Just came back from FutureShop, after purchasing ourselves a new keyboard. We tried out a few that they had on display and settled for a BenQ model.

It's a very slim profiled keyboard with soft touch keys. Very nice, and I've just configured the shortcut keys on my KDE desktop.




Anyway, as we (my wife and I) were waiting in line at the checkout, I noticed a couple in front of us about to buy a piece of software called "MP3 Maker". The sad part about this was the price tag on it was $40.00.

This poor lost soul. If only I had a Kanotix CD handy, I could have saved this guy some money and a lot of frustration.

I've got to remember to carry a couple Live CDs in the car for emergencies such as this.

Last night I was channel surfing and in doing so, came across the movie "Star Trek: First Contact."

I'm not a real big Star Trek fan, but I did watch the original T.V. series as well as some of the Next Generation run. I've also seen the movies up to, and including, First Contact, but it's been a while since I've seen it.

I caught the movie at the part just after the Borg took control of the Enterprise and Picard is somewhere in the bowels of the ship with Lilly, the woman from 20th century they brought back to the ship for medical care.

As they're running from the Borg, Lilly asks how large the ship is and how much it cost to build. Then Picard replies with a line that suddenly lit a light bulb in my head. Picard said something like, "Earth's economy is different in the future. We don't have money. Instead of pursuing personal wealth, we strive to better ourselves and humanity...." or something to that effect.

Although I knew that this was the sort of society that Star Trek has always suggested to be in our future, the idea never occurred to me until last night.

Gene Roddenberry's idea was that after Wold War III, the people of Earth finally put their differences aside and built the foundations that ultimately lead to the Star Trek you know now. But with all that is happening with our current economy and technology, I'm wondering if Gene may actually envisioned not a war of rockets and bombs, but a war between business practises. I'm talking about the current "war" between the philosophies of Capitalism and Open Source.

Consider, for a moment, the ideas behind Linux, Open Source and the free software movement. Are they not very similar to the ideas behind the Star Trek universe and how their society is to benefit humanity as a whole, not just to make more money for a corporation?

I mean, that's what Open Source is all about (at least in my mind). Someone writes some code, distributes it to the world, where others then contribute to it to make it even better, and then the entire community benefits from it. And so, on and, so on......

Maybe the world of Star Trek is really the Open Source movement at its pinnacle, and rather than its birth coming as a result of World War III, Gene saw the foreshadowing of free software and the defeat of the corporate monopoly.

Do you think it's possible that the Enterprise's main computer is running some sort of advanced version of Linux? Kernel version 212.3.12, perhaps?