Neowin.net

Toppling Saddam Hussein is in the war simulation game "Gulf War 2" is the easy part. Coping with what comes next is more difficult.

In "Gulf War 2", players assume the role of President Bush in the online game, receiving regular briefings from caricatures of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The game starts with Baghdad's quick fall, but then proceeds to an Iraqi anthrax attack on Israel, a retaliatory nuclear strike, revolt in Saudi Arabia, and a Kurdish coup in northern Iraq. Once Saddam Hussein's body is found, players are asked to select one of three look-alike successors, who soon requires military backing to fend off an anxious Iran.

Dermot O'Connor, a 33 year old computer animator who moved to California from Ireland 3 years ago created the game in November. As Dermot says "This is a projection of the most likely outcome of a new war in the Gulf".

The game appears interactive but leads players down a set path, designed by O'Connor to highlight the risks of war. "There is only one deliberate outcome. It didn't make sense to give people the idea that they could avoid the worst," he said in an interview.

So far, over 20,000 people play the game every day. Dermot recently posted this on his web site...

I've been getting a LOT of emails lately, and the majority are overwhelmingly positive. Some of the "critics" just don't seem to get it however. Out of the 12 messages in my "negative" folder, 2 are literate, 1 is written in a strange version of the english language, 8 are childish to varying degrees, and one is from a psycopath. Infantile Ad Hominem attacks are common. Sounds like the republican party to me.

News source: Reuters
View: IdleWorm and play Gulf War 2 game (flash) or download/play full window actual iraq2.swf

That fell flat, but Stanco ended up landing an executive position at the Cyber Security Policy & Research Institute at George Washington University. And that led to his role as organizer of the conference, which is in its second year.

Ruben Safir, the president of NYLXS, has been the most vocal opponent of the Microsoft appearance. He's even gone so far as to recommend legal action against Stanco.

"Tony should be investigated for criminal activities in this regard, and the session should be boycotted," Safir wrote to members of his constituency and to Richard Stallman, the man who founded the Free Software Foundation.

He bases that statement on his belief that Microsoft is involved in criminal activities.

"Microsoft is an anti-competitive corporation GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY of destroying individuals and separating them from the fruit of their work through unfair competition and stifling people's right to innovation. Microsoft is DIRECTLY responsible for undermining people's right to innovate and compete in a free market," Safir writes.

"That company should have been decommissioned long ago for anti-trust activities, and I'll be damned if their blood should be on my hands. Their objective is to destroy the community and it's really as simple as that."

David Sugar, Free Software developer tries to clarify Safir's assertions. "If this conference is, as appearently it is stated, as being a conference for "marketing" OS/FS ideas and ideals, then why have a hostile vendor intending to disrupt that message?" Sugar writes.

"When I say intending to disrupt the message, I come to that conclusion on the stated reasons given by Microsoft's own reps on what they intend to say and do at the conference. If this event is intended primarly for us to 'market', then why do we have them there? This, I think, is the principle question Ruben is posing, and from that particular perspective, it is a very fair question to raise."

We asked Richard Stallman how he feels about Microsoft attending the Open Source conference. "We don't need to invite Microsoft to share our platform in order to point out the fallacies in their position," Stallman says. "Inviting them is simply weakness; more people will hear their statement than our response.

"Tony Stanco invited me and several free software leaders to his previous conference about 'open source' in government. We asked him to recognize our movement equally, to make it a 'free software and open source' conference.

"He refused, insisting in effect that the conference would only recognize the Open Source Movement and would in effect present us as its supporters, so we declined to attend. I heard that proprietary software forces had put pressure on the event's sponsors to exclude our movement and our views.

"It may be useful for some free software advocates to participate in a carefully chosen way in Stanco's conferences; but in order for this to be positive, we have to do it in a way that presents loud and clear our disapproval of the conference itself. Anyone who thinks that we share the values of the organizers of this event has completely misunderstood where we stand.

"I am not sure of the best method to get this view across. But Microsoft and other non-free software developers deserve protests wherever they have an event."

Other people in the community are trying to talk Safir and his supporters down, saying that because Free Software is becoming mainstream and governments around the world are adopting it, the sphere of activity is bound to include some participants who don't see things the same way.

To demonstrate would only make Free Software look bad, says Bruce Perens, who calls himself "an agent for constructive change during the genesis of corporate cooperation with the Open Source community."

"My feeling is that if we either locked them out or disrupted their program, it would only make them look better," Perens wrote to the group. "If we lock them out, they will say, very publicly, 'see, these folks won't let us tell you the truth.' If we disrupt their program, they'd say the same, and also would point out that we were incapable of taking part in a civilized political dialogue. We don't want either of those, because we want to be seen as the good guys who are fighting the side that doesn't play fair."

Stanley Klein, a GNU developer out of Rockville, Maryland concurs. "Tony (Stanco) is doing the right thing letting Microsoft speak. At least they want to show up to take the heat themselves."

Klein adds, "We are running a guerilla, stealth campaign and doing quite well at it with a very limited budget. Terry Bollinger, who is on the conference committee and will speak, wrote the Mitre report on free/open-source penetration in the Defense Department. He showed it runs around 40% and opened a bunch of eyes--and raised a lot of hackles in Redmond.

"Susan Turnbull and Brand Niemann, who are both on the conference committee and will also speak, run a monthly government/industry "Collaborative Exploration Workshop" that is helping government CIO's learn about free/open-source and a bunch of other disruptive ideas that can save money and improve productivity.

"I hope to speak there about a forthcoming IEEE-USA broadband position that will really make things interesting politically.

"David Wheeler, another conference committee member who will also speak, works for a government contractor but has independently made a name collecting business case numbers on the benefits of free/open-source and is the author of the 'stacker' module of the Linux Loadable Security Module effort.

"Microsoft's next point of attack will be in the area of security. Tony has been working on countering that for some time by getting Security Enhanced Linux evaluated. That's probably what the Microsoft lobbying at NSA was all about.

"Come in here with New York tactics," Klein concludes, "disrupt the conference, and raise the level of controversy to in-your-face 24/7 and you will cut all these people off at the knees."

Tony Stanco shares his conviction with NewsForge that Free Software is all about free speech, and that means hearing from some people you may disagree with. "It is not about unilaterally stopping people from presenting their viewpoint, because you disagree with them. That is generally called censorship and is unacceptable to reasonable minds."

Despite the rancor against him, Stanco finds humor in the situation. "Microsoft thinks I'm too sympathetic to Free Software and tries to discredit me to the government on that basis. Now, it seems that Free Software wants to discredit me, because I am perceived as too sympathetic to Microsoft. I guess if I am upsetting both extremes equally, I must be being perceived somewhere near the middle by most people, which is the right place for someone in my position to be."

"True arguments are like true gold," he adds. "They don't fear the fire. The hotter the fire, the purer the gold."