erinja:
My company competes with other companies to win contracts. Of course we don't publish all of our plans on our website and give away all of our information so that others can profit from our ideas. If something small like a company of a couple hundred people won't give away its proprietary information, why should a big organization like a government tell everyone about every thing it does, every private letter it sends and receives, every backup plan for the future? That's insane.

Substitute company by tribe and you have the typical thinking of the stone age. I'm really afraid that the mankind will not survive with this kind of thinking.

erinja:
I think that if you expect things to be so open, then you're naive and unrealistic about the way the world works.

Perhaps some people just hope that the world will not always rest in the stone age. Can you imagine what would happen if the people work together instead of everyone competing with everyone?
That's the way the open source movement works, every information is open for everyone and everyone can contribute to solve the problems.
And perhaps that's the only way to solve the problems of the world.

erinja:So I take it that you would not mind if someone opened your private messages to your friends and posted them to the internet?

And posted the details of your home security system, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, to the internet?

Or if you went to a different country to negotiate a business deal on behalf of your company, would you want the e-mails you sent back to your company to be posted to the internet for everyone to read, including the company you met with, including your competitors? Including information about your strategy for winning the business deal at the best possible price for you? How could you possibly publish this confidential company information to the internet for everyone to read? And if you wouldn't do it for your company, then why on earth should you expect your government to do it?

Personally, if a person is in support of governments divulging all of their secrets, and of leaking government secrets, I would never ever hire this person to work in my company. How could you tell if their idea of "divulging secrets" also extended to putting our company's proprietary information online, and giving an advantage to our company's competitors?

We're talking about information that shouldn't be private though.

Like "Hey citizens this is your government that coerced you into letting us have a war, we're meant to be nothing but a tool for the development of peaceful and fair human society but we happened to take things into our own hands and now think we might just nuke those fellows in the desert, how does that sound?"

Undoubtedly worse case scenario and to my understanding Obama may or may not have successfully made it so only 3 or so countries can be nuked to death as opposed to most of them, but the point when it affects the PUBLIC's business, affairs, and lives, the government needs to clue them in.

While half the leaks are utter trash no doubt, some are disturbing and require attention. Like, is the war in Afghanistan being handled as well as its meant to? If that was a police operation, it'd be labeled a disaster, and many people would lose their jobs or go to gaol over it. But because it's the army, meh, a couple of dead civilians ain't a bad thing (until it inspires more people to join the Taliban). If it's just a couple of army generals running the shop, then there's always going to be a military bias in their decisions. Also, many in the gov't have ties with the military anyway.

But if we get normal peaceful citizens who can relate not only to their government but to the people being invaded to help in the decision making process because they have the right information, ain't that excellent?

(not only that, but if I'm correct, the reason afghanistan was able to become so out of control after the soviet invasion was because American involvement sort of derailed due to decision makers not quite knowing the extent of the situation, was it not? Mind you, I only have an idea of this period through various forms of media and have never researched it properly, so forgive my possible assumptions there).

It will never happen that everyone will work together.

If that could happen, then a true communist ideal would also work.

But true communism doesn't work. Why? Because there's always a lazy person who wants to profit from the work of others without doing their fair share of work. Because there will always be lazy and dishonest people. And as long as this world has lazy and dishonest people, there will be people who steal information and misuse it.

No. People will never all work together in harmony, because there will always be a dishonest person who will take advantage of the honest and harmonious work of other people - to the advantage of the dishonest person, and to the disadvantage of the honest and hardworking people.

I didn't say it has to be perfect harmony. We just need to have a bit more backbone when it comes to honesty.

Anyway, all it requires is constant attention so it becomes something people better identify with. It's really not as bigger issue to discuss things is it? I mean, I can discuss problems I'm having with most people, so it's not like it's something you have to have a special organ for.

And lazy and dishonest people don't necessarily derail the entire thing, otherwise then it really would be a crap system like communism. In fact, communism is NOT the direction I want to go, that's in the direction of strengthening the state as an organism and not as a tool. Anyway the point is that with the right amount of fine tuning and with having the government open enough, you can encourage a state where the balance always needs to be restored, thus if someone lies, you have someone with an ego like Assange's get the information, the public find out, and so forth. In fact, it's not that far off from where we are now, it's just some critical changes need to occur, which is easier said than done.

