Voice of the Masses: How can Trump make computing great again?
OK, so it might sound like we’re jumping on the Trump hype train here, but there’s a serious point to this fortnight’s Voice of the Masses. Donald Trump has repeatedly positioned himself as the anti-establishment candidate, but also the best for boosing jobs in the USA. So with that in mind, when he takes office, what can he do to really help the IT industry in America? What could really shake up “the establishment”?
Obviously as GNU/Linux fans we’d like to see the end to software patents, or laws that push governments and public bodies to use open source and open document standards. But what else could or should the new president do? Do you think he cares about change, or will he just cosy up to entrenched interests in the IT industry? Should he stake his position in the great Vim vs Emacs war? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and we’ll read out the best in our upcoming podcast.
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
He could declare PI to = 3. Pesky irrational numbers.
He could ban all that communist open source stuff.
But I’m pretty certain we he will instead disavow software entirely. “WE DON’T DO SOFTWARE!! ALL OUR WARE IS HARD!!! YOU WON’T BELEIVE HOW HARD OUR WARE IS!!!!!”
I think the only thing he’s gonna achieve is make IT in Canada great again!
O and maybe make Microsoft change to micro-hard you won’t believe how hard our micros are. Then he will realise what micro means. And probably change it to kilo… While England rebrands it to a random imperial measure unit. pint hard probably. But humour and togetherness will save us all in the end. From France with love. Veuillez agréer madame monsieur l’expression de mes salutations distinguées
In à creative commons spirit I should give credit to shadow firebird for the hard joke
I release that joke under the LGPL v3.
It is difficult to make an assumption on any of Trumps policies. He regularly contradicts himself or swaps to the opposing viewpoint based on what is the most hashtag trending opinion. In the real world a president only have so much influence and power. A majority of the policies will be driven by the advisors, policymakers and campaign funders. But if Trump’s previous comments are anything to go by I wouldn’t be surprised if he pushes that all hardware and software should be proprietary and get the NSA and FBI seal of approval.
I think The Donald could well issue an executive order to take direct control of Twitter, because The Donald writes fantastic Tweets, marvellous Tweets, the most winning Tweets.
Apart from that I doubt Trump knows anything about the IT industry, never mind care anything about Free Software – you can imagine that on having Free Software explained to him he would explode with rage that such a communistic thing could exist. He may even Tweet about it.
No, The Donald is more about building and slapping his name on enormous phallic symbols – see Trump Tower and those tint, tiny hands
He could Make Apt-Get Great Again.
Now that he’s obtained admin privileges, President-elect Trump could “sudo apt-get purge” the foreign packages from our system.
Trump will do nothing good for computing and Free Software as he won’t even do anything good for American workers he is all talk.
He might be against “the establishment” but I think open source software will be something he (believes) he hates more. What could be less American than giving something away for free that someone has spent years building. It’s about as communist as it comes and nothing could be more un-American and less patriotic as that. So for open source and GNU/Linux he’ll probably do nothing good and possibly even ban or try to remove its use in government offices.
Get Real! Trump’s proximity to IP enthusiasts and maximalists in the entertainment industry is deeply worrisome, and I might be in the minority on this, but I think Trump is going to feign some attempt to re-negotiate TPP and then push it through, maximalist IP laws and all.
I think a lot of people are in for a great surprise from President Trump. Don’t believe what the mass media have told you, they have been telling you what they want you to believe, what the Establishment wants you to believe.
First of all, he is not a politician, he is a businessman. He is not encumbered by dogma. If someone tells him a better way to look at an idea he is very happy to take that new view on. We are seeing this already in some of his post election pronouncements.
Don’t, like many politicians, ridicule him, talk to him, convince him of the merits of Free and Open Source Software and Data. He will listen to good ideas and incorporate them into his business plan.
Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. Complicated. Thank you very much.
I’ve just received a call from Rcihard Stallman. He congratulated us. It’s about us. On our victory, and I congratulated him and his FSF on a very, very hard-fought campaign.
I mean, he fought very hard. Richard has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe him a major debt of gratitude for his service to our software.
I mean that very sincerely. Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division, have to get together. To all Developers and Engineers and Hackers across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united team.
