to have good, free, socialist software - and so they just make it, voluntarily. A better real life demonstration of the power of communism is difficult to imagine.
The contrast to how corporations develop software is striking. Underpaid programmers working long hours towards impossible deadlines, sacrificing usefulness and reliability for "ease-of-use", pretty colors and other cheap gimmicks aimed at the braindead masses. The very things communism is here to rescue us from. That, and spam, whether in the form of e-mail or American presidents.
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