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Well, here I come back from holiday in England and find a third of the country in ruins. Fortunately I live in Ankara, which experienced only minor tremors, and all my Turkish relatives seem to be OK. I was going to travel to the earthquake zone as an interpreter but got laid low with diarrhea of all things, so I'm having to content myself with internet fundraising. This is where you, dear reader, come in. The earthquake survivors are still in a thoroughly miserable condition, often without adequate shelter, clean water or medical supplies, so all donations are most welcome. There are various sites where you can find out more, such as http://www.redcross.org.
As with most disasters, people are now looking for someone to blame, but in this case they are probably at least partly right in pointing the finger at building contractors. It cannot be a coincidence that hardly any historical buildings were damaged, and nearly all of the houses which collapsed were built in the last few decades. The West of Turkey has seen a construction boom fuelled by population growth and, especially, massive migration from the underdeveloped rural East of the country (causing one person to call Istanbul "the biggest village in the world"). Houses went up like mushrooms, with about the same resilience. Designs are poor, materials are substandard and it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone other than Turkey's long-suffering geologists that building a ten-storey apartment block on a faultline is not a terribly bright idea.
However, it is not enough to blame a few wicked building contractors. I must admit that building contractors are not amongst my favourite occupational groups - given the choice I would rather share a flat with an architect or a doctor any day - but as people they probably aren't monstrously evil. What is responsible for tragedies like this is not the moral depravity of the few, but the complacency of the many. Someone has to give planning permission for such a building, and someone has to buy it. As my wife said, how many people ask about the materials used in a house, or whether the foundations are laid with metal suports to prevent earthquake damage? This is a problem which is not confined to any one section of the economy - buildings regularly blow up because someone used an ordinary rubber tube to connect bottled gas, traffic accidents abound because of careless driving and bad roads, and we all know about that oil refinery which is still burning merrily as I write (if you're wondering how anyone could build an oil refinery on a faultline, remember that there is a nuclear power station on the San Andreas fault).
Blaming the system is often seen as an easy way out, but if we see "the system" as the sum of all our social, political and economic interactions, then it is the system which is to blame, or rather, those aspects of it which encourage ignorance and complacency, what Turks call gaflet uykusu, the sleep which precedes death. It is sad that it has taken something like this to wake people up.
We can hope that at least some of these rumours are simply that - the kind of wildly distorted half-truths and outright fantasies that accompany any kind of disaster. Turks are a very nationalistic lot, but are rarely racist, and I doubt if there can be many Turks who would refuse a blood transfusion on the grounds of the nationality of the blood involved. However, every country has its share of prejudice, so I don't see why Turkey should be an exception.
Other awakenings are more pleasant. It is not surprising that a nation so fond of helping others would rush to the aid of the earthquake victims, helping out with money, supplies, professional services or just manual labour. What is particularly encouraging is the international response, with specialist teams arriving from all over the world (except for those unfortunate Armenians, of course). I found two things especially touching. The first was the response from the Kosovars, who said they wanted to repay all the help Turkey had given them during the war, but had no money to spare ... so they donated blood. The second was the response from Greece, which, I am told, was both the quickest and the most generous. All this despite recent anti-Turkish Philippics from Prime Minister "Everything in the Aegean is Greek" Simitis. I've just been watching a joint broadcast from Izmit by the Turkish TGRT and Greek Skai channels, and the warmth between the Greeks and Turks was palpable. And these are not left-wing internationalists - I don't know anything about Skai, but TGRT is a conservative, nationalist channel.
This is about my fifth attempt at writing this, due to two power cuts and two cases of Windows '98 crashing (I still haven't got a Linux-compatible modem!). Last time I walked out in disgust, my (Turkish) wife asked me what I was writing, so I gave her a summary. "Good," she said, "say 'thank you' to the Greek people for me." So if there are any Greeks reading this - thank you.
