Linux As a Model For a New Government?

An anonymous reader writes "The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns, Andrew Lahde, wrote a goodbye letter to mark his departure from the financial world. In it, he suggests people think about building a new government model, and his suggestion is to have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery. In doing so, he refers to how Linux grows and competes with Microsoft. An open source government. How would such a system work, and could it succeed? How long before it became corrupt? Would it need a benevolent dictator (Linus vs. Soros)?"

So long and thanks for all the money

[Anonymous Coward]

So long and thanks for all the money.

terrible idea

[gEvil (beta)]

This is a terrible idea. Any thinking person knows that we should use BSD as a model for a new government.

Fork the government

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! I always wanted to fuc.. fork the government.

Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree

[Anonymous Coward]

And then along comes some group that disagrees with the project leaders and they fork it. Since the government 0.6.1.1 code is open, they start their own 'republic of Tivo', which makes consumers of government very happy and makes 'the father of open source government' unhappy.

Soon, there are so many government distributions, each with their own election managers and schedulers (some completely fair, some not) that nobody knows which government is best for them. They only know it sometimes won't sell wireless and sometimes the open source penal code is not 100% compatible with new versions of the city manager and some people keep getting called 'blobs'.

I'm sure that someday will be the 'year of open source on the government' and one of the distributions will Linspire us to all wear little red hats instead of tin foil. What a Novell idea!

We'll be laughing all the way to the bank about our new, freee government until the judge hits us with patent infringement and says gleefully, "RTFM Noob!" as he issues the kill -9 sentence on us.

Linux in power?

[Rik Sweeney]

We would all be ruled by a penguin, but not just any old penguin:

An emperor penguin :)

Re:terrible idea

[swillden]

Nah, the OpenBSD model is clearly superior.

Imagine the State of the Union addresses.

Already there

[cthulu_mt]

The wealthy bankers already buy and sell our elected representatives; why would they want to make it official?

headline typo?

[gEvil (beta)]

Shouldn't that be "Linux As a Model For a GNU Government"?

Re:Nothing would change...

[tomhudson]

And when the government makes a bad decision, can I fork my government?

In USSA, government bailout forks YOU!

... and they didn't even give you the courtesy of a reach-around ...

Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree

[eobanb]

Most of their proposals seem to be based on the idea of some sort of dictator, with everyone's best interests in mind.

As a Mac user this sounds strangely familiar [wikipedia.org]

Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree

[Hijacked Public]

Logistics?

If the Dow loses 15% of its value we don't have to figure out where to hide all the lost dollars. Lose 15% of the human population and you either have to find lots of grave space or learn to live with the stench.

Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree

[MrZaius]

AC wrote: And then along comes some group that disagrees with the project leaders and they fork it. Since the government 0.6.1.1 code is open, they start their own 'republic of Tivo', which makes consumers of government very happy and makes 'the father of open source government' unhappy.

Soon, there are so many government distributions, each with their own election managers and schedulers (some completely fair, some not) that nobody knows which government is best for them. They only know it sometimes won't sell wireless and sometimes the open source penal code is not 100% compatible with new versions of the city manager and some people keep getting called 'blobs'.

Sounds like hellheaven ala Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash or Ken Macleod's Star Fraction. There are plenty of nutty little microstate endorsers that would love to see something similar to this occur. Me, I'll be happy when they let me eat cake. Preferably with Oreo-based crust. Mmmmm.... crust.

Re: minor correction

[Anonymous Coward]

but as long as the democratic process itself isn't corrupted, repairs can be made.

I guess we're fscked then......

Fixed that for you. ;)

Re:Fork.

[dilvish_the_damned]

Some say its already forked.

Re: minor correction

[Anonymous Coward]

# fsck.democratism /dev/world
fsck.democratism: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/world
Could this be a zero-length partition?
#

Re:Under the sea

[Narnie]

I think Google is working on something like this.
The Google Navy [slashdot.org]

Re:How long before it became corrupt?

[Poltras]

Yes! Lets fork the country and call it some other name!

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