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We've all heard the quote, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." by Charles H. Duell in 1899, insisting that his office be closed (he was the top guy at the Patent office in the U.S.). And a lot has happened in the last 100 years. Anyone who thinks that is true for software should get his head out of the sand.

First off, asking questions about the law on Slashdot is a futile endeavour. The best that can happen is that you don't get any answers at all. The worst is that you do, but they're all wrong.

I managed to find some general info on the net for you though; check this and this. I have no idea of whether or not they are relevant to your inquiry. I just happened to stumble upon them while googling for an answer to an even more general question, namely: "what the #%&! are 'zoning restrictions'?" (I'm not a US citizen and therefore have no idea.)

An exercise for the AC...

Here are my points:

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OSS doesn't make sense in the reseller market (the one Microsoft is in)

As said previously, why spend millions making software when it's out there for free. If Microsoft makes the best product in the world and sells it for $300 with the source under an open source license, someone will just take the code, maybe modify it a bit, and derive their own product, presumably selling it for less.

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but it makes sense in the support market.

Read.

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Example is Red Hat. No, they're just under being profitable

From Red Hat's website:
"In an increasingly difficult IT environment, Red Hat delivered a profit and generated positive cash flows for the first time," commented Matthew Szulik, President and CEO of Red Hat.

I conceed, I was a touch out of date.

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but they aren't catering to the large market

From Entrepreneur.com:
"Linux was the primary OS for 27 percent of the server operating market at the end of last year"

Again, I'm a little out of date, but 27% is not the kind of market share that Microsoft has (41% from the same website). I phrased "catering to the large market" incorrectly, but I think you get the point.

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I should also add that it's estimated that over 70% of development occurs in-house and not for resale.

From opensource.org:
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Programming will collapse if software has no market value

Very unlikely. Code written for resale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. It used to be said that 85% of all the code in the world was written in-house at banks and insurance companies. This is probably no longer the case ... but most estimates put the proportion of all code written in-house at companies other than software vendors at over 75%.
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I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but I figured that someone asked for links, I might as well offer them for those who show a real interest (and don't have their heads up their asses).

So many inept comments.

I live in New Orleans, and the reason for such an offer is simply one man: Greg Meffert.

He has been appointed Mayor Ray Nagin's CTO.

No one else in City Hall really does technology, so the idea that it's "stupid politicians" is ridiculous.

Meffert is respnsible for getting City Hall online, really, with online business forms, taxes, etc. People don't like change here, and there is great resentment, believe it or not.

But there is again no one else really in place at City Hall to make a choice for open source. Meffert also headed the largest software company in New Orleans, so there's noone else to really tell him or Nagin how to do things.

The Open Source solution looks bleak.

However, if anyone is truely concerned, one can send a well written propsal here.

Funny, knowing the inside story and seeing the comments under this post, I can only wonder how others feel when they know the story, and there streams in comment after comment of same-a-thon logic and peer modeling.

Anyway, send in a request! Get New Orleans to Linux! I can only do so much!

Thanks.

Here's the story of a man in New York City who was selling apples on the corner for $100,000 each. When asked how he expected to sell any, since his apples were so expensive, he answered, "But I only have to sell one."

This happens to be a good article, if a little oversimplified; certainly available to Realnames, as it was published in 1997. They really should have read this part:

...no matter how revolutionary a can opener is, there is a pricing threshhold of how much someone will pay for it. You need to understand the industry you are selling your idea to. If you don't, you may look foolish for asking for a price that is much higher than the industry standard.

Doh.

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

Visions of grannies saying "the patterns want to be free" come to mind. ;-)

...and when Hakuta saw it, he said, "Wow, this is really something. This is the purpose of my life. I've been living for these wall walkers."

I wonder what old "Dr. Fad" is up to these days.

-Tommy