However, there are other, more important reasons for my venom than the trivial fact that Windows '98 is the operating system from Hell (after all, at the risk of alienating my Linux friends, I really think Windows '95 wasn't all that bad). One is the rather complicated issue of proprietary software. Here I must apologise to all non-geek readers who haven't already hit their Back buttons, and slow down a bit (and also apologise to geek readers for explaining the obvious - life is hard sometimes). First things first - an operating system is a complex of programs that comes between the hardware (the physical computer) and the applications (the programs that you use, like word-processors and games). Every computer has one, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if washing machines had them these days (can you imagine MS Winwash? On second thoughts, don't imagine it, it could come true). Proprietary software is software that is copyrighted, so you can't re-distribute or fiddle with it. Usually, though not always, you have to pay for it as well. If you think you didn't pay for Windows because it came with your computer, think again. Either the cost was passed on to the price of the hardware, or (as is usually the case here in Turkey) you have a pirated version. Since nearly all PC's come with Windows already installed, you are actually paying for an operating system you may not even have wanted.
Copyrighting software doesn't sound too bad. After all, if I eventually fulfill my ambition of writing a book, I wouldn't mind making a bit of money out of it, and I certainly wouldn't want anybody to change the parts they didn't like and resell it (which is what Bowdler did with Shakespeare - hence the verb "bowdlerise" - and Noah Webster even did with the Bible). But software is different. Unlike some of the more extreme Free Software advocates, I don't really mind people writing something like a game or a multimedia documentary and copyrighting it, and/or charging me for it. However, the nuts-and-bolts of computer software need to be free. Not just free in the sense of "free beer" but in the sense of "free speech" (thanks to Richard Stallman for this analogy). Normally when you buy, borrow or steal a program, what you get is a "binary", the collection of 1's and 0's that makes the computer do things. With Free Software, you also get the "code" - the original instructions that make the program do what it does. You also get permission to copy or modify it.
"Big deal," you might say. But with software, and with operating systems in particular, this is extremely important. Unlike a novel, an OS is not the work of one person, but of many. Windows '98 was not written by Bill Gates, but by a horde of techno-serfs (admittedly, very well-paid techno-serfs). If the code is available, anyone can analyse it and suggest improvements, and this is what happens with systems like Linux. For this reason, Linux is probably the most stable OS around, i.e. it is almost impossible to make it crash (I managed it, but that was only by running extremely experimental software). With Windows, on the other hand, even the best hacker cannot decipher the string of 1's and 0's to find out exactly what makes your screen freeze when you try and run more than two programs at once. As I've said, if a programmer says "This is mine and you can't do anything to it" with a game or an astrology program, I don't really mind, but OS's are too important to leave to the creative genius; they are by nature co-operative works that cannot be left to an individual, still less a corporation. What I've said applies as much to Macintosh or Sun as it does to Microsoft.
There is also a political (or as Richard Stallman says, a "psycho-social") dimension to software. Free Software encourages the values of openness, co-operation and sharing. Apart from a few egotistical hackers, most of the people I've met in the Linux community have been pretty nice, and many of them have been generous enough to spend a lot of time answering what to them are inane questions from newcomers like me. They spend vast amounts of their free time writing programs in the hope that someone, somewhere, might find them useful. Real geeks are like that. In contrast, Microsoft is not only bent on making money (which most of us want to do) but on ensuring that the whole world accept their error-ridden software unconditionally. Free Software is a kind of anarchism, not in the popular bomb-throwing sense, but in the sense of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" (and let's get rid of the State while we're at it). I'm not much good at writing programs, but I can do other things, like translating Turkish or teaching ta'i chi. If someone is kind enough to give me a piece of software or advice, that encourages me to give my time and labour to somebody else.
This brings me to the main reason why I hate Bill Gates. The man is not only rich and powerful, but disgustingly rich and powerful. Estimate's of Bill Gates' wealth vary, but the last I heard was $97,000,000,000. Even if it's a lot less than this, for someone with this amount of dosh to donate a few million dollars to charity and then write an article on philanthropy is sickening. If someone gave me just one billion dollars to spend only on myself, I'd run out of ideas pretty quickly - a supercomputer, a cottage in the mountains, a few Rembrants, a harem ... what more can you ask for? I really don't mind people being richer than me - most of my material desires are already satisfied, even on a teacher's salary - but this amount of wealth and power cannot go unchallenged.