Mozilla and Pentagon

If you haven't already read this article I recommend you to read David Eaves article on the mozilla firefox 3 download pledge map. He thus takes a limited look at the geopolitics of open source and finds some interesting correlations between the mozilla download map and the Pentagons map.

One of his most interesting findings is the status of Iran, which one would usually describe as isolated due to its regime.

Indeed, outside of the western world Iran has one of the highest download rates per capita. This would suggest Iran is quite well connected (and, I suspect, deeply mistrustful of MicroSoft). This should pose a challenge to Barnett’s thesis, in which connectedness should make a country safer to the international system

He also argues that open source programs helps transitional countries to 'increase their connectedness', as the cases of Eastern European and new EU countries shows explicitly.