MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-03-03 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir Secretary NYLXS
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Suitwatch Linux Journal
|
SuitWatch--March 3
Views on Linux in Business
--by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal
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The Greater Zero
"Battle Lessons: What the Generals Don't Know":
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050117fa_fact is a long report
by Dan Baum in the January 17, 2005, issue of The New Yorker. It's a
fascinating report on one way the US Armed Forces adapted to Iraq, on
the ground, without top-down help from brass who were not in the best
position to provide the necessary clues:
These officers, scrambling to bring order to Mosul, Fallujah, and
Baghdad, had been trained and equipped to fight against numbered,
mechanized regiments in open-maneuver warfare. They had been taught
to avoid fighting in cities at all costs. Few had received
pre-deployment training in improvised explosive devices, or
I.E.D.s, the insurgents' signature weapon. None had received any
but the most rudimentary instruction in the Arabic language or in
Iraqi culture. They were perhaps the most isolated occupation force
in history; there are no bars or brothels in Baghdad where
Americans can relax, no place off the base for Americans to remove
their body armor in the presence of locals. Every encounter was
potentially hostile. The chronic shortage of troops and shifting
phases of fighting and reconstruction forced soldiers into jobs for
which they weren't prepared; Wong found field artillerymen,
tankers, and engineers serving as infantrymen, while infantrymen
were building sewer systems and running town councils. All were
working with what Wong calls "a surprising lack of detailed
guidance from higher headquarters." In short, the Iraq that Wong
found is precisely the kind of unpredictable environment in which a
cohort of hidebound and inflexible officers would prove disastrous.
And:
Yet he found the opposite. Platoon and company commanders were
exercising their initiative to the point of occasional genius.
Whatever else the Iraq war is doing to American power and prestige,
it is producing the creative and flexible junior officers that the
Army's training could not.
After suggesting several generational reasons for this, Baum adds:
The younger officers have another advantage over their superiors:
they grew up with the Internet, and have created for themselves, in
their spare time, a means of sharing with one another, online,
information that the Army does not control. The "slackers" in the
junior-officer corps are turning out to be just what the Army needs
in the chaos of Iraq. Instead of looking up to the Army for
instructions, they are teaching themselves how to fight the war.
The Army, to its credit, stays out of their way.
He goes on to tell the story of how soldiers developed their own
Net-based experience sharing system. One is Companycommand.com:
http://companycommand.army.mil/ and the other is Platoonleader.org:
http://platoonleader.army.mil/. Long story short, these and other DIY
(do-it-yourself) efforts have led to positive results. One measure of
their success is the new .mil addresses sported by both sites. Baum
explains:
Little by little, the Army is absorbing Companycommand.com and
Platoonleader.org. In 2002, West Point put Platoonleader on its
server, and a year later added Companycommand; both sites now have
military addresses. The Army also began paying the Web site's
expenses. It sent all four of its founders to graduate school to
earn Ph.D.s, so that they can become professors at West Point,
where they will run the sites as part of their jobs. And the Army
is starting to pay the Web sites the sincerest form of flattery: in
April, the commanding general of the First Cavalry Division, Major
General Peter Chiarelli, ordered up a conversation site for his
officers. Cavnet, as it's known, exists only on siprnet, and is
vetted, as an official Army site. "We had a guy put up something
that wasn't within the rules of engagement," Major Patrick
Michaelis, who created the site, told me, "and within half an hour
the staff judge-advocate guys put a response up." But, of all the
Web-based means of sharing combat information, Cavnet is the most
immediate. While call is used mostly in training units in the U.S.,
and both Companycommand and Platoonleader are intended to build
leadership skills and share general tips and tricks about fighting
in Iraq, Cavnet is oriented, Michaelis said, to "the next patrol,
six to nine hours out." Lieutenant Keith Wilson, for example, read
a "be on the look out" posting about insurgents who were wiring
grenades behind posters of Moqtada al-Sadr, counting on Americans
to detonate the explosives when they ripped the posters down. He
spread the word among his men, and a few days later a soldier whom
he'd sent to peel a poster off a wall peeked behind it first. Sure
enough, a grenade was waiting.
The punch line, however, comes earlier in the piece, between the point
when the sites were built and when the Army took them in-house:
"Hey guys," one captain wrote. "Remember this is an open-source Web
site. Everything you type is being read by the enemy."
I'm sure that captain was not familiar with the OSI's Open Source
definition:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php. I doubt he even knew
precisely what "open source" meant in the first place (which was
roughly, if not exactly, when Eric S. Raymond announced it:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html in February 1998). Instead,
he was using a term Google finds repeated more than 27 million places
on the Web and which has come to hold much more than its original
meaning. Just as "ground zero" is no longer confined to exploding
bombs, "open source" is no longer confined to software.
At LinuxWorld Expo in February, Martin Fink, General Manager of HP's
Linux Systems Division, gave a keynote in which he lamented--as have
many others--the proliferation of software licenses certified by the
Open Source Initiative:
http://opensource.org. From a Builder.au:
http://builderau.com.au/program/work/0,39024650,39177963,00.htm
report:
"This current path of approving licenses--based simply on the
compliance to a specification rather than on the basis of a new
license's ability to further innovate the business model of the
open-source industry--represents to me a clear and present danger
to the very core of what makes open source work," Fink said. "If
this is the path the OSI continues to choose, then it is choosing a
path towards irrelevance."
I'm not so sure.
The OSI has been defined by its definition:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php since the beginning. The
fact that it attracts so much heat attests to the importance of both
the organization and its definition.
I happen to believe it's in the best interest of software developers
to choose familiar and understandable licenses. I also believe that
restricting the number of licenses the OSI approves risks putting the
OSI out of compliance with its own definition.
Let's face it: the whole thing is complicated naturally and changing
rapidly. Creativity has that effect. So does politics, of course. And
so does populating the world with an abundance of highly varied
infrastructural building materials that work best because they're open
to all kinds of uses. How do you put limits on defining all that?
I think it helps to take a wider view--one that appreciates what open
source has come to mean outside the industry as well as inside. I
think there's a large value system involved here, and we don't yet
know its full scope, much less its fine definitions.
And by "we" I don't mean just what we used to call "the open source
world".
--
Doc Searls:
mailto:doc-at-ssc.com is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. He writes the
Linux for Suits column for Linux Journal. He also presides over Doc
Searls' IT Garage:
http://garage.docsearls.com, which is published by SSC, the publisher
of Linux Journal.
_________________________________________________________________
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Notice to Subscribers
Your copy of the April 2005 issue of Linux Journal is being mailed
this week and should reach you soon! (Delivery outside US may take
longer.) The April issue also will be available on newsstands
beginning on March 17 (US).
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