About (abuse of) Power

This is an unusual post as it started with something unrelated to IT but i think recent events made it relevant to our industry because of the Java TCK licensing kerfuffle (AKA: Oracle versus ASF).

A few months ago, i was having lunch with some friends and we were talking about power in politics. Abuse of power in politics, to be specific. After all the talking, i realized that we tend to believe power has properties that it actually doesn't have.

We tend to think power is a solid. Something like bricks.

The idea being that we can get as much power as we can pile bricks.

Such was the mental image i had when the conversation started, but the image changed rapidly.

I figured that comparing power with a solid was not entirely right. I was missing something.

I think power is more of a fine grained solid. To continue the construction metaphor: power is like sand.

You can have some small amount of power and hold on to it, the same way you can do with sand.

You can even succeed and get a lot of power for a while.

Yet, as it happens with sand, power filters out eroding while it filters, making the leak bigger and bigger.

And as you see the leak you begin to get desperate because you are loosing what you hold dear. And you start doing stupid things. Just as anybody does when they have lots of power.

This has happened to genocidal maniacs, dictators, presidents, political parties, police, mobsters, gangsters, companies, CEOs, bosses, abusive husbands, abusive wives, child molesters, bad teachers, bullies, big brothers, little brothers, etc.

We all have abused power in some situation or another.
We all know abuse comes back to balance the score.

I think we have recently seen an example of abuse of power in the way Oracle used Java's ownership. My guess: as a way to get Google to pay for using Java on Android (J2ME enabled phones probably pay royalties of some sort). I don't have anything against Oracle making money, yet i personally disagree with this move because it gets the open source programming community and the ASF in the middle of a corporation war.

Oracle may succeed in the short term in getting some more money, but the forces propelling open communities will route around this issue and when that happens, this will undoubtedly come back to bite Oracle on the hand.

Abuse of power has happened before and will happen again.
Loss of that power has happened before and will happen again.
No matter who. No matter why.

Disclosure: i'm not active in any open source community.

This is enough to be my fifth post.

PS: photographs are from stock.xchng and iStockPhoto