As a follow-up to my previous “Why Principles?” post, let’s examine principles, the OLPC, and a recent blog post by Ivan Krstić.
Mr. Krstić does a great job of deconstructing OLPC, particularly recent moves to switch to a version of Windows XP as an operating system for the OLPC laptop. In effect, what he rails against is OLPC’s lack of conviction in its principles — that it is willing to drop principles (e.g., open source all the way down) for the sake of expediency in dealing with competitive issues.
In fact, one gets the impression that Mr. Krstić has his own set of principles and tries to stick by them. Mr. Krstić doesn’t quite come out an list a set of principles in his post. However, it would appear that his principles are “constructionist learning, widely deployed”.
Had his post been solely about how he’s sticking by his principles and how OLPC is not sticking by theirs, it would have been a stellar piece of writing. However, at least twice, he ventures off into another area, bashing somebody else for sticking by his principles, namely Richard Stallman.
Mr. Stallman, of course, is the leader of the Free Software movement, founder of the Free Software Foundation, etc. Mr. Stallman has rock-ribbed conviction in his principles (the Free Software Four Freedoms) and doesn’t mince words when espousing them…such as in his essay on the OLPC’s move to Windows.
Now, I can forgive Mr. Krstić for complaining about Mr. Stallman comparing proprietary software to “an addictive drug” — arguing points of rhetoric is a time-honored tradition. Where I get more antsy is when Mr. Krstić says:
At the end of the day, it just doesn’t matter to the educational mission what kernel is running Sugar. If Sugar itself remains open and free — which, thus far, has never been in question — all of the relevant functionality such as the ‘view source’ key remains operational, on Windows or not. OLPC should never take steps to willingly limit the audience for its learning software. Windows is the most widely used operating system in existence. A Windows-compatible Sugar would bring its rich learning vision to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of children all over the world whose parents already own a Windows computer, be it laptop or desktop. To suggest this is a bad course of action because it’s philosophically impure is downright evil.
The last sentence of the quoted passage, in the context of the whole posting, is clearly aimed at Mr. Stallman’s advocating that OLPC only run Free Software.
What makes this declaration by Mr. Krstić so disconcerting is that, to a large extent, my presumed assumptions overlap largely with Mr. Stallman’s. In the end, the Four Freedoms are all about learning: anyone should be able to learn how any software functions if she wishes to spend the time to do so. Learning from experimenting with software is inherently constructionist, and the Open Learning Foundation that Mr. Krstić espouses at the end would appear to be all about constructionist learning from experimenting with software.
Mr. Stallman thinks that all software should serve as constructionist learning material; Mr. Krstić apparently is willing to settle for some subset of that software. Mr. Krstić, in effect, puts the emphasis on the constructionist part, while Mr. Stallman puts the emphasis on the software part.
That’s why I decry the use of the term “evil” by Mr. Krstić. It’s too similar to some evangelical Protestants calling Catholics “evil”, “the great whore”, etc. Once upon a time, those were highly relevant statements (e.g., during the religious wars of the 1600’s), but nowadays it’s merely religion-baiting. There are just too many similarities between Catholicism and many Protestant denominations — calling Catholics “evil” just begs the question of who else might be considered “evil” over similarly small differences. Similarly, Mr. Krstić calling Mr. Stallman “evil” because Mr. Stallman goes further than Mr. Krstić wants vis a vis learning from software does a fair bit to weaken Mr. Krstić’s otherwise strong arguments.
And, rolling this back to the Cooperative Democracy Project, this is another fine example of why I want to establish a clear set of principles and then use them as the benchmark for comparing implementations of wide-area online opinion-gathering tools. We have to be clear and unambiguous, we have to stand by those convictions, and we have to feel confident that, if we follow our principles, good things will happen as a result.