But just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible.

erinja:No. People will never all work together in harmony, because there will always be a dishonest person who will take advantage of the honest and harmonious work of other people - to the advantage of the dishonest person, and to the disadvantage of the honest and hardworking people.

+1.

I think the world can be a better place, but there are a lot of people, including many in nia ujo, who need a reality check as far as utopian daydreaming is concerned.

Roberto12:

erinja:No. People will never all work together in harmony, because there will always be a dishonest person who will take advantage of the honest and harmonious work of other people - to the advantage of the dishonest person, and to the disadvantage of the honest and hardworking people.

+1.

I think the world can be a better place, but there are a lot of people, including many in nia ujo, who need a reality check as far as utopian daydreaming is concerned.

The Open Source community is not a utopian daydream. Every lernu.net user uses Open Source technology right now. Right here. The person who initiated that ( Stallman ) grow up in a north-amercian "bussiness first" society. "Bussiness first" mentality can also be found in many areas of the world. I really don't wanna blame that because a lot of European fields are moving to the "business first" mentality, too. How I understand Stallmans motivation is that he did work at a well-beloved coding project of a company which changes ownership. The new owners decided to cut every access to the regarding project files and from one day to another he had no access anymore to it's own work. That did let him develop that copyleft software coding community. And how I mention before Assange has strong support of that community which best known how the Internet works and how to use it to enforce access to decicion making processes. Maybe a lot of people agree: The Internet changes life. And the Internet can be used to enforce changes, too. So, that will also effect governmental decision making process and citizen privacy protection of course, too.

qwertz, we aren't talking about open source software. We are talking about stealing confidential correspondence between members of government offices, reporting about their day to day activities, and posting this information online for everyone to read.

It's the equivalent of taking the contents of an entire corporate e-mail system and posting it online, including reports of negotiations with clients, honestly held opinions of clients and competitors, etc. It isn't legal, not to mention it isn't even ethical, not to mention it isn't even in our best interest, unless you count our best interest as being reading juicy diplomatic gossip about world leaders.

erinja:
qwertz, we aren't talking about open source software. We are talking about stealing confidential correspondence between members of government offices, reporting about their day to day activities, and posting this information online for everyone to read.

erinja, it's not possible to distinct between Julian Assange and the (Swedish) Pirate Party which could categorized a kind of political representation of the Open Source software community which was triggered by Stallman. If someones wanna understand Assanges motivation s/he should take a look at the Pirate Party. Furthermore he has software coding expertise (university level).

01:20minute: "After days of speculation, the Pirate Party annonces it is taking over..."

The Pirate Party is no joke party. Even if the name could let assume that. They discuss their purpose of party issues and decicion making processe at an wiki and forum in public and they know how to use the Internet to enforce something. And they have been sucessfull in the past during votings in several countries.

Like rano posted before:

rano:i just found this Documentary on youtube about wikileaks and its history: part1 | part2 | part3 | part 4

erinja:qwertz, we aren't talking about open source software.

Erinja, we were not talking about software, we were talking about the way this software was created. You say:

erinja:
No. People will never all work together in harmony, because there will always be a dishonest person who will take advantage of the honest and harmonious work of other people - to the advantage of the dishonest person, and to the disadvantage of the honest and hardworking people.

But exactly this happens in open source: People working together and all information is freely available. Perphaps you call that communism, and in fact also Steven Ballmer from Microsoft once called Linux communism.
But nowadays also big companies begin to work openly, as for example Google. Google uses open source software and developes new products based on open source, as f.e. the Android operating system for cellular phones and small sized computers, which is right now conquering the market. And of course also Android is open, every information about it is publicated.

Why should this kind of working together not work in other areas?

horsto:Why should this kind of working together not work in other areas?

(If I can just dip in again.)

The open-source situation is pleasing, but the reason such practices can't spread throughout other spheres is because of the usual factors of power, status, and money. No system, no matter how cleverly designed, can overcome the negative aspects of the human condition. It is because of the human condition that we'll never live in a perfect world.