Ralph Peters also has a low opinion of the Saudis, and a low opinion of Bush's suck-up act.

Deroy Murdock thinks the Saudis are worse than the Iraqis.

Victor Davis Hanson has a nice screed about the moral differences between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Mark Steyn has a great article on the benefits of a US-sponsored destabilization of the mideast.

Jonah Goldberg has an excellent two-part rant here and here on the irresponsibility of the intellectual elites the last few centuries.

Stephen Den Beste and Eric S Raymond have an interesting debate on the merits and applicability of the Open Source development model here, here, and here.

My take on it is that the whole debate is a waste of time; they are clearly arguing at cross purposes. Stephen den Beste is arguing that there are huge areas of software development for which OSS is not a viable option, Eric Raymond is claiming that there are huge areas of software development for which it OSS is the best option.

To be honest, I think Stephen has the better argument, partly because it is less extreme than the one Raymond takes. And partly because my experience has more closely mirrored Stephen's. The vertical application I'm currently working on consists of something like 1.8 million LOC of C++(large, but there are OS projects out there that are in the same ballpark). But because the skills needed to work in this are so far beyond what is taught in school that new developers typically need 1+ yrs to become productive.

Beyond that, it is far from proven that OSS is even the best model for the areas it has been most successful at (development-related tools), and in software fields much removed from this domain OSS has been strikingly unimpressive. Even within this domain there are some awfully high-profile yet lousy stuff (Zope for example).

Eric Raymond also hand-waves off several of Stephen den Beste's arguments, revealing his lack of understanding of (or more likely, his unwillingness to admit) the problem of NDA's and proprietary technology:

A more serious error is when he writes "It is plausible that an OSS project would require each participant to sign an NDA before being given access to the source." It is not plausible. The licenses and community values of the open-source community would not permit this.

Sorry, Eric, but Stephen's point is that for many of the projects outside of the current OSS domain, the NDA is non-negotiable. Since the OSS developers will not sign them, they will not be allowed to work on them. Hence the OSS model is inappropriate in such fields. QED. Beste wins.

Here's another example of Raymond's tunnel-vision:

Steve's whole argument that open-source can't win in embedded systems is very curious, since it predicts exactly the opposite of what is actually happening out there. Linux is taking over in embedded systems -- in fact, many observers would say it has already won that space. If Steve had worked in the field within the last three years he would probably know this.

Again, Linux is an operating system, not the application. The fact that it is portable, and has source is very handy for the embedded market, many embedded development tools (libraries, OS's, etc) came with source code even in the pre-OSS days -- this is pretty much a prerequisite when you're dealing with specialized hardware and you (not the tool vendor) is the one under the NDA so it's your ass on the line for making it work. Linux fits very well here, and again it's a development tool so programmers are happy to work on it.

What Raymond doesn't mention, although he is surely aware, is that the actual value-added embedded application tends to not be open-source. As an example, the popular TiVo personal video recorder runs Linux as its operating system, but the TiVo application itself is decidedly closed-source.

One slightly unusual, but perfectly valid, development model used by OSS can perhaps be exemplified by the Mozilla group, which is an OSS project staffed largely by professional developers, funded by some of the major users of that software. This model comes closest to a viable model for the areas that den Beste claims that OSS isn't really applicable for, in that it give you at least the potential for dedicated, trained, full-time developers. But this model still doesn't address the proprietary technology/trade secret/NDA issue, and handwaving won't make it go away.

WaPo has an absolutely wonderful article describing a Pentagon briefing in which the Saudis are described as US enemies. It's about time the Govt started taking the Saudi threat seriously.