The Iron Yuppie

I thought this was a bit of an interesting page:

Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)?

So as I mentioned before, the web offers unprecedented opportunity for people to have a soapbox as well as for visibility into conversations that would normally take place in private. The above fascinates me because it highlights one more thing the web is particularly good at: making your case on a controversial (or not) subject.

Above you have someone listing a number of points for why you should use Linux or open source software. While I have my own opinions on this subject (independent from my employer’s opinion), the more interesting point of discussion is the one way nature of the publication. Unlike broad communication mechanisms today, such as newspapers or TV, the web has no editors and has no real incentives for encouraging accurate reporting. This is exacerbated by the number of web pages out there; people end up getting in their loop of checking and all the sources have the same opinion. Picking a selection from the article,

Sites using Microsoft’s IIS web serving software have over double the time offline (on average) than sites using the Apache software, according to a 3-month Swiss evaluation.

Well, that’s nice, but that’s 4 years ago and measured before Windows 2000 even came out (I will assume it was Windows NT 4 running on those machines, but the article did not say). But if I’m the average reader of the article I’m not necessarily going to know that. The web presents it all equally. I do not need a license or millions of dollars to get my opinion out there and state it as fact. The web inherits the same sense of permanence and quality that all these other sources we’ve become accustomed to, yet it is dramatically less reliable for the exact same reasons that it is so accessible. I guess that’s what makes things like this Onion article so funny.

D