Political Leaning and Free Software

00_NOP writes "HateMyTory is the world's first political rating site and occasionally gets blasted or promoted by British bloggers on either side of the political spectrum. But here's something even more intriguing: when the right come visiting they hate the site but they are disproportionately likely to be users of free software, whether that is just Firefox on top of their Windows box, or all the way with some Linux distro. But when the left rally to the cause they are more likely than not to be proprietary software users, albeit with a big bias towards Apple. If Microsoft's defenders think free software is the road to socialism, why don't the left seem to agree? As a leftie, and a free software advocate, I find this pretty puzzling."

Re:It's not puzzling, are you people or sheeple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also markets heavily to the homosexual community. (See http://www.angryfrozenhead.com/articles/Summer2006 /applereally.html [angryfrozenhead.com] for a great example of how they do it.)

People who promote the homosexual agenda tend to be left-wing sheeple. (Not only that, but very susceptable to left-wing marketing. For example, even though under the law of the Palestinean Authority homosexuals are sentenced to death, homosexuals in the SF "gay rights parade" can be seen carrying banners for Israel to "end its occupation.")

"Tories want open source Whitehall"

[AirLace]

BBC News: Tories want open source Whitehall [bbc.co.uk]

The government could save more than £600 million a year if it used more open source software, the shadow chancellor has estimated.

George Osborne said the savings would cut 5% off Whitehall's annual IT bill.

What I found inspiring about the talk by a leading Conservative MP [conservatives.com] was that it emphasised not so much the savings of going Open Source, but that it embraced the idealogogy as a philosophy to run an entire government. I am not a Conservative, but this talk inspired my faith in UK politics as a whole.

Re:Moding up political items

[Anonymous Coward]

By most of the worlds standards of political 'left' and 'right', the US is Far far right wing (embracing much of fascism), when fascism is defined as not just a dictatorship, but 'politics by corporation'. When lobbyists hold much sway over elected public officials (read MPAA, RIAA over senators), patent laws that allow and encourage submarine patents, lawyers that create nothing being able to sue those that do create things (hampering development of new products for 50 or 100 years), corporations dictating whether the environment is undergoing destruction or not (reguardless of how hot it gets or how many hurricanes Florida gets in a season), where 500,000 poor people can get flooded because of the desire to save a few million dollars, but watch a few thousand corporate executive types get killed and billions can be wasted on a war, arbitrarily made up, just to exact revenge on someone --anyone--, then you have fascism (in this case, defined as rule-by-corporation). Perhaps it had its beginnings when Andrew Carnagie was allowed to have more money than the US treasury.

Re:Moding up political items

[meringuoid]

Remember that by British standards, American politics is right wing, or far-right.

Peter Cook put it best:

"American politics is very simple. They have the Republican Party, which is basically like our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is basically like our Conservative Party."

What you call a far-left bleeding-heart liberal we call a filthy Tory.

Conservative Party Advocating Open Source

[TobascoKid]

There's an article at the BBC [bbc.co.uk] about how the Conservative party is advocating the use of FOSS in government.

Re:Why indeed.

[0123456789]

Last time I checked, shooting somebody with a gun was already illegal.

Not in all circumstances. Plenty of people are injured or killed by accidents (both through accidental discharge and through confusion) involving firearms. New York police seem to shoot someone by accident every couple of years, for example. In Britain, returning to the subject of the article, police officers do not routinely carry guns. And there are no political parties in the UK advocating arming the public (hence why the police are rarely armed).

The only people who get hurt while around guns are using them in an illegal and unsafe manner

Such as Amadou Diallo [wikipedia.org]?

Libertarian vs Authoritarian

[Per Abrahamsen]

The attitude to free software does not correlate well to the left-right axes of politics, but rather to the libertarian-authoritarian axes [politicalcompass.org].

RMS and ESR are on opposite ends of the left-right axes, but they are both extreme libertarians on the libertarian-authoritarian axes.

Re:Left-wingers

[homer_s]

But the events in the world have not shown (2) to be true.

Everyone is better off (see this video for the stats-
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4237353244 338529080&sourceid=searchf [google.com]

Fifty years ago, not even the richest person in world had access to the kind of medical care, communications, etc the average person has access to today. The life expectancy is higher. The quality of housing, transportation, etc is also higher.

So, (2) in your example is simply not true (except for countries like Zimbabwe where people are not free to produce what they want).