>The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue
Obviously, but most of university research - at least in Europe - is funded by public money. The idea is that research funded by public money should be public by default, unless there's a reason to do otherwise.
>Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
Yet it's not American "public" money that funded it.
And it's good to realize what 'public' means in this case: paid for by the general public. What companies produce is also (often) paid for by them, only not via taxes but through purchases, subscriptions, etc. Why should the software produced by companies be exempt?
American public money funded most of the tech that the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value. Your American using Italian uni stuff is nonsense.
30 years ago, one of the things we were all naively hoping for was that a globally connected network would help to reduce the tribalism, obsolete these "American money" and "European bits" and "Chinese protocols" ideas and stop all the cross-border fighting over what's mine and what's yours. When a piece of software has contributors from 50 countries, how could it "belong" to one country? Obviously we are in an even worse spot, global cooperation wise, now than we were in the 90s.
I've seen this work in certain situations, CERN and the LHC for example (I was on a data team for a detector). Everyone was driven by the science, where you came from didn't matter. With that said, and this part is going to be inflammatory potentially, people who are fear and tribal/in group driven are likely never going to be swayed (and building the mental model up via comments to properly contextualize this is beyond the scope of this thread). Tech doesn't fix people problems.
It might have been a bit naive, and very much reliant on a more open, more liberal, and less neo-liberal, international order than we have right now. Greed and power are not (<-edit: I had skipped that bit) conducive to such ideals.
Indeed, it appears they are upset that "the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value" from American open source spend in some way.
2011 was 15 years ago. I was not even legally adult back then. And even if I was old enough back then, people are allowed to change their opinions in 15 years.
The GP didn't say changing Maduro to other president is bad, but that "periods of violent transition" can have dire consequences for the regular people. And US seems to be in it for the money, not to liberate the downtrodden.
This is a parallel argument to the whole "to big to fail" nonsense and not really in line with the famous comparison of a single person to a machine. Company strategies are typically created by small groups of people who - especially in this case - know exactly what the impact and longer-reach implications of their decisions will be. It is entirely reasonable to hold the people of any organization accountable for the policies they enact via that organization.
Obviously, but most of university research - at least in Europe - is funded by public money. The idea is that research funded by public money should be public by default, unless there's a reason to do otherwise.
>Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
Yes, of course.
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