americans obey, europans interpret, and the GPL
The General Public License, which has been one of the most important organs in the great body that is Open Source Software for many years, may finally be tested in court. SCO vs. IBM. Andrew Orlowski, covering (or failing to cover) this story for The Register, found it necessary to delve a little into the differing attitudes of Americans and Europeans regarding the proper deference to be given to The Law. The article he thusly pens doesn’t have that much to say about the pending legal trail involving the GPL, but is a really interesting departure into the comparitive psyches of two people, and the place of the Constitution in US legal and moral history.
Not bad for coverage of boring legal battle obscured by it’s computer geek underpinnings.
You could read it here.
Britain, like most European countries, has accrued hundreds of years’ worth of arcane laws. The US has a beautiful Bill of Rights, a splendid constitution and a civilian army of its best and brightest to uphold these laws. And while it’s a tough call to say who has most fun in each respective park, Europeans have learned that the law and its social instruments are best ignored.
There’s a strong and growing secessionist movement in the United States, and when I last met the great Robert Anton Wilson (just before Christmas) I asked him which constitutional system he’d choose for ‘Pacifica’, which is Bob’s name for the new breakaway Union of California, Oregon and Hawaii.
Well, he told me, “We’ve got one already. We could go back to the Constitution without any interpretation of what the Constitution says: free speech, and freedom of religion. Everything that has been destroyed in the last two hundred years that was intended by the original Constitution. We can start from that.
“But in about two hundred years someone would have to secede from the California Republic, because it takes about two hundred years for any system to get corrupted and monopolised.”