The US media and Fox News, in particular, have gone berzerk in the aftermath of the closing of Venezuelan TV station, Radio Caracas Television. As supporters of public source code, public media and the common good, we want to contribute some understanding to this situation that isn’t being offered by the corporate media in the United States. RCT went on the air in 1953. One year earlier, Marcos Pérez Jiménez took over the government of Venezuela in an election which was not recognized by the government. Jiménez was typical of Latin American dictators of the time: ruthless, intolerant of political dissent, illegitimately holding power, opposed by most of the population, and supported by the United States. So first, we must understand that RCTV is a remnant of a brutal military dictatorship and that fact is not lost amongst the Venezuelan population. RCTV is well-known as being an extremely right-wing station. Second, we must understand that RCTV’s leadership participated in an illegal, violent kidnapping of President Hugo Chavez during the failed coup attempt against him in 2002. RCTV’s role was to immediately broadcast that the coup had occurred, that it was successful, and to help the people of Venezuela adjust to the “new order.” RCTV did not do “journalism” during the coup — it is very clear to anyone watching that they were part of the plan and they aired pro-coup propaganda throughout the entire incident. As the coup was failing, and as Hugo Chavez was returning to office to reclaim his democratically-elected position of president of Venezuela, RCTV broadcast cartoons — no news. So, when RCTV’s license came up for renewal, President Chavez exercised his right to deny the renewal. Replacing RCTV would be a public station run by the community. As a result, this action has received widespread support by the Venezuelan people. Yes, the opposition have staged violent protests so that Fox News can show the Venezuelan police trying to restore order to their democracy, but these protests have been typically small, especially compared to the rallies which are supporting the move by Chavez. For people who are “shocked” at Hugo Chavez’s actions in shutting down RCTV, please just answer one question: if a media company in the United States openly assisted in the violent kidnapping of the President of the United States, what would happen to that media company in the United States? I believe that their leadership would receive the death penalty for treason and for participating in the kidnapping of the highest-ranking politician in our country. Perhaps RCTV’s leadership should be grateful that the revokation of their license is the only penalty they will receive. For those of us who believe that the airwaves belong to the people — ALL the people, not just a minority class of the extremely wealthy — we should applaud Chavez for his courage in doing something positive about this entire quagmire. Open source and digital rights advocacy should include the struggle for returning the airwaves to their rightful owner: we, the people.

The United States has a history of violent intervention in Latin America and that legacy continues in practice to this day. We will probably never know the full extent of the Bush Administration’s role in the illegal coup attempt against democratically-elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. But documentation of official US involvement on some level is readily available. Thus, good-hearted computer geeks everywhere have cast a suspicious eye on a new video game, “Mercenaries 2: World in Flames,” created by Los Angeles based Pandemic/Bioware Studios, with simulates an invasion of Venezuela in the year 2007. Pandemic is a subcontractor for the US Army and CIA funded Institute for Creative Technologies, which uses Hollywood techniques to mount war simulations in California’s high desert in order to conduct military training. “Mercenaries 2: World in Flames” simulates destruction in downtown Caracas, and promises to leave no part of Venezuela untouched. U2’s Bono, well recognized for his campaigns to reduce poverty and treat AIDS in Africa is backing a videogame which promotes the invasion and destruction of Venezuela in order to check “a power hungry tyrant” who has “seized control of Venezuela and her oil supply.” Bono has failed to respond to concerns raised by the Venezuelan Solidarity Network about his funding of this project.

In a significant change of course, the Free Software Foundation is working to make the upcoming version 3 of the General Public License (GPL) compatible with an alternative, the Apache License.

A bunch of people involved in the open source movement in Brazil will be presenting at the Social Technologies Summit in Manchester, May 10-12, hosted at the Futuresonic Urban Festival.

Java One is in San Francisco and there has been a ton of press because Sun has re-licensed Java with the GPL2. We can’t ignore it any longer :) Java is not one of the technologies that northxsouth really uses. If you don’t know, open source software contributed to a period of sharp decline for Sun Microsystems during the dot-com crash. While Linux enjoyed over 10% growth quarter after quarter, Sun’s revenue kept plummeting. Everyone with an IT department realized that Linux offered everything that Sun offered at a substantially lower cost, both initial and maintenance. In their defense, Sun fought back and is starting to recoup their losses from that period. In the web development world, a similar effect happened, with widespread adoption of open source PHP. So, for over a year, there has been a battle within Sun for the strategy to open the source code to Java. Finally, the big announcement was made at this year’s Java One Conference, happening right now in San Francisco. They even made suggestions that open source developers should be compensated for the technology they’ve contributed to the general public. Remember that recently, Sun recruited Ian Murdock of Debian fame, who had been working at the Linux Foundation.