It is time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be President for all geeks, and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support Free Software in the past, of which there were a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great code base.
As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign but rather an incredible and great movement, made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their computers and want better, brighter software for themselves and for their family.
It is a movement comprised of Nerds from all systems, environments, code-bases, and languages, who want and expect our software to serve the people — and serve the people it will.
Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our code-base and renewing the FSF dream. I’ve spent my entire life in business, looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world.
That is now what I want to do for our software. Tremendous potential. I’ve gotten to know our software so well. Tremendous potential. It is going to be a beautiful thing. Every single developer will have the opportunity to realize his or her fullest potential.
The forgotten Hackers and Crackers of our country will be forgotten no longer.
We are going to fix our Kernel and rebuild our network stack, file systems, fire walls, and init systems. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our engineers to work as we rebuild it.
We will also finally take care of our great administrators who have been so loyal, and I’ve gotten to know so many over this 18-month journey.The time I’ve spent with them during this campaign has been among my greatest honors. Our administrators are incredible people.
We will embark upon a project of OS growth and renewal. I will harness the creative talents of our developers, and we will call upon the best and brightest to leverage their tremendous talent for the benefit of all. It is going to happen.
We have a great economic plan. We will double our growth and have the strongest DevOps anywhere in the world. At the same time, we will get along with all other OPerating Systems willing to get along with us. We will be. We will have great relationships. We expect to have great, great relationships with great great codes of conduct.
No dream is too big, no challenge is too great. Nothing we want for our future is beyond our reach.
Developers will no longer settle for anything less than the best. We must reclaim our kernels’s destiny and dream big and bold and daring. We have to do that. We’re going to dream of things for our kernel, and beautiful things and successful things once again.
I want to tell the world community that while we will always put Linux’s interests first, we will deal fairly with everyone, with everyone. All people and all other Operating Systems.
We will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict.
And now I would like to take this moment to thank some of the people who really helped me with this, what they are calling tonight a very, very historic victory.
First, I want to thank my Scrum Masters who I know are looking down on me right now. Great people. I’ve learned so much from them. They were wonderful in every regard. Truly great Scrum Masters.
I also want to thank my testers, Marianne and Elizabeth, who are here with us tonight. Where are they? They’re here someplace. They’re very shy, actually.
And my architect Robert, my great friend. Where is Robert? Where is Robert?
My Architect Robert, and they should be on this stage, but that’s okay. They’re great.
………
I don’t know about shaking up the establishment, but if nothing else, I at least would imagine that the people who were – let’s be nice and say complacent – about blanket surveillance under Obama are thinking back to when they were told not to trust the government of today with any powers they wouldn’t trust to the government ten years from now. I’m sure they are reconsidering their stance on “nothing to hide, nothing to worry about.” Articles on encryption and privacy enhancement will soon be in high demand, I’m sure!
Still, Trump in the past has not exhibited any great understanding of technology, so unless he hires a good technological advisor, the big names in the tech industry will probably have him on a leash if that’s where they want him. Maybe we should all start tweeting suggestions at him.
I agree. I think he’s pretty clueless about tech in general, best to hope for a really sharp advisor.
From my point of view, computing is great again.
I loved computing in the 1980-90s (amiga, psion, acorn, powermacs etc) – it was interesting and fun. But all that went away in the 00’s with Windows – I didn’t know about linux, and Mac OS X was pretty slow back then. Computing became boring and the computer user had developed a sense of learned helplessness with Windows 2000/XP/vista.
Now Linux is really polished while still being fun and open. Maybe snaps will help unify distros so that getting the latest software won’t be such a ballache.
Apt will never be great. Why have 10s of different programs to downloas/update your software. Dnf/yum and rpm do it all.
Looking back on former president Dwight Eisenhower’s definition of fascism (Where private organisations have more power over politics than the state), I can not see how Trump can exclude himself from the “establishment”. I’m not saying that Clinton would lift a finger to save us from patent trolls, I’m just saying that there are other forces that we have to rely on than governments. Govs has a habit to go with the trolls. The FOSS Communities are those that drives the positive changes. Those remain regardless of presidency.
So happy new year dear FOSS communities, you’ve done a great job so